How a 40-year-old movie is still making sense

My favorite record album of the year reaches back 40 years to re-energize one of the most memorable events in my musical lifetime.

That event is Stop Making Sense, a movie of a performance by the quirky new-wave rock band Talking Heads, directed by super-famous director Jonathan Demme. The album, Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense revives and updates that film and its soundtrack.

Everyone’s Getting Involved isn’t on any year-end 10-best list I’ve seen.

It’s actually not on my best list either.

Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense re-energizes the 2004 movie and soundtrack with new musicians.

For me, the best album would be Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter for its many great songs and more importantly, because it’s a cohesive and well-deserved full-frontal assault on the tyranny of locking artists into creative silos based on someone’s idea of what genre they belong in.

Everyone’s Getting Involved doesn’t even contain my favorite song of the year. My pick for both favorite, and best, song is The Rolling Stones’ Dreamy Skies. It offers a relaxed, tuneful departure from the Stones’ usual rockers. It’s an uncharacteristic announcement about taking a break from the fast life and heading out to the woods. Plus, I can’t keep from laughing at the image of Mick Jagger “chopping up wood.”

A dance party with substance

So while Everyone’s Getting Involved doesn’t make even my best lists, it’s my favorite for its success at uniting four decades of rock history. It’s an album that’s a dance party with substance and a story.

The story is about how music is made up of styles, backgrounds, and influences from all over the world. The substance is that the album walks the walk—the musicians and their music also come from all over the world.

Everyone’s Getting Involved recreates the 16 tracks, in order, of the 1984 movie and live album Stop Making Sense. But with different performers.

Tribute albums can be interesting, especially if you’re a fan of the honoree. They’re less often significant.

Everyone’s Getting Involved does something a lot of tributes do. It uses familiar songs to bring attention to lesser-known musicians. This album does that, at least for me. I’d never heard of BADBADNOTGOOD or Blondshell.

Then it goes further. Most profoundly it carries forward the Talking Heads legacy of borrowing beats and styles from everywhere. Artists on Everyone’s Getting Involved come from different countries and genres. On one of the songs, Él Matô a un Policia Motorizato sings Slippery People entirely in Spanish.

And at least some of the artists on the album have described how they were changed by the weird humor, theatrics, and tunefulness of Talking Heads.

The background to the movie is that Talking Heads formed out of New York’s art school and punk scene of the 1970s, with the strong personality of lead singer David Byrne. In 1984 noted movie director Jonathan Demme (Risky Business, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) released Stop Making Sense, a striking concert movie that starts with Byrne walking onto a bare stage with a guitar and a cassette tape player he uses to accompany him.

With each song, another musician enters with their equipment. The bass player. The drummer and drum set. Congas. Backup singers. Keyboards. Until by the fifth song the stage is filled with the nine band members.

Stumbling around the stage and a ridiculously big suit

There are very few of the traditional concert movie audience shots. There doesn’t need to be. The band members play with enthusiasm, with Byrne as the centerpiece, playing his guitar while stumbling around and seeming to almost fall, inexplicably holding his arm up and chopping at it with his other hand, head jerking forward and back like a chicken, sprinting circles around the band. Most famously he performs in a hilariously oversized suit.

The movie (with a title pulled seemingly at random from a lyric of one of the songs) endured. Last year a 40th anniversary restored IMAX version was released in theaters. This spring the tribute album was released.

By reaching back to 1984 and recruiting musicians from different countries, Everyone’s Getting Involved makes a powerful statement about the worldwide and generational influence of Talking Heads. But what I find the most satisfying about this tribute is how it reveals the storytelling in the music of Talking Heads.

Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne opened the 2004 concert movie Stop Making Sense by playing alone onstage, then was joined one-at-a-time by the other members of the group.

Byrne’s theatrics are hugely entertaining. But until Everyone’s Getting Involved, I didn’t realize how those antics can distract from the lyrics.

Exhibit A is The National’s version of Heaven. On the original, Byrne’s voice soars delightfully. On the remake, The National’s simpler crooning lets you pay attention to a novel and intriguing description of the afterlife as a place that ought to be boring, but somehow isn’t. (Or maybe it’s irony—you decide.)

Paramore takes a different tack to clarifying the lyrics by using the force of a fierce female voice. While Talking Heads version seems to be fantasizing about angry payback, Paramore delivers a more threatening listen-to-me-or-else vengeance message.

Musically there are a couple sour notes on the album.

Miley Cyrus should be arrested for what she does to Psycho Killer, turning quiet, lurking terror into pop froth more suited to Radio Disney. When Byrne sings “Fa-fa-fa-fa,” you’re hoping someone will call the cops. When Cyrus sings it, you’re waiting for someone to say, “Bring on the dancing girls.” At least it’s the first song, getting that nonsense out of the way for the rest of the album.

I feel more charitable toward the recording’s most spectacular failure. On Life During Wartime, a DJ from Nigeria, DJ Tunez, takes a slow and understated Latin/jazz/hip-hop approach that drains out the frantic paranoia. That’s a problem for a song that’s about frantic paranoia. Turns out when singing about fear of the apocalypse, it doesn’t work to just recite the words. But hey, as the sayings go, no guts, no glory, go big or go home, etc.

Otherwise, this collection delights.

Blondshell makes magic on Thank You For Sending Me an Angel by changing up the driving, machine-gun drumming of the original into an ethereal slow build—think Ravel’s Bolero. The Cavemen add African instrumentation and choirs to What a Day that Was. girl in red transforms Girlfriend is Better into a mean girls slumber party nya-nya fantasy.

I did a double take when I thought I heard Norah Jones singing on This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody). I had to look up BADBADNOTGOOD—apparently it’s a Canadian instrumental group. That is indeed Norah Jones singing with them and maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’s long been a favorite of mine especially for her variety that includes jazz, pop, a bit of political commentary, and a couple albums as the Country/Western Swing group The Little Willies. She even recorded a duet with Tony Bennett. You’d think I’d get used to being surprised by her career. As Ravi Shankar’s daughter she has a strong pedigree from the Department of “Who Knew?”

Lorde nails Take Me To the River

With such a rich mix I’ll stop short of picking a star for the album, but Take Me to the River gets a treatment from Lorde that adds another layer of wow to that storied song.

The incredible Al Green co-wrote and recorded the song but quit performing it after focusing more on religious ministry, deciding it was a bit too steamy for his new career. Talking Heads were reluctant to record a cover of it but decided, what’s more rock and roll than a song about baptism and teenage lust?

Lorde is among those who gives Talking Heads credit for her career. She once wrote that watching a clip of them perform Take Me to the River when she was 12 helped her understand that her oddness was OK.

That clip from a 1980 TV show presents a driving, relentless, and sinister march of baptizer and baptizee toward sinfulness, or something like that. On Stop Making Sense it became more performance art with a comic tinge—Byrne still wore the big suit from the previous song. And it was used as a vehicle to introduce the band members.

On Everyone’s Getting Involved Lorde resurrects the song’s dark side, pitching her voice a bit higher than normal and putting a catch in it, for a schoolgirl’s wail of desperate and confused passion.

Lorde is a millennial from New Zealand, singing a song by an Arkansas soul-singer turned pastor, that inspired her when she saw it performed by a 1970s New York new wave group that took its styles from across the continents.

The Stop Making Sense tribute album shows rather than tells that, well, everyone’s getting involved.