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'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 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" the had been feeling and writing about in New York. Instead of writing music to Byrne's lyrics, the group performed extended instrumental jams, using the Fear of Music track "I Zimbra" as a foundation.
Eno arrived in the Bahamas three weeks after Byrne. While reluctant to work with the band again after collaborating on their previous two studio albums, he changed his mind after hearing the instrumental demo tapes. He and the band experimented with the communal African way of making music, in which individual parts mesh as polyrhythms. Nigerian musician Fela Kuti's studio album Afrodisiac (1973) became their template. According to Weymouth, the emergence of hip-hop made the band realize that the musical landscape was changing. Before the studio sessions began, the band's friend David Gans told them that "the things one doesn't intend are the seeds for a more interesting future", encouraging them to experiment, improvise and make use of "mistakes".
Recording and production
Recording sessions started at Compass Point Studios in July 1980. The album's creation required additional musicians, particularly percussionists. 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. Eno compared the creative process to "looking out to the world and saying, 'What a fantastic place we live in. Let's celebrate it.'"
Sections and instrumentals were recorded one at a time in a discontinuous process. Loops played a key part at a time when computers could not yet adequately perform such functions. Talking Heads developed Remain in Light by recording jam sessions, isolating the best parts, and learning to play them repetitively. The basic tracks focused wholly on rhythms and were all performed in a minimalist method using only one chord. Each section was recorded as a long loop to enable the creation of compositions through the positioning or merging of loops in different ways. Byrne likened the process to modern sampling: "We were human samplers."
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. After a few sessions at Compass Point, engineer Rhett Davies left following an argument with Eno over the fast pace of recording, and Steven Stanley stepped in to replace him. The engineer Dave Jerden obtained a Lexicon 224 digital reverberation unit, one of the first of its kind. Like Davies, Jerden was unhappy with the fast pace at which Eno wanted to record, but 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 he recorded his parts in one day. Singer Robert Palmer, who had recorded his sixth studio album, Clues, at the same studio shortly before Talking Heads, contributed additional percussion.
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. 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
Remain in Light has been variously described as new wave, post-punk, worldbeat, dance-rock, art pop, art rock, avant-pop, Afrobeat, and psychedelic funk. Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it a "dense amalgam of African percussion, funk bass and keyboards, pop songs, and electronics." 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".Brog, p. 166
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).
The "rhythmical rant" in "Crosseyed and Painless"—"Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late"—was influenced by early hip-hop, specifically Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks", which was given to Byrne by Frantz. "Once in a Lifetime" borrows heavily from preachers' diatribes. While some critics deemed the song "a kind of prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s", Byrne disagreed with this categorization and commented that its lyrics were meant to be taken literally: "We're largely unconscious. You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'."