Remain in Light is the fourth studio album by the American rock band Talking Heads, released on October 8, 1980, by Sire Records. The band's third and final album to be produced by Brian Eno, Remain in Light was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and Sigma Sound Studios in New York in July and August 1980.
After the release of Fear of Music in 1979, Talking Heads and Eno sought to dispel notions of the band as a mere vehicle for frontman and songwriter David Byrne. Drawing influence from Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, they blended African polyrhythms and funk with electronics, recording instrumental tracks as a series of looping grooves. Session musicians included the guitarist Adrian Belew, the singer Nona Hendryx, and the trumpeter Jon Hassell.
Byrne struggled with writer's block, but adopted a scattered, stream of consciousness lyrical style inspired by early rap and academic literature on Africa. The album artwork was conceived by bassist, Tina Weymouth, and drummer, Chris Frantz, with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s computers and design company, M & Co. The band hired additional members for a promotional tour, after which they went on a year-long hiatus to pursue side projects.
Remain in Light attained acclaim for its sonic experimentation, rhythmic innovations, and merging of disparate genres into a cohesive whole. The album reached No. 19 on the U.S. Billboard 200 album chart and No. 21 on the UK Albums Chart, and produced the singles "Once in a Lifetime" and "Houses in Motion". It has been featured in several publications' lists of the best albums of the 1980s and of all time, and is often considered Talking Heads' magnum opus. In 2017, the Library of Congress (LC) deemed the album "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
Background
In January 1980, the members of Talking Heads returned to New York City after touring in support of their previous studio album Fear of Music (1979), and took time off to pursue personal interests. Lead vocalist David Byrne worked with Brian Eno, the record's producer, on the collaborative studio album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). Keyboardist Jerry Harrison produced an album for funk singer Nona Hendryx at Sigma Sound Studios' secondary facility in New York City; Talking Heads would later record at Sigma and employ Hendryx as a backing vocalist on Harrison's advice.
Drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth, a married couple, discussed leaving Talking Heads after Weymouth suggested that Byrne was too controlling. Frantz did not want to leave, and the two took a long vacation in the Caribbean to ponder the state of the band and their marriage. They became involved in Haitian Vodou religious ceremonies, practiced native percussion instruments, and socialized with the Jamaican rhythm section and production duo Sly and Robbie.
Frantz and Weymouth ended their holiday by purchasing an apartment above Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, where Talking Heads and Eno had recorded More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1978. Byrne joined the duo and Harrison there in early 1980. The band members realized that songwriting had thus far been largely Byrne's responsibility, and that they had become tired of the notion of being a singer and a backing band; the ideal they aimed for, according to Byrne, was "sacrificing our egos for mutual cooperation". Byrne also wanted to escape "the psychological paranoia and personal torment" that he had been feeling and writing about in New York. According to Weymouth, the emergence of hip-hop made the band realize that the musical landscape was changing. Talking Heads used the working title Melody Attack throughout the studio process after watching a Japanese game show of the same name. According to Harrison, the band's ambition was to blend rock and African genres rather than simply imitate African music. Eno's production techniques and personal approach were key to the record's conception. The process was geared to promote the expression of instinct and spontaneity, not overtly focusing on the sound of the final product.
According to Frantz, the band had met with Jamaican reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry in New York and arranged to record with him at Compass Point, but he did not show up to the sessions. Like Davies, Jerden was unhappy with the fast pace at which Eno wanted to record, but he did not complain.
The tracks made Byrne rethink his vocal style and he tried singing to the instrumental songs, but sounded "stilted". Few vocal sections were recorded in the Bahamas. The lyrics were written when the band returned to the U.S., in New York City and California. Harrison booked Talking Heads into Sigma Sound, which focused primarily on R&B, after convincing the owners that the band's work could bring them a new clientele. In New York City, Byrne struggled with writer's block, Harrison and Eno spent their time tweaking the compositions recorded in the Bahamas, and Frantz and Weymouth often did not show up at the studio. Doubts began to surface about whether the album would be completed, which were assuaged only after the recruitment of guitarist Adrian Belew at the request of Byrne, Harrison, and Eno. Belew was advised to add guitar solos to the Compass Point tracks, making use of numerous effects units and a Roland guitar synthesizer. Belew performed on the tracks that would become "Crosseyed and Painless", "The Great Curve", "Listening Wind" and "The Overload"; in 2022, he recalled that "all of [his] parts were done in one day". Singer Robert Palmer, who had recorded his sixth studio album Clues at the same studio shortly before Talking Heads used the facility, contributed additional percussion to Remain in Light.
Byrne recorded the rough mixes to a cassette tape and improvised over them on a portable tape recorder. He tried to create onomatopoeic rhymes in the style of Eno, who believed that lyrics were never the center of a song's meaning. Byrne continuously listened to his recorded scatting until convinced that he was no longer "hearing nonsense". After he was satisfied, Harrison invited Nona Hendryx to Sigma Sound to record backing vocals for the album. She was advised extensively on her vocal delivery by Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth, and often sang in a trio with Byrne and Eno. Brass player Jon Hassell, who had worked with Byrne and Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was hired to perform trumpet and horn overdubs. In August 1980, half of the album was mixed by Eno, engineer John Potoker, and Harrison in New York City, while the other half was mixed by Byrne and Jerden at Eldorado Studios in Burbank, California.
Music and lyrics
alt=Casual portrait of John Dean sitting in his office with his feet on the desk|thumb|upright|The testimony of [[Watergate scandal conspirator John Dean was one of several inspirations for the lyrics on Remain in Light.]]
