Friday, September 03, 2004



What I've been listening to: The Name of this Band is Talking Heads, the two-CD set of the 1978 live album of the same name, one of the few Heads discs I've never owned in one version or another, so it's a real feast -- or it would be, if I wasn't stuck on Track 13, Disc One: "Mind," from Fear of Music. Much better than the studio version, I think, far more impassioned, with David Byrne slurring and stretching the words -- "Religion won't change yeeeeeeeeewwwww" -- and making me think again what a curiously intense little love song this is; a song equal parts desire and frustration, the exact nature of which is left deliberately vague. When he sings "I need something to change your mind," you can't say for sure whether he wants to seduce an unseduceable girl or if this is about a couple at the end of their road -- stuck in their ways, in who they are, tired of each other, one yearning for the other to be the same but different, to take a quantum leap into being some surprising and spontaneous other being, and knowing, from the beginning, that only a miraculous something will do the trick. I don't know when I'll get around listening to the rest of the CD. I've played the song three times just writing this.

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