Trivia / Remain in Light

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite being widely regarded as Talking Heads' greatest album and one of the best albums ever made by both fans and critics, it sold fairly poorly compared to the rest of the band's output even if it charted higher than the albums before it and eventually went gold; Chris Frantz went as far as calling it their worst-selling album. David Byrne elaborated on this, stating that program directors considered it "too black for white radio and too white for black radio." Still, that didn't stop the album from being advertised as among the first CD titles for the initial Western launch of the format in 1983, as even then the album had a towering critical reputation.
• Chart Displacement: While it's unarguably known today as Talking Heads' Signature Song, "Once in a Lifetime" performed very modestly even by the band's standards, peaking at just No. 103 on the Bubbling Under chart in the US (though in Britain it performed at a much more decent No. 14 on the UK Singles chart); indeed, for a long time "Burning Down the House"— their actual highest-charting single— was Talking Heads' most popular song before "Once in a Lifetime" eventually overtook it.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Tina Weymouth was frustrated with Brian Eno's dominance of the band's work at the time, facetiously suggesting superimposing his face over the bandmates' portraits on the album artwork at one point after he asked to be included on the cover.
  • Then there was the spat over songwriting credits on the album, in which Eno convinced Byrne to change them to attribute the songwriting solely to the two of them "and Talking Heads," rather than crediting Eno and the individual band members alphabetically as was originally planned, an alteration that everyone but Byrne and Eno detested. Later re-releases of Remain in Light would revert the songwriting credits back to the intended alphabetical list, but the sting of Eno's alteration left a permanent mark on the band; Chris Frantz described himself, Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison as having been "very burnt" by Eno's meddling, and Weymouth recounted Byrne facing a lot of yelling after the alteration was first discovered.
  • For the tour, Weymouth was particularly annoyed by the decision to take on another bassist, Busta Jones, relegating her to guitar, percussion, or synthesizer on some songs. She liked Jones personally, but didn't think it worked having two bass players.
• Half-Remembered Homage: "The Overload" was a tribute to Joy Division, based entirely on reviews from the music press. It wound up a remarkably good Pastiche of Joy Division's gloomier, more atmospheric material. Amusingly, the members of Talking Heads were a bit disappointed when they finally listened to Joy Division for real and found that the former Manchester band was more conventional-sounding than they'd been led to believe.
• Hitless Hit Album: While the album drew critical raves, charted in the Top 20 albums on Billboard and sold steadily, the album's first single, "Once in a Lifetime," didn't even make the Top 100 in the U.S. (it did chart at #14 in the U.K.) The song only became Talking Heads' Signature Song when the video was put in heavy rotation on MTV a year later.
• Referenced by...:
  • In the season 3 Millennium (1996) episode "Borrowed Time", a near death experience support group is called "Remain in Light".
  • The music video for Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Taiso" is an extended parody of that for "Once in a Lifetime".
  • ENA features a large number of nods to David Byrne's moves in the "Once in a Lifetime" video, so much so that at least one video exists compiling most of them.
  • Nine Inch Nails' logo is based on the typography on the cover. Trent Reznor has cited the album as one of his favorites in interviews.
  • Phish has covered the album in concert.
  • Angélique Kidjo released a cover of the entire album in 2018 that more prominently emphasized the songs' African influences; according to her, the idea to do so was born out of her own immediate recognition of the songs as afrobeat back when the Talking Heads version was first released and her feelings of encouragement by the band's homage to the genre.
  • Peter Gabriel covered "Listening Wind" for his Scratch My Back album (Byrne returned the favor with a cover of "I Don't Remember" on And I'll Scratch Yours).
  • A Certain Ratio covered "Houses in Motion".
• Similarly Named Works: "Once in a Lifetime" is unrelated to the song of the same name by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
• Troubled Production: For starters, frustrated with David Byrne's increasing ego, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were pondering quitting the band before recording even started. After spending a few weeks in Africa, the couple brought new rhythmic and tonal ideas to the band that intrigued Byrne. This ended up changing their style when they were already on edge. Brian Eno, who had worked with the band on More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music, initially didn't want to work with them again until he heard the new recordings, after which he changed his mind. Byrne wanted looped rhythms, which recording technology at the time was incapable of reliably creating (computers outright couldn't do looped rhythms, early digital samplers like the Fairlight CMI were prohibitively expensive and incapable of high-quality sound output, and using tape loops over the course of entire songs was a risky gamble, due to both the high number of moving parts involved and the natural playback degradation of analog tape). Consequently, he resorted to making the band become increasingly good at playing repeated beats and musical ideas throughout an entire song. It sounds simple on paper, but it ended up exhausting his musicians all the more, as Byrne demanded mechanical precision from them. The breakneck pace of the recording caused original sound engineer Rhett Davies to step out, prompting Steven Stanley to replace him. After instrumental recording wrapped up, Byrne found himself suffering from Writer's Block, using more African techniques to finish up lyrical ideas. Mixing was done in two different sessions by both Eno and John Potoker. The album was released in 1980 to critical acclaim, but Eno was so taken aback by the stress of the recording sessions that he vowed to never work with the band again. The perfectionism instigated by Byrne set the stage for the eventual demise of the band eleven years later.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The liner notes— similarly to those of Fear of Music— include a number of verses on several tracks not actually included in the final edits of the associated songs, indicating that the tracks were originally somewhat longer before being edited down to fit on a single LP. This is most noticeable on "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", where an audible tape splice can be heard just before the final repetition of the chorus before the fade-out begins. As of 2019, the full versions of these songs have yet to be released, officially or not.
  • Brian Eno wanted the album to be credited to him and Talking Heads, only relenting when the band members pointed out to him that he would be expected to accompany them on the supporting tour.
  • The album was only going to be supported by the expanded lineup's appearance at the Heatwave Festival in Toronto and at the Wollman Rink in New York City. The enthusiastic response to these concerts prompted the band to launch a full-scale tour.
• Working Title: The band considered calling the album Melody Attack; this, along with Tina Weymouth's Military Brat background, explains the World War II planes on the back cover, which was actually meant to be the front cover art before the title was changed. The planes were left intact partly because of how timely their presence was in the wake of the then-ongoing Iran hostage crisis.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The album's songs were worked up from jams in the studio. When it came time for David Byrne to write lyrics, he followed Eno's working style of singing nonsense syllables and forming them into words.

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