David Byrne and his Talking Heads concert film told us to Stop Making Sense in 1983.
Forty years later, it was restored, honored and rereleased. It hit like a storm.
At Larkspur’s Lark Theater on New Year’s Eve, people were dancing in the aisles with joy, matching the joyous musicians on the screen. Stop Making Sense continues to demonstrate David Byrne’s lyrical urgency that we stop trying to make sense of modern times.
Nowadays, artists play second stage to influencers; art is replaced with content, and our urge to seek creativity is dulled by scrolling social media blips. Byrne’s lyrics uphold their messages well, blasting a list of charges against those allowing this cookie-cutter normalcy.
In his song, “Heaven,” he sings, “Heaven, heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” Regarding the song “Burning Down The House,” Byrne said, “when I wrote the lyrics back in 1982, the title phrase was a metaphor for destroying something safe that entrapped you.” He also said, “Like the film title, it doesn’t make literal sense, but it makes emotional sense.”
These songs still invite us to stop making sense of unoriginality, of an unkind, precarious world, and of online algorithms that steer us into consuming disempowerment and dread. All this resonates in his songs “Crosseyed And Painless,” “What A Day That Was,” “Once In A Lifetime” and “Life During Wartime.”
This rings and sings so true now. And as the film progresses, this urgency builds until it explodes our senses with an ecstatic performance.
As 2025 is shaping up to be chaotic, David Byrne’s lyrics hold fast, so let’s try to stop making sense of the senselessness and get creative.
Phillip Saxon Lieb is from Petaluma, where he played guitar in alt rock bands Maltese Falcons, Trap A Poodle and operated a used record store, Vinyl Planet. He currently lives in Marin County.
