Top Ten Talking Heads Songs: Wild Wild Life (#10)

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I'm probably going to spread myself thin here over the next week and a half, which isn't a good thing given that I have a road trip and six concerts in a five-day span (five Robbie Fulks and Lucinda Williams as soon as I get home from Chicago), but that never stopped me from jumping off the deep end before! Next up is my favorite band from the 80s, Talking Heads. They were a brilliant band that ran the musical gamut: funk, R&B, rock, punk, and even elements of country (I'll show you that when I get to that song). Here we go with the first song. #10: Wild Wild Life Talking Heads never toured after the Stop Making Sense tour, meaning they never played anything from their final two albums (True Stories and Naked) live. That's a shame (for the former album, at least: I never cared much for Naked and always felt that the cracks that split Talking Heads were so blatantly obvious on that album that it was sad that they broke up after that album and not before). True Stories was a quasi-soundtrack. The songs were all originals, and all written for the film True Stories, which Talking Heads front man David Byrne co-wrote, directed, and starred in (not much in the megalomania department there!) Some of the songs in the movie were better than the Heads' version (especially Pops Staples' version of "Papa Legba"), but overall True Stories was a fine album, with or without seeing the movie. "Wild Wild Life" became Talking Heads' final top 40 song. The video spliced a karaoke scene from the movie with new footage of band members (the highlight is, without question, keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison impersonating Prince). It was a good song that dealt with the dangers of whatever one perceives constitutes "wild wild" living (drugs, alcohol, whatever). A great rock song for the 80s, it's held up quite well over the past 30 years. Wild Wild Life Written by David Byrne From True Stories, 1986