My Top 1000 Songs #736: And She Was

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

The Talking Heads have so many songs that are simply brilliant--groundbreaking, complex, absurd, insightful, and unlike anything anyone else has ever recorded. I've cited a few, and I wish I had room for more. So it feels a little odd including "And She Was," which is, quite frankly, none of those things. 

It's just a silly pop song--almost a Talking Heads guilty pleasure, if there is such a thing. But after a long run of increasingly intricate music, culminating in what felt like a career capstone in the Stop Making Sense tour movie, there was a sense that maybe they were done? And instead, in 1985, we get the surprisingly modest and low-key Little Creatures. For the first time in awhile, it didn't sound like a grand statement, just a record with some pretty good (and occasionally great) songs, itself a statement of a sort (and, sadly, what turned out to be their last essential record). There are better songs on the album--I'd go with "Road To Nowhere"--but "And She Was" was awfully fun. And to this day still makes for a surefire way to pep up a mix.

David Byrne live: