Remain in Light by Talking Heads

Remain in Light, Talking Heads' fourth album, came out on Sire on October 8, 1980, the third and last they made with Brian Eno producing. They cut it that July and August at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and Sigma Sound in New York, and they went in with a point to prove: this was a band, not just David Byrne and some backing players.

Fela Kuti's Afrobeat was the lodestar. Instead of writing songs, they built tracks as interlocking loops of groove, piling African polyrhythms and funk on top of electronics until the whole thing seethes and hums. Adrian Belew's guitar squalls, Nona Hendryx sings and Jon Hassell's trumpet drifts through the mix. Byrne, stuck for words, got around his writer's block by throwing out lyrics in a scattered, stream-of-consciousness rush that owed something to early rap and to academic books about Africa. "Once in a Lifetime" is the one everybody knows, a groove that never stops rolling under Byrne's bewildered sermon, and "Crosseyed and Painless" and "Houses in Motion" are just as hypnotic. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz came up with the cover with the help of computers at MIT and the design firm M & Co.

They hired extra players to take it on the road, then vanished for a year into side projects. The album has since been hailed for welding all of it into one thrilling, coherent piece, and in 2017 it went into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

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