Remain in Light

''Remain in Light'' is the fourth studio album by the American rock band Talking Heads, released by Sire Records on October 8, 1980. Produced by Brian Eno, his third album with the band, the album was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and Sigma Sound Studios in New York in July and August 1980.

After the release of ''Fear of Music'' in 1979, Talking Heads and Eno sought to dispel notions of the band as a mere vehicle for frontman and songwriter David Byrne. Drawing influence from Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, they blended African polyrhythms and funk with electronics, recording instrumental tracks as a series of looping grooves. The sessions incorporated a variety of side musicians, including guitarist Adrian Belew, singer Nona Hendryx, and trumpeter Jon Hassell.

Byrne struggled with writer's block, but adopted a scattered, stream-of-consciousness lyrical style inspired by early rap and academic literature on Africa. The artwork was conceived by bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, crafted with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computers and design company, M&Co. The band hired additional members for a promotional tour, and following its completion went on a year-long hiatus to pursue side projects.

''Remain in Light'' was acclaimed by critics, who praised its sonic experimentation, rhythmic innovations, and cohesive merging of disparate genres. The album peaked at number 19 on the US ''Billboard'' 200 and number 21 on the UK Albums Chart, and spawned the singles " Once in a Lifetime" and "Houses in Motion". It has been featured in several publications' lists of the best albums of the 1980s and of all time, and is often considered Talking Heads' magnum opus. In 2017, the Library of Congress deemed the album "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

Background

In January 1980, the members of Talking Heads returned to New York City after touring in support of their 1979 album ''Fear of Music'', and took time off to pursue personal interests. Singer David Byrne worked with Brian Eno, the record's producer, on the album '' My Life in the Bush of Ghosts''. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison produced an album for soul singer Nona Hendryx at Sigma Sound Studios' secondary facility in New York City; Talking Heads would later record at Sigma and employ Hendryx as a backing vocalist on Harrison's advice.

Drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth, a married couple, discussed leaving Talking Heads after Weymouth suggested that Byrne was too controlling. Frantz did not want to leave, and the two took a long vacation in the Caribbean to ponder the state of the band and their marriage. They became involved in Haitian Vodou religious ceremonies, practiced native percussion instruments, and socialised with the reggae rhythm section of Sly and Robbie.

Frantz and Weymouth ended their holiday by purchasing an apartment above Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, where Talking Heads had recorded ''More Songs About Buildings and Food'' in 1978. Byrne joined the duo and Harrison there in early 1980. The band members realized that songwriting had thus far been largely Byrne's responsibility, and that they had become tired of the notion of being a singer and a backing band; the ideal they aimed for, according to Byrne, was "sacrificing our egos for mutual cooperation". Byrne also wanted to escape "the psychological paranoia and personal torment" that he had been feeling and writing about in New York. Instead of writing music to Byrne's lyrics, the group performed extended instrumental jams, using the ''Fear of Music'' track "I Zimbra" as a foundation.

Eno arrived in the Bahamas three weeks after Byrne. While reluctant to work with the band again after collaborating on their previous two albums, he changed his mind after hearing the instrumental demo tapes. The band and Eno experimented with the communal African way of making music, in which individual parts mesh as polyrhythms. Nigerian musician Fela Kuti's 1973 album ''Afrodisiac'' became the band and Eno's template for the album. According to Weymouth, the emergence of hip-hop made the band realize that the musical landscape was changing. Before the studio sessions began, the band's friend David Gans told them that "the things one doesn't intend are the seeds for a more interesting future", encouraging them to experiment, improvise and make use of "mistakes".

Recording and production

Recording sessions started at Compass Point Studios in July 1980. The album's creation required additional musicians, particularly percussionists. Talking Heads used the working title ''Melody Attack'' throughout the studio process after watching a Japanese game show of the same name. Harrison said the ambition was to blend rock and African genres, rather than simply imitate African music. Eno's production techniques and personal approach were key to the record's conception. The process was geared to promote the expression of instinct and spontaneity without overtly focusing on the sound of the final product. Eno compared the creative process to "looking out to the world and saying, 'What a fantastic place we live in. Let's celebrate it.'"

Sections and instrumentals were recorded one at a time in a discontinuous process. Loops played a key part at a time when computers could not yet adequately perform such functions. Talking Heads developed ''Remain in Light'' by recording jams, isolating the best parts, and learning to play them repetitively. The basic tracks focused wholly on rhythms and were all performed in a minimalist method using only one chord. Each section was recorded as a long loop to enable the creation of compositions through the positioning or merging of loops in different ways. Byrne likened the process to modern sampling: "We were human samplers."

According to Frantz, the band had met with Jamaican reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry in New York and arranged to record with him at Compass Point, but he did not show up to the sessions. After a few sessions at Compass Point, engineer Rhett Davies left following an argument with the Eno over the fast pace of recording, and Steven Stanley stepped in to replace him. Frantz credited Stanley with helping to create " Once in a Lifetime". A Lexicon 224 digital reverberation unit, one of the first of its kind, was obtained by engineer Dave Jerden and used on the album. Like Davies, Jerden was unhappy with the fast pace at which Eno wanted to record, but did not complain.

