When David Byrne wrote his first and most successful hit song for the Talking Heads, 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.
The band’s 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.
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David Byrne, Alice Cooper, and Randy Newman Walk Into a Room
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 “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” Newman. Nevertheless, the combination of these three artists—or, more specifically, Byrne’s imagining of this combination—contributed to the creation of Byrne’s first and most successful song he wrote for the Talking Heads: “Psycho Killer.” (Hear that iconic bass intro yet?)
In a 2023 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Byrne called the now-classic cut “an 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’d 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.”
“So, I thought, ‘Let’s see if we can get inside this guy’s head,’” Byrne continued. “We’re not going to talk about the violence or anything like that. But we’ll just get inside this guy’s 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.” Thus, the line psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est.
The Talking Heads Took After Other Midcentury Stars
Randy Newman and Alice Cooper weren’t the only icons of the mid-20th century that David Byrne turned to for inspiration. As he explained in a 2023 interview with Conan O’Brien, he based a lot of the Talking Heads’ 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.
“A lot of them, not all of them, from album to album, they’d evolve,” Byrne said. “They’d do different things and try adding these odd sounds and odd ideas into their songs, and I thought, ‘That’s what you do. You can get away with it.’ And look, they’re successful. So, I thought, ‘Well, okay, if they can do it, that’s the way to go.”
Starting with a Randy Newman and Alice Cooper hybrid is certainly pushing the word “odd” to its fullest extent. But then again, we wouldn’t expect anything less from the one and only David Byrne.
Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage