Composer Reacts to Talking Heads - The Great Curve (REACTION & ANALYSIS)

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Күн бұрын

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@GarrettEulett Жыл бұрын

Brian Eno wasn't the bassist, that would be Tina Weymouth. Brian was a friend and collaborator, and at this point he was basically the 5th member, but was not officially a member of the band.

@noteverton 5 ай бұрын

Eno's track "Kings Lead Hat" is an anagram of Talking Heads.

@StringHead92 Жыл бұрын

You've listened so far to two tracks from this Talking Heads album, the other one was one of their bigger hits, Once in a Lifetime. This album and this song in particular are heavily influenced by afrobeat, a style of dance-oriented music originated in Nigeria, that draws from complex polyrhythmic folk styles, funk, soul, jazz and psychedelia. The use of multi-part vocal harmonies is typical for the genre too, as are extended instrumental sections (a lot of songs feature improvisation and would easily run over 10 minutes in length). Originally the genre was very politically-minded, and its biggest exponent was Fela Kuti, which is a big influence on this Talking Heads album in particular ("Remain in Light"). They really brought this genre to mainstream Western audiences, as filted through pop and rock lenses of course. I'd really recommend checking some Fela Kuti to get the "non-distilled" version of afrobeat, "Why Black Man Dey Suffer" or "Zombie" could be good tracks to check. Going back to Talking Heads, "Remain in Light" is usually considered their magnum opus, it features several popular songs by them and it remains very influential being cited by bands even in the 21st century. A fun bit of info that I learned through Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead took their name from a Talking Heads song, so you can imagine that they are one of many influences), is that nothing is looped in this album and every repeated thing was played over and over again, so you get a bit of that human element when it comes to the recording. One of the guitar players here, and I'm assuming it's the soloist since that's his style, is Andrew Belew, who was part of the 80's King Crimson line-up. Talking Heads had previously worked with Robert Fripp (also from King Crimson) on their previous album, "Fear of Music", so there's a bit of a trade-off with prog rock too. Brian Eno produced (or co-produced with the band) this record and also "Fear of Music", Eno is a pioneer of ambient music but he also worked with a lot of new wave and post-punk artists, most notably U2, so he was definitely experienced and a big name, and his production style is very clean so this kind of layering is nothing surprising coming from him. I don't have much to add that you didn't covered in the analysis, so I just wanted to add some context. Great insight as always, Bryan!

@semchen9 Жыл бұрын

I believe it was within a recent (of three months ago ?) Marc Maron did an interview with Adrian Belew, Adrian recalled being asked by either Brian Eno or David Byrne, to come into the Studio and to [do what he does], to play on top of existing played out Rhythms. What resulted from it was the Song, The Great Curve. - Side Two of Remain in Light, for me, is where the Talking Heads reached their "Mariana Trench" Depths.

@damagejacked 2 ай бұрын

(Addressing the video creator here, adding a few points to this very good parent comment) Have a listen to Coltrane’s ‘Africa,’ and you’ll find staccato elements, rhythmic instrumental shrieks, and other bits and pieces transcribed from Afro-jazz to the studio instrumental formula that Byrne/Eno devised for this remarkable project. Another commenter rightly noted Fela Kuti, who also drew from Coltrane. When Byrne and Eno had Adrian Belew have a try with improv swooping guitar, the final element fell into place. His playing is impossible to disentangle from Eno’s deformation of his parts, in some cases. Belew was essential in sealing the tracks to then-current instrumentation on this disk with interpretive melody using at least a sort of recognizable instrument played in solos, while also recapitulating at times the thematic rhythm and staccato motifs. The guitar being ‘boring’ would also be a comment on King Sunny Ade and other west African guitarists of the 70s-it’s a style of Afro-pop playing.

@dampersand Жыл бұрын

You can always recognize an Adrian Belew solo (or in this case two of them).

@jerryflick7187 Жыл бұрын

What's amazing is the Rythym never changes key or pattern yet it's never boring. David Byrne was ahead of his time & is still influencing musicians today. 👍 He's on the Autistic Realm.

@grrggrrg4805 Жыл бұрын

Anatomy of a track is an absolutely awesome channel. My old music teacher used the channel to teach arrangement and it really helped get people excited about making music.

@ganazby Жыл бұрын

I dig those whammy bar guitar solos. They sound phenomenal - the way they explode out of the mix.

@siflex Жыл бұрын

Interesting analysis. You sorta missed who Brian Eno is .. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Albums_produced_by_Brian_Eno .. He had already produced Devo, Ultravox and 3 David Bowie albums by the time he started working with the Talking Heads and then U2 among others. The rhythms aren't reggae, they're African. There was a lot of experimentation in the early 80s with African beats .. Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads probably being the most obvious and then later Paul Simon - Graceland 1986. Tony Allen and Felah Kuteh were big influences.

