3. More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978)

Funky and bright, More Songs About Buildings And Food delivers a messy agglomeration of radio frequencies, with Byrne’s punk monotone often in sharp relief against the bubbly pop seltzer. Rigorously unorthodox in its trajectory, the album begins on a plateau of ecstasy (“Thank You For Sending Me An Angel”) and eases into a place of calculated, funky contemplation through “Warning Sign.” In the middle, there’s a massive unloading of dance (“The Girls Just Want To Be With The Girls”) and a series of reflections on the place of the artist in the non-art world (“I don’t have to prove/ that I am creative!”). The funk gets downright slimy for a few songs (through the Al Green cover “Take Me To The River”), but then the album ends on a rural paean to the big city, with “The Big Country.”

However, the band seems only to be following the advice of the perpetually mystifying “Found a Job”: “They might be better off, I think, the way it seems to me / making up their own shows, which might be better than TV.” If you don’t like what you see out there, Talking Heads posit that the artist’s job, if there can be said to be one, is to make it.