Naked (Talking Heads album)

Co-producer Steve Lillywhite (pictured in 2010) helped consolidate the album's shift in sound.

Wanting to try something different after their use of regional American music and the pop song format on their previous two albums Little Creatures (1985) and True Stories (1986), Talking Heads decided to record their next album in Paris with a group of international musicians. According to the album's liner notes, the decision to do so was in part a reaction to the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration, which had grown increasingly isolationist in approach.[5] Prior to leaving for France, the band recorded about 40 improvisational tracks that would serve as the foundation for the sessions in Paris.

In Paris, the band, along with producer Steve Lillywhite, were joined by a number of other musicians in the recording studio where they would rehearse and play for the entire day. At the end of each day, one take was selected as being the ideal version of a particular tune. "Paris is a wonderful place to work," observed drummer Chris Frantz in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. "We were really embracing world culture fully." In the interest of freedom for the musicians, it was decided that lyrics and melodies would be left until later. The lyrics were not overdubbed until the band returned to New York. Many of David Byrne's lyrics were improvisations sung along with the prerecorded tracks until he found something that he felt worked. In this way, the melodies and lyrics evolved in a similar fashion as the songs themselves. According to Lillywhite, the album's more organic, percussive sound was a deliberate move away from the bombastic production that he had helped make commonplace in the 1980s, stating that "It wasn't made so angular and mixed so loud as it might have been in the past. It was more of a warm sound with all for the beats compensated for."[6]

Byrne told Record Mirror in 1988 that many of the songs on Naked are "about human beings stripped of their pretensions; stripped of their surface trappings", which in turn inspired putting a picture of a chimpanzee on the album cover.[7]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[8]
Chicago Tribune	[9]
Christgau's Record Guide	B+[10]
Los Angeles Times	[11]
Mojo	[12]
NME	9.68/10[13]
Rolling Stone	[2]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[14]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	8/10[15]
Uncut	6/10[16]

Naked was well received by critics, who hailed it as a vast improvement over True Stories.[17] Chris Willman from the Los Angeles Times said the band abandoned "the stripped-down four-piece rock approach of late" in favor of a "far more eclectic big-band, world music extravaganza."[11] In Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis called the album "stylistically bold and intellectually provocative," a "dizzying and disturbing piece of work" that "marks a return to the more open-ended, groove-oriented style the Heads defined on Remain in Light." He noted that "the vital human harmony suggested by the international band of players .. is the strongest counterpoint to the album's pervasive themes of alienation and dread." He concluded by interpreting the view of the album's lyrics: "The human race consists of some pretty cool people ... but it's got a very destructive monkey on its back. Human survival is not guaranteed. With humor and good-hearted-ness [sic], hope and fear, Talking Heads contemplate a world on the eve of destruction on this important record — and leave wide open the question of what the dawn will bring."[2]

Naked was voted the 24th best album of 1988 in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll of American critics nationwide. Robert Christgau, the poll's supervisor, regarded it as "an honest if less than sustaining internationalist gesture" and said "Byrne concealed the ricketiness of his current compositional practice by riding in on soukous's jetstream, but the trick didn't stick", attributing the band's diminished success to a weariness with the music business.[17] In Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), he wrote, "where Paul Simon appropriated African musicians, David Byrne just hires them, for better and worse – this is T. Heads funk heavy on the horns, which aren't fussy or obtrusive because Byrne knew where to get fresh ones. What's African about it from an American perspective is that the words don't matter – it signifies sonically." However, he called, "(Nothing But) Flowers" a "gibe at ecology fetishism that's very reassuring".[10] Years later, he revised his stance on both Naked and True Stories, "which I once thought overrated. I was wrong. They sucked."[18]

In a retrospective review, Michael Hastings from AllMusic found Naked "alternately serious and playful", allowing Byrne to continue worrying about "the government, the environment, and the plight of the working man as it frees up the rest of the band to trade instruments and work with guest musicians. It's closest in spirit to Remain in Light – arguably too close." He further stated that "the album sounds technically perfect, but there's little of the loose, live feel the band achieved with former mentor Brian Eno. It's quite a feat to pull off a late-career album as ambitious as Naked, and the Heads do so with style and vitality." He concluded that "the album's elegiac, airtight tone betrays the sound of four musicians growing tired of the limits they've imposed on one another."[8] Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it "marked a return to their worldbeat explorations, although it sometimes suffered from Byrne's lyrical pretensions."[19]

All lyrics written by David Byrne, all music composed by Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth.[20]

• Naked at Discogs (list of releases)