The tracks made Byrne rethink his vocal style and he tried singing to the instrumental songs, but sounded "stilted". Few vocal sections were recorded in the Bahamas. The lyrics were written when the band returned to the U.S., in New York City and California. Harrison booked Talking Heads into Sigma Sound, which focused primarily on R&B music, after convincing the owners that the band's work could bring them a new type of clientele. In New York City, Byrne struggled with writer's block, Harrison and Eno spent their time tweaking the compositions recorded in the Bahamas, and Frantz and Weymouth often did not show up at the studio. Doubts began to surface about whether the album would be completed, which were assuaged only after the recruitment of guitarist Adrian Belew at the request of Byrne, Harrison, and Eno. Belew was advised to add guitar solos to the Compass Point tracks, making use of numerous effects units and a Roland guitar synthesizer. Belew performed on the tracks that would become "Crosseyed and Painless", "The Great Curve", "Listening Wind" and "The Overload"; in 2022, he recalled that "all of isparts were done in one day".

Byrne recorded the rough mixes to a cassette tape and improvised over them on a portable tape recorder. He tried to create onomatopoeic rhymes in the style of Eno, who believed that lyrics were never the center of a song's meaning. Byrne continuously listened to his recorded scatting until convinced that he was no longer "hearing nonsense". After he was satisfied, Harrison invited Nona Hendryx to Sigma Sound to record backing vocals for the album. She was advised extensively on her vocal delivery by Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth, and often sang in a trio with Byrne and Eno. Brass player Jon Hassell, who had worked with Byrne and Eno on ''My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'', was hired to perform trumpet and horn overdubs. In August 1980, half of the album was mixed by Eno, engineer John Potoker, and Harrison in New York City, while the other half was mixed by Byrne and Jerden at Eldorado Studios in Los Angeles.

Music and lyrics

''Remain in Light'' has been described as new wave, post-punk, worldbeat, dance-rock, art pop, art rock, avant-pop, Afrobeat, and psychedelic funk. Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album a "dense amalgam of African percussion, funk bass and keyboards, pop songs, and electronics." The album contains eight songs with a "striking free-associative feel", according to psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog, in that there is no extended thought process that can be followed in its stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Gans instructed Byrne to be freer with his lyrical content, advising him that "rational thinking has its limits".Brog, p. 166

Byrne included a bibliography with the album press kit along with a statement that explained how the album was inspired by African mythologies and rhythms. The release stressed that the major inspiration for the lyrics was John Miller Chernoff's ''African Rhythm and African Sensibility'', which examined the musical enhancement of life in rural African communities. Chernoff travelled to Ghana in 1970 to study native percussion and wrote about how Africans have complicated conversations through drum patterns. One song, "The Great Curve", exemplifies the African theme with the line "The world moves on a woman's hips", which Byrne used after reading Robert Farris Thompson's book ''African Art in Motion''. He also studied straight speech, from Watergate scandal co-conspirator John Dean's testimony to the stories of African American former slaves.

Like the other tracks, album opener " Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" borrows from "preaching, shouting and ranting". The expression "And the Heat Goes On", used in the title and repeated in the chorus, is based on a ''New York Post'' headline Eno read in the summer of 1980, while Byrne rewrote the song title "Don't Worry About the Government" from Talking Heads' debut album, '' Talking Heads: 77'', into the lyric "Look at the hands of a government man". Although the unorthodox guitar solo has often been credited to Adrian Belew, it was in fact performed by Byrne via manipulating a Lexicon Prime Time digital delay unit.

The "rhythmical rant" in "Crosseyed and Painless"—"Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late"—is influenced by early hip-hop, specifically Kurtis Blow's " The Breaks", which was given to Byrne by Frantz. "Once in a Lifetime" borrows heavily from preachers' diatribes. While some critics deemed the song "a kind of prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s", Byrne disagreed with the categorization and commented that its lyrics were meant to be taken literally: "We're largely unconscious. You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'."

Byrne has described the album's final mix as a "spiritual" piece of work, "joyous and ecstatic and yet it's serious"; he has pointed out that, in the end, there was "less Africanism in ''Remain in Light'' than we implied ... but the African ideas were far more important to get across than specific rhythms". According to Eno, the record uniquely blends funk with punk rock and new wave. None of the compositions include chord changes, relying instead on the use of different harmonies and counter-melodies over pedal points. "Spidery riffs" and layered tracks of bass guitar and percussion are used extensively.

The first side contains the more rhythmic songs, "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", "Crosseyed and Painless", and "The Great Curve", which include long instrumental interludes. "The Great Curve" contains extended guitar solos by Belew, the first contributions that he made during his day in the studio. Belew performed the solo with the aid of four effects pedals: an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff distortion unit, an Alembic Strat-o-Blaster reverb unit, an equalizer, and an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress flanger.

The second side features more introspective songs. "Once in a Lifetime" pays homage to early rap techniques and the music of the Velvet Underground. The track was originally called "Weird Guitar Riff Song" because of its composition. It was conceived as a single riff before the band added a second; Eno alternated eight bars of each riff with corresponding bars of its counterpart. "Houses in Motion" incorporates long brass performances by Hassell, while "Listening Wind" features Arabic music influences and Belew adding textural content via the Electric Mistress and " bending">String_bending.html" ;"title="nowiki/>String bending">bendingthe sound up and down while working a Delay (audio effect)">delay