Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock

by Jonathan Gould Narrated by Jason Culp

Overview

""Definitive...Not just for Talking Heads fans-it's a masterful dive into downtown New York in the 70s, and the changing face of rock music.”-Town & Country

""Riveting""-New York Post

""A masterful achievement."" -Booklist (starred review)

On the 50th anniversary of Talking Heads, acclaimed music biographer Jonathan Gould presents the long-overdue, definitive story of this singular band, capturing the gritty energy of 1970s New York City and showing how a group of art students brought fringe culture to rock's mainstream, forever changing the look and sound of popular music.

“Psycho Killer.” “Take Me to the River.” “Road to Nowhere.” Few musical artists have had the lasting impact and relevance of Talking Heads. One of the foundational bands of New York's downtown 1970s music scene, Talking Heads have endured as a musical and cultural force for decades. Their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock remains a lingering influence on popular music-despite their having disbanded over thirty years ago.

Now New Yorker contributor Jonathan Gould offers an authoritative, deeply researched account of a band whose sound, fame, and legacy forever connected rock music to the cultural avant-garde. From their art school origins to the enigmatic charisma of David Byrne and the internal tensions that ultimately broke them apart, Gould tells the story of a group that emerged when rock music was still young and went on to redefine the prevailing expectations of how a band could sound, look, and act. At a time when guitar solos, lead-singer swagger, and sweaty stadium tours reigned supreme, Talking Heads were precocious, awkward, quirky, and utterly distinctive when they first appeared on the ragged stages of the East Village. Yet they would soon mature into one of the most accomplished and uncompromising recording and performing acts of their era.

More than just a biography of a band, Gould masterfully captures the singular time and place that incubated and nurtured this original music: downtown New York in the 1970s, that much romanticized, little understood milieu where art, music, and commerce collided in the urban dystopia of Lower Manhattan. What emerges is an expansive portrait of a unique cultural moment and an iconoclastic band that shifted the paradigm of popular music by burning down the house of mainstream rock.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

“Riveting...In a gripping narrative, Gould traces Talking Heads’ journey from their hometowns to their art schools, Chrystie Street loft, and eventual global stardom. He sharply analyzes their work and includes rich portraits of individuals, art movements, and music scenes in their orbit.”  — New York Post

“Like with his now-classic book Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, And America, Gould infuses his writing with an indelible sense of time and place, making the music feel like part of the scenery and vice versa.”
— AV Club

"Well-wrought, insightful...Gould is a superb stylist” — Washington Post

"A masterful achievement."  — Booklist (starred review)

“Talking Heads fans, rejoice!...a comprehensive biography of the seminal band that injected an art school vibe into popular music and forever changed rock ‘n’ roll...Gould, a former professional musician, writes exceedingly well about music.” — Associated Press

“The story of this band, its world, and its impact—a tale of fruitfully conflicting personalities, social politics, art, and luck (good and bad) has been taken up before...But it has never been told as fully and vividly as Jonathan Gould tells it in Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. Gould, a former professional drummer and the author of books on Otis Redding and the Beatles, writes with clarity and musical acumen on a period in American musical history that rock writers tend to romanticize and inflate.” — The Nation

"Definitive...Not just for Talking Heads fans—it’s a masterful dive into downtown New York in the 70s, and the changing face of rock music.” — Town & Country

“Goes deep into the group’s history and impact, while paralleling the socioeconomical challenges facing New York at the time." — Rolling Stone

“Well-researched and impressive, this is the definitive history of Talking Heads, which will appeal to anyone interested in modern rock.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“Gould delivers a colorful and expansive genealogy of the band and the scruffy downtown music scene they helped form…devoted Talking Heads fans will want to pick this up.” — Publishers Weekly

““Well written and informative…Fans of the band will find much to appreciate here.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Music biographer Gould tells the definitive story of the Talking Heads and the gritty New York City scene that birthed them in this overdue account, out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the band’s founding.” — The Millions

Kirkus Reviews

2025-07-03
A warts-and-all biography of the New Wave legends.

Gould (Can’t Buy Me Love, 2007) begins his biography of art-rock legends Talking Heads with an account of the band’s first show at legendary New York club CBGB, writing that the performance didn’t call “attention to their musical virtuosity, for the simple reason that they had none.” Maybe not, but a few pages later, he allows that the band’s “combination of talent, originality, discipline, self-awareness, and steely artistic ambition would form the basis of a major musical career.” Gould writes about their formation, when drummer Chris Frantz asked singer David Byrne if he wanted to start a band. “I guess so,” was Byrne’s halfhearted answer. He chronicles the band’s early successes, which started with their debut album,Talking Heads: 77, and first hit song, “Psycho Killer,” and continued through seven more studio albums. The portrait of the band that emerges is one marked by acrimony, with Frantz, bassist Tina Weymouth, and keyboardist Jerry Harrison never quite sure what Byrne was going to do; Gould partially attributes Byrne’s caprice and lacking communication skills to his apparent Asperger’s syndrome. (Weymouth, at one point, attributed it to Byrne being “a bully and a coward.”) That the band would break up in 1991, after 16 years, does not come as a surprise; Gould writes about the band’s dissolution with a sense of inevitable sadness that isn’t leavened by their awkward, occasional reunions. The book is necessarily hampered by the fact that none of the Heads was willing to talk to Gould, which might be why he indulges in a series of odd tangents, writing about New York’s political history and, bizarrely, a series of stunts involving the city’s skyscrapers. Nonetheless, it’s well written and informative—not the last word on the Talking Heads, but a respectable try.

Fans of the band will find much to appreciate here.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940190904901
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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