Burning Down The House

Here is the closest Talking Heads ever came to a legitimate pop hit, their only song to crack the Billboard Top Ten. It isn’t as conceptually or musically groundbreaking as “Once In A Lifetime“, but it contains depths of its own.

In addition to the four band members, the track also features Wally Badarou‘s mysterious Prophet-5 leads. (This is one of several Talking Heads tracks graced by Badarou’s synths; see also his exquisite playing on “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)“.) Steve Scales plays concert toms, and you can also see him playing them in the sweat-drenched version from Stop Making Sense.

The ambient synths in this version are played by Bernie Worrell from P-Funk, which is appropriate, because the band was drawing on P-Funk when they wrote the song in the first place – more on that below. In another P-Funk touch, notice that Tina Weymouth is playing synth bass, which she did for its more crisp sound.

You can demonstrate the intense Talking-Heads-ness of “Burning Down The House” by listening to covers of it. No Talking Heads song has been covered by more people. And yet, I have never heard a really good cover. I have heard plenty that were okay, but none of them were anything you would need to hear twice. If you take away the specifics of the groove, the production, and David Byrne’s unhinged vocal style, you take away the core of the song.

I have heard a couple of good remixes. This one is very silly, but it’s fun.

The Reflex Revision is not silly at all. It only uses sounds found in the original multitracks, and it’s a banger.

David Byrne explains the writing process in some depth in this 1984 NPR interview. Start at 2:15. It’s especially interesting to hear the demos at different stages of development; artists hardly ever share those.

For more detail, there’s a great oral history in the Wall Street Journal of all publications. David Byrne:

“Burning Down the House” wasn’t a song about arson. When I wrote the lyrics in 1982, the title phrase was a metaphor for destroying something safe that entrapped you. I envisioned the song as an expression of liberation, to break free from whatever was holding you back.

As for the rest of the lyrics, there are no hidden meanings. There’s no logical, linear connection. They aren’t telling a story or signifying anything. I simply combined aphorisms and nonsequiturs that had an emotional connection.

Chris Frantz:

The music’s inspiration began when Tina and I went to Madison Square Garden in February 1979 to see Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins and the Brides of Funkenstein.

(One of the Brides, Lynn Mabry, is singing backup in Stop Making Sense.)

Before Parliament came on that night, the audience chanted things like, “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” and “Burn down the house! Burn down the house!” That last one stuck with me.

Tina Weymouth:

I used a four-track recorder to capture takes of David singing what initially were experimental, nonsensical vocals. As he sang, I took notes and played back the bits that I thought had the most potential for a melody.

You can see Paul McCartney using the same method to write lyrics in the Get Back documentary.

David Byrne again:

A car is a good place to write lyrics. Driving occupies one part of your brain, freeing up the other. As I drove, I scatted the melody and recorded every random phrase I could think of that fit the song’s groove.

Many of the phrases may have been inspired by lines in P-Funk songs. I had seen them in concert at a club and had their albums. These lines were like little verbal Zen poems. They helped me come up with aphorisms like, “Time for jumpin’ overboard” and “Watch out, you might get what you’re after.”

Later, I wrote down in my tiny handwriting as many phrases from the tape that fit on one sheet. Seeing all of them at a single glance let me identify the ones that worked together. There was no logical or linear connection between them.

Tina Weymouth says that David Byrne’s lyrics favor “rhythm over rhyme”, which is literally true, they often don’t rhyme at all. She also says that lyrics are “a melodic poem, not prose”, and that is a crucial insight that not many people appreciate. Song lyrics can be exquisitely crafted literature on the page and still not work if they don’t sound good when you sing them. Meanwhile, it’s possible to have an excellent song with goofy or meaningless lyrics, and it’s also possible to love a song in a foreign language without having any idea what it’s about. Next time I teach songwriting, maybe I’ll assign the class to write a Talking Heads song, not so that the students imitate the style, but so they experience the pleasure of the method.

Here’s my transcription:

As much as it was inspired by funk, the song does not groove like a funk song. The drums are square like a rock beat, except for the surprising low tom hit on each “and” of four. The bassline sounds more like reggae. The rhythm guitar pattern in the chorus is an unclassifiable oddity. The guitar and keyboard parts in the verses are definitely funky, especially the envelope filter on the guitar (the thing that makes it go woh-wa-wa woh-wa-wa.) The synth part under the chorus and in the instrumental break is extraordinarily jagged and syncopated, and its strange inharmonic timbre makes it hard to make out the pitches. It works!

The tune is harmonically uninteresting by design, a standard I-bVII groove in G Mixolydian mode. However, there are a few noteworthy departures from this modal framework. The vocal melody, synth and guitar countermelodies use G Dorian mode. The two scales are identical except that G Mixolydian includes B (the major third), whereas G Dorian includes B-flat (the minor third). Combining the two scales is a time-honored formula for blues tonality. There is one other harmonic wrinkle: the A chord on the line “burning down the house.” When I first sat down to learn the song many years ago, it was effortless, except for that one chord. The root note is obviously A, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what was on top. My first guess was Am, or maybe F/A, or possibly Dm/A. Any of those would make sense. But now I have the multitrack stems and can zoom in on the guitar part in isolation, and there it is, an unmistakeable A major chord. That is WRONG. You don’t use A chords in G Mixolydian! Except, I guess, when you do? The C-sharp in the chord gives the hook extra edge, and contributes to its ear-grabbing intensity.

Songs like this have unexplored potential for music pedagogy, especially at the beginner level. My six year old daughter, who is in her first year of piano lessons, adores David Byrne, and the “Burning Down The House” bassline is well within her ability if we take it nice and slow. She can play it on piano while I strum the chords and sing, and it is a delightful time. She is doing the usual method book stuff too, and enjoys it fine, but it’s nice to be able to play a “real” song with her. I know there are copyright obstacles to including pop songs in the actual method books, but there is nothing stopping you from just figuring them out and playing them with students by ear.