@jonathanhenderson9422 Жыл бұрын

Love Talking Heads, and this album in particular (Remain in Light) is one of the best and most original albums of the 80s. Such a unique mix of post-punk, afrofunk, worldbeat, art rock, and just some good-old fashioned pop. There's nothing else in pop music quite like it. What's interesting is that the music both before and after it was much more traditional: the music before was still quite original for the time, but it feels very 80s; while the music after was even more traditional than the music before it. All of it's good-to-superb (they're one of those bands without any genuinely sub-par albums), but this was definitely their creative/artistic peak and I never understood why they only tried this style-collage for only one album, but I'm glad it exists. EDIT: You realizing what the lyrics are about was funny! Kinda reminds me of Bob Seger's Her Strut that has probably the best pun I've ever heard in a pop song: "they do respect her but they love to watch her strut" Pun is actually more obvious given the way the lines are sung.

@robg2657 9 ай бұрын

I really enjoyed your analysis of this song which is one of my favorite TH tracks. The early 80's live performances of this song were WILD and did incorporate a second bass player by the name of Busta Jones.

@alex11v3 Жыл бұрын

You need to do a full Remain in Light album analisys, is easily one of the best albums of all time and I think you would agree Also, the production was mostly handled by Brian Eno, he created the most experimental sounds on the album and created the most repetitive and hypnotic loops on the album, Tina Weymouth was the bass player.

@darland3821 Жыл бұрын

"she" is mother nature

@damagejacked 2 ай бұрын

Yep, she’s the feminine non-analytic evocation who embodies the later idea of ‘stop making sense.’

@christerfurberg6538 Жыл бұрын

Missed this when it was posted. This is one of my favorite songs. The combination of all the rhythms and sounds, the wailing guitar, everything! I agree with the comment below about it being about Mother Earth. The lyricist would be David Byrne. When it comes to defining new wave, I don't think it has a musical one. It's just the bands that came out of the punk movement, with a similar attitude and ideology but with a lot of new influences from e.g. pop and world music. Even more "pure" punk bands, like The Clash, had elements of reggae and latino music in their songs.

@stevenboettcher4796 Жыл бұрын

Thanks for this review. I've listened to this song hundreds of times and never analyzed the lyrics before and I learned so much.

@jmdavison62 10 ай бұрын

Bryan only gets to It around the 26-minute mark, and he seems to lack the language to describe it: most of _Remain in Light_ was based on short tape loops, and that affects all of the decisions they made as the songs were fleshed out. If he misses something this obvious, has he chosen the right vocation?

@thecrye6798 11 ай бұрын

"New Wave" was just a term that Talking Heads' manager came up with to separate them from the Punk scene that they were initially a part of.

@CriticalReactions 11 ай бұрын

I don't know why I never made this connection before, but it's very similar to Bossa Nova in that regard. It translates loosely to "new trend" or .... "new wave." It didn't really describe the music as much as described what the music wasn't; even if decades later historians would ascribe as sound to that genre.

@thecrye6798 11 ай бұрын

@@CriticalReactions Great point! I follow TH's drummer, Chris Frantz, on Facebook and he talked about the fact that TH was playing CBGB's and The Mudd Club in NYC because that's where new and different music was happening at the time, but the other bands were predominantly Punk, like the Ramones and Blondie in their pre-Pop era. While Punk was popular in clubs, radio stations were refusing to play anything with that label, often unheard. So Seymour Stein of Sire Records coined the term "New Wave" to separate TH from that pack. So, yeah, the term is more about what the music ISN'T.

@ggluckmanful Жыл бұрын

I think that because all of these bands came out of the punk movement, the players are mostly not terribly virtuosic and largely self-taught. These bands have also been the punk bands that moved away from the early punk formulas and you can really see their playing skills improve across their careers, but I think their ears and ideas were often ahead of their hands. Talking Heads, even more than the others, used guests like Mr. Puyols above mentioned to get access to players who could play what they couldn’t. I think they also used tricks like these to achieve complexity that they couldn’t produce in fewer layers.

@CriticalReactions Жыл бұрын

I think you touched on something I've never really noticed -- some of my favorite rock/punk/metal stuff are albums where the ideas required more skill than the musicians had to pull off so there's this interesting unexplored potential that is, as is the case here, compensated by technology and or featured musicians. There's something pure about pushing the limits of yourself to achieve a goal even if you don't quite accomplish it the way you intended.

@RubraLIber Жыл бұрын

TH were not self-taught, on the contrary they were extremely erudite, and refined researchers of sounds and styles, they met in an art school. They have nothing to do with the classic punk of improvised musicians.

