Art imitating life imitating art. “Wild Wild Life” was the lead single from True Stories, the soundtrack to David Byrne’s pseudo-documentary about the fictional town of Virgil, Texas. Byrne wrote the song, but the band fleshed it out. Let’s look at the meaning behind “Wild Wild Life.”
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True Stories, The Movie
Byrne introduces the 1986 film: “I sometimes thought of this movie as a chance to highlight the incredible richness of music in just one specific area. In this case, Texas. Country, rock, R&B, Tex-Mex, gospel, blues, polkas, folk, opera, acid, disco, Latin marches, fox trots, and the whine of air conditioners. I’m David Byrne, and these are True Stories.”
The songs sung by the actors in the film were all written for their characters and for the places where they would be expected to sing.
I’m wearing fur pajamas
I ride a hot potato
It’s tickling my fancy
Speak up, I can’t hear you
Here on this mountain top, oh-oh-oh
I got some wild wild life
I got some news to tell you, oh-oh
About some wild wild life
Here come the doctor in charge, oh-oh-oh
She’s got some wild wild life
Ain’t that the way you like it, oh-oh?
Living wild, wild life
The Music Video
“‘Wild Wild Life’ was my attempt at writing a song like something one might hear on MTV at the time,” Byrne wrote in the liner notes for the Criterion DVD release. “I wanted it to be believable that the characters would be lