Psycho Killer, Burning Down The House and Take Me To The River by the Talking Heads
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Talking Heads '77 Psycho Killer
It started when lead singer David Byrne decided to write something in the vein of Alice Cooper, whose shock rock was all the rage. Byrne started with the first verse, which establishes a dangerous paranoia:
I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax
I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire
The rest of the lyric is even more capricious, with this guy admitting he's a psycho killer and warning us to run. It ended up being far more introspective than most Alice Cooper songs, but just as believable: while Cooper is a completely different guy off stage (Vince Furnier), Byrne really is the socially awkward genius he portrays in performance. He's never killed anyone (that we know of) but can convincingly inhabit the character.
This was the first Talking Heads song. It was written in 1973 at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where David Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz had a band called The Artistics. When Byrne presented the song, he explained that he wanted a Japanese section in the bridge, but when he asked a girl who spoke the language to come up with some murderous words, she understandably freaked out. Frantz' girlfriend, Tina Weymouth, spoke French, so they had her write a French part for the bridge instead. She drew inspiration from the Norman Bates character in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho, which influenced the next verse:
You start a conversation you can't even finish it
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it again?
Byrne incorporated a French line into the chorus: "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" (meaning "What is this?") and followed it with a stuttering warning:
Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away
The end result is one of the most famous songs about a psychopathic murderer, influenced by two touchstones of the genre: Alice Cooper and the movie Psycho.
The French section in the Bridge roughly translates to:
What I did that night
What she said that night
Realizing my hopes
I launch myself towards a glorious destiny
This reveals that the psycho killer is targeting a woman, just as Norman Bates did in Psycho.
Credited to David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, this is the only song on the Talking Heads' debut album that isn't listed as a solo Byrne composition. Songwriting credits quickly became a sticking point in the band as Byrne became the focal point and gave the impression that he did all the songwriting himself. Frantz claims that he wrote the second verse to "Psycho Killer," but Byrne has downplayed his contribution to the song, telling Mojo, "Chris and Tina helped me with some of the French stuff."
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