@ggluckmanful Жыл бұрын

@@RubraLIber Art school is not music school. Being erudite has nothing to do with having formal musical training. If you were playing gigs at CBGB in the 70s, you were part of the original NYC punk scene.

@RubraLIber Жыл бұрын

@@ggluckmanful

@RubraLIber Жыл бұрын

@@ggluckmanful Many people confuse the British punk scene with the American one. NYC's punk scene was much more diverse and included different genres of music and types of artists. TH have never been associated with the typical guitar riff as understood in British Punk, moreover often the British punk bands were composed of improvised musicians with a very low education and raised in the poorest neighborhoods of the cities. The THs were not virtuosos of the instrument, but their origins and growth denote a much more sophisticated training and lifestyle. I think they were the only band to perform at CBGB in normal clothes, as if they were going to work in the office.

@Brian-kl1gf Жыл бұрын

Howdy from New England once again..I really dig the Talking Heads...It's hard to put them in a genre but I'd say it's rock but in the vein of Frank Zappa...This has a strong funk feel to it..This era of music was very interesting and produced many successful bands..And that solo was very cool and fitting... ✌️🤘

@lordslaar4808 11 ай бұрын

Brian Eno was the producer, not the bassist. Tina Weymouth is the bassist.

@OursDéplumé 5 ай бұрын

this is not exactly New Wave, with this album, they were released at that time but they had nothing to do with the New Wave aesthetic, this is just a unique creation and Byrne said simply in interviews that it'll be a breakout

@ggluckmanful Жыл бұрын

I read the lyrics as someone watching a woman dancing and contrasting the obscured meaning they’re reading into that observation with existential confusion they believe is inherent in the human condition.

@ggluckmanful Жыл бұрын

Maybe they’re trying to read her mind as well, or infer her experience by observation. 😊

@alex11v3 Жыл бұрын

David Bryne said that about the woman on the song: "Oh, boy. I’m not talking about one particular woman. I’m not talking about my girlfriend [laughs]. You think that’s very down and earthy, but I was talking about something metaphysical. That a gesture can resonate outward, like ripples in a pond, causing realms of meaning. An attitude of the body can embody a whole world view [laughs]."

@stuarthastie6374 Жыл бұрын

Brian Eno developed strategies for recording. About this time he and David Byrne made My Life In The Bush Oof Ghosts, a groundbreaking L. For me Talking Heads the best band of the 80s,

@RubraLIber Жыл бұрын

TH are an anomaly of modern music difficult to understand and difficult to understand even after many listenings, the musical internalization of some of their pieces sometimes happens by unconscious incubation. Then one fine day, almost by chance, the listening arrives that opens the doors to the piece for us.

@johnforde7735 10 ай бұрын

There weren't any guitar solos, they were synth solos.

@benjamincarylewis 10 ай бұрын

That's Adrian Belew on guitar.

@blueoystercultscowbell969 Жыл бұрын

I consider Talking Heads more of Art Rock then New Wave.

@colecolettecole 11 ай бұрын

tina weymouth is the bassist from day one ~ eno produced ~

@geob3963 Жыл бұрын

Those long AAAAAAAA sections enhance the unrelenting speeding driving pace without speeding up the tempo. The guitar solo is more about tone & timbre (attitude) than melody and juxtaposes nicely with the repetitive rapid rhythm.

@lawrencegillies Жыл бұрын

Brian Eno played bass in this? I thought he was the keyboard player/other guy in Roxy Music?

@alex11v3 Жыл бұрын

Nope, he misunderstood, Brian Eno produced the record, Tina Weymouth played bass

@CriticalReactions Жыл бұрын

I'm seeing that both Tina Weymouth and Brian Eno did bass for this song.

@johannesswarts1440 6 ай бұрын

This is like dissecting a formaldehyde-pickled frog in junior high school and trying to reconstruct the life and beauty of the living animal. Bottom line - d'ja like the tune or not??? No, Eno is the producer - bassist is Tina Weymouth. Try this - Nubian Sundance by Weather Report - and don't bother with the little graphs - you're entirely missing the point of the damn MUSIC!

@Robobotic Жыл бұрын

You never do my suggestions but do Drudkh When the Flame Turns to Ashes or the whole album Blood in Our Wells

@ggluckmanful Жыл бұрын

The songs are chosen by polls run through his Patreon or purchased as special selections by individuals. Neither is expensive to participate in and I’ve found it relatively easy to stuff covered, though you have to be patient and do a bit of work to make it happen via the polling. The special selections aren’t expensive but the backlog can take a while to get to your requests. I’ve found both methods to be totally worth the time and cost.