Remain in Light has been variously described as new wave, post-punk, worldbeat, dance-rock, art pop, avant-pop, Afrobeat, Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album a "dense amalgam of African percussion, funk bass and keyboards, pop songs, and electronics." Far Out described the album as containing "funk-rock musings". It contains eight songs with a "striking free-associative feel", according to psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog, in that there is no extended thought process that can be followed in its stream of consciousness lyrics. Gans instructed Byrne to be freer with his lyrical content, advising him that "rational thinking has its limits".
Byrne included a bibliography with the album press kit along with a statement that explained how the album was inspired by African mythologies and rhythms. The release stressed that the major inspiration for the lyrics was John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1981), which examined the musical enhancement of life in rural African communities. Chernoff travelled to Ghana in 1970 to study native percussion and wrote about how Africans have complicated conversations through drum patterns. One song, "The Great Curve", exemplifies the African theme with the line "The world moves on a woman's hips", which Byrne used after reading Robert Farris Thompson's book African Art in Motion (1974). He also studied straight speech, from Watergate scandal co-conspirator John Dean's testimony to the stories of African American former slaves.
Like the other tracks, album opener "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" borrows from "preaching, shouting and ranting". The expression "And the Heat Goes On", used in the title and repeated in the chorus, is based on a New York Post headline Eno read in the summer of 1980, while Byrne rewrote the song title "Don't Worry About the Government" from Talking Heads' debut studio album, Talking Heads: 77 (1977), into the lyric "Look at the hands of a government man". Although the unorthodox guitar solo has often been credited to Adrian Belew, it was in fact performed by Byrne (manipulating a Lexicon Prime Time digital delay unit). Closing track "The Overload" features "tribal-cum-industrial" beats created primarily by Harrison and Byrne alongside Belew's "growling guitar atmospherics". Weymouth and Frantz decided to use the joint credit acronym C/T for the artwork, while Bender and Fisher used initials and code names because the project was not an official MIT venture. The design credits read "HCL, JPT, DDD, WALTER GP, PAUL, C/T". The final mass-produced version of Remain in Light had one of the first computer-designed record jackets. Psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog has called its front cover a "disarming image, which suggests both splitting and obliteration of identity", and which introduces the listener to the album's recurring theme of "identity disturbance"; he has said, "The image is in bleak contrast to the title with the obscured images of the band members unable to 'remain in light'."
Talking Heads and Eno originally agreed to credit all songs in alphabetical order to "David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth" after failing to devise an accurate formula for the split, but the album was released with the label credit: "all songs written by David Byrne & Brian Eno (except "Houses in Motion" and 'The Overload", written by David Byrne, Brian Eno & Jerry Harrison)". According to Weymouth, Byrne told Kalman to doctor the credits on Eno's advice. Later editions credit all band members. Frantz recalled in 2009 that he and Weymouth "felt very burned by the credits dispute". On August 27, the expanded Talking Heads performed a showcase of tracks to an 8,000-person full house at the Wollman Rink, as well as approximately another 10,000 seated on the grass outside the walls, in Central Park. Only these two performances were initially planned, but Sire Records decided to support the nine-member band on an extended tour. According to writer David Sheppard, "it was received as a great cultural event as much as a vivid art-pop record." Unusually, the album's press release included a bibliography submitted by Byrne and Eno citing books by Chernoff and others to provide context for how the songs were conceived. “I didn't read those books", said an incensed Weymouth.
Remain in Light was certified gold by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) in February 1981 after shipping 50,000 copies, and by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in September 1985 after shipping 500,000. Over one million copies of the album have been sold worldwide.
Critical reception
The album attained widespread critical acclaim on release. Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone felt it was a brave and absorbing attempt to locate a common ground in the era's divergent and often hostile musical genres; he concluded, "Remain in Light yields scary, funny music to which you can dance and think, think and dance, dance and think, ad infinitum." Robert Christgau, in The Village Voice, called the record one "in which David Byrne conquers his fear of music in a visionary Afrofunk synthesis—clear-eyed, detached, almost mystically optimistic". Michael Kulp of the Daily Collegian wrote that the album deserved the tag "classic" like each of the band's three previous full-length releases, while John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times, suggested that it confirmed Talking Heads' position as "America's most venturesome rock band". Sandy Robertson of Sounds praised the record's innovation, while Billboard wrote, "Just about every LP Talking Heads has released in the last four years has wound up on virtually every critics' best of list. Remain in Light should be no exception."
AllMusic's William Ruhlmann wrote that Talking Heads' musical transition, first witnessed in Fear of Music, came to full fruition in Remain in Light: "Talking Heads were connecting with an audience ready to follow their musical evolution, and the album was so inventive and influential." In a 2008 review, Sean Fennessey of Vibe concluded, "Talking Heads took African polyrhythms to NYC and made a return trip with elegant, alien post-punk in tow."
Accolades and legacy
Remain in Light was named the best album of 1980 by Sounds, ahead of the Skids' The Absolute Game, and by Melody Maker, while The New York Times included it in its unnumbered shortlist of the 10 best records issued that year. It figured highly in other end-of-year best album lists, notably at number two, behind the Clash's London Calling (1979), by Christgau, and at number six by NME. It featured at number three—behind London Calling and Bruce Springsteen's The River—in The Village Voices 1980 Pazz & Jop critics' poll, which aggregates the votes of hundreds of prominent reviewers.