{"id":50116,"date":"2025-07-09T01:06:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T01:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50116\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T01:06:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T01:06:10","slug":"the-talking-heads-hit-that-david-byrne-wanted-to-be-an-alice-cooper-and-randy-newman-hybrid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50116\/","title":{"rendered":"The Talking Heads Hit That David Byrne Wanted To Be an Alice Cooper and Randy Newman Hybrid"},"content":{"rendered":"

When David Byrne wrote his first and most successful hit song for the Talking Heads<\/a>, he had one question in mind: what would it sound like if Alice Cooper and Randy Newman wrote a song together? An absurd question, perhaps. But the results speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s signature debut has a double-platinum certification in the U.S., landed the Talking Heads on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, and is still a beloved track all these decades later. Maybe Alice Cooper and Randy Newman should have actually collaborated.<\/p>\n

David Byrne, Alice Cooper, and Randy Newman<\/strong> Walk Into a Room<\/p>\n

One would be hard-pressed to find a more eccentric musical trio than Talking Heads founder David Byrne, King of Shock Rock Alice Cooper, and Randy \u201cYou\u2019ve Got a Friend in Me\u201d Newman. Nevertheless, the combination of these three artists\u2014or, more specifically, Byrne\u2019s imagining of this combination\u2014contributed to the creation of Byrne\u2019s first and most successful song he wrote for the Talking Heads: \u201cPsycho Killer.\u201d<\/a> (Hear that iconic bass intro yet?)<\/p>\n

In a 2023 interview<\/a> on NPR\u2019s Fresh Air, Byrne called the now-classic cut \u201can experiment to see if I could write a song. I thought I would try and write something that was maybe a cross between Alice Cooper and Randy Newman. I thought I\u2019d have the kind of dramatic subject that Alice Cooper might use. But then look at kind of an interior monologue, the way Randy Newman might do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, I thought, \u2018Let\u2019s see if we can get inside this guy\u2019s head,\u2019\u201d Byrne continued. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to talk about the violence or anything like that. But we\u2019ll just get inside this guy\u2019s kind of muddled up, slightly twisted thoughts. I imagined that he would imagine himself as very erudite and sophisticated, and so he would speak sometimes in French.\u201d Thus, the line psycho killer, qu\u2019est-ce que c\u2019est.<\/p>\n

The Talking Heads Took After Other Midcentury Stars<\/strong><\/p>\n

Randy Newman and Alice Cooper weren\u2019t the only icons of the mid-20th century that David Byrne turned to for inspiration. As he explained in a 2023 interview<\/a> with Conan O\u2019Brien, he based a lot of the Talking Heads\u2019 creative ethos on artists that came before him, like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Temptations, and James Brown. The key element that all these artists and bands had in common, Byrne explained, was their evolutionary process.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of them, not all of them, from album to album, they\u2019d evolve,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cThey\u2019d do different things and try adding these odd sounds and odd ideas into their songs, and I thought, \u2018That\u2019s what you do. You can get away with it.\u2019 And look, they\u2019re successful. So, I thought, \u2018Well, okay, if they can do it, that\u2019s the way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starting with a Randy Newman and Alice Cooper hybrid is certainly pushing the word \u201codd\u201d to its fullest extent. But then again, we wouldn\u2019t expect anything less from the one and only David Byrne.<\/p>\n

Photo by Chris Walter\/WireImage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When David Byrne wrote his first and most successful hit song for the Talking Heads, he had one…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":50117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[37886,37887,171,975,37888,4185,22764,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-50116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-alice-cooper","9":"tag-david-byrne","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-randy-newman","13":"tag-rock-music","14":"tag-talking-heads","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114820598329240564","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}