this week’s obsession: talking heads “and she was”

Talking Heads was, for me, a band that I’d heard of with a bunch of singles that I knew but could never have named as theirs. During the early pandemic days when I was desperate for more things to watch on TV, I stumbled across Amazon Prime Video’s significant collection of music documentaries. And I watched Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed live documentary about Talking Heads.

The things I don’t know about documentary filmmaking far outweigh the things I do know about music, so I can’t really speak to the film qua film other than to say that I know it’s famous. But I can say that the Talking Heads are crazy brilliant, both in their inventive songwriting and in the sheer entertainment value of their live performances.

I knew of the song “And She Was” in the way that many people can sing the “hey ho let’s go” part of “Blitzkreig Bop” without ever knowing a single other word or even thinking of it as a cohesive musical composition. It’s a fun song, just on the face of it. A classic example of a mid-tempo ‘80s pop song with a catchy hook in the bass and an easily grasped hook in the chorus.

But then I discovered how perfectly structured the song is and I became obsessed. It builds so cleanly from the simple drum/bass/synth opening, adding simple vocals with lots of space, then pushing the synth up an octave, harmonies in the vocals…it’s too good. Even the opening “hey” from David Byrne references the third verse and the outro, tying the whole thing up with a bow.

Just listen to how the synthesizer jumps up in the second half of each verse to add a little more energy. Or how the chord progression introduces a simple secondary dominant (a V of V in this case) just before the chorus to delay for a half-measure the arrival back at the tonic. It’s not “clever” — it’s just good.