(Credits: Far Out / Sire Records)
Thu 1 January 2026 17:00, UK
Following the massive success of the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, frontman David Byrne was bitten by the cinematic bug, setting out to create a story of his own that fused his musical sensibility with his signature eccentricity.
During Stop Making Sense, Byrne oversaw the stage design and choreography that amplified the Talking Heads’ performance. He’d also ventured into theatrical scores before, working closely with choreographer Twyla Tharp to score The Catherine Wheel for a ballet of the same name in 1981, and writing Music for “The Knee Plays” for the 1985 opera, The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down. Both projects allowed Byrne’s music to go beyond the studio and grow into lives of their own, adapted for the stage in a way that surely invited new visions of how music could be heard and seen into the artist’s mind.
Working with director Jonathan Demme on Stop Making Sense allowed Byrne to literally step into the editor’s studio, granting an elevated look into the filmmaking process that went further than his previous experiences directing the Talking Heads’ early music video offerings for MTV.
Under Demme’s direction, Byrne could envision how he would adapt stories outside of his comfort zone. “Working with Jonathan got me over my fear of playing in the big sandbox,” Byrne said to Rolling Stone. “A lot of my videos were shot on 16-millimeter, so 35 millimeters seemed like a grown-up medium at the time. I was fascinated by how movies were made, technically, and how editing worked. So after working with him, I thought, ‘Well, time to try it.’”
Byrne began with a series of drawings and images: people singing, sketches of the Texas landscape and more. He’d match them with headlines and stories that he and his wife collected from the Weekly World News, an American newspaper-style tabloid that published primarily fictionalised “news” with a satirical flair. A storyline evolved naturally, though with a welcome unconventional flow, and turned into the 1986 film True Stories, “a film about a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas,” as Byrne says in the film’s trailer.
David Byrne, Tine Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison. ( Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Narrated by Byrne, True Stories follows a cast of characters that, in the fictional town of Virgil, represent a strange, fascinating era of Americana: a voodoo faith healer, a singing cowboy, a theatrical preacher and more. “I sensed there was a lot of unappreciated creativity in flyover states,” Byrne said, of his impetus to make the film. “It’s very vibrant and eccentric and a lot of fun there. I still feel that way now about that part of the country.”
For the film’s music, Byrne wrote songs intended for the Talking Heads to provide backing tracks that the characters would then sing. While mixing their sixth album, 1985’s Little Creatures, the Talking Heads were simultaneously rehearsing and recording the True Stories material. “The songs were really written for the characters, for the scenes they appeared in,” Byrne explained. “That was the first time I’d written songs from a character’s point of view before, but it was an attempt to jump in and make it not just a character, but a scene and a moment that the character is going through.”
When asked about the ease of getting the band – bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison – to garner interest in his project, Byrne laughs. “I think they indulged me,” he admits, explaining that the finishing of Little Creatures meant that they were more positive about recording True Stories.
“They liked the songs, but I think they could see this was, you know, a ‘David project’,” he says. “I think they might have sensed that I was going to be deep in the film world, on location and this stuff for a while, so the fact that these recordings were all lined up meant there would be stuff coming out to the public even while I was in Texas.”
The resulting album, also titled True Stories, features studio recordings of songs from the film, including the hits ‘Wild Wild Life’ and ‘Love for Sale’, which soundtrack memorable scenes. ‘Wild Wild Life’ is the chosen song for a lip-sync contest, while the music video for ‘Love for Sale’ doubles as a television commercial, commenting on the nature of American advertising. True Stories may have been a labour of love from Byrne, but the Talking Heads’ legacy was surely solidified even further in the film’s quirky, music-driven story.
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