'The everyday can be just fine'
For any critically beloved band, anniversaries tend to be pure, uncomplicated commerce: You can set your watch by the stream of reissues and deluxe editions that roll out once or twice a decade, boasting bonus material but few revelations. But when the news broke this summer that Stop Making Sense, the documentary showing art-rock icons Talking Heads in their performing prime, would be re-released to mark 40 years since the 1983 concerts captured indelibly by director Jonathan Demme, the reaction in the music press was something close to ecstatic disbelief.
The shock wasn't how the film would be presented, though that's quite something: Overseen by indie powerhouse A24, the new release's remastered sound and picture, projected in larger-than-life IMAX, has already produced reports of crowds leaping from their seats at preview screenings to dance and shout along. But the true bonus feature was one few thought possible: The band's four original members, all in one room, celebrating their achievement together, beginning with a live Q&A at the restoration's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The dissolution of Talking Heads is one of those hell-freezes-over breakups that becomes inseparable from a group's legacy. Frontman David Byrne split from the group in the early 1990s, and sued his former bandmates not long after. In the years that followed, the members continued to develop their own performing careers, produced albums for other artists and, in Byrne's case, even made it to Broadway, but rarely appeared in public together. Even as recently as 2020, drummer Chris Frantz's book Remain in Love — a memoir of his life in music with his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth — described Byrne during the Talking Heads years as intense, at times disrespectful and overly possessive of songs the group had written collaboratively.
The awkwardness of those years of distance — sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not — was apparent when Byrne, Frantz, Weymouth and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison gathered in a New York studio to speak with host Steve Inskeep, ahead of 's return to theaters this weekend. But perhaps more remarkable was the warmth, nostalgia and sense of growth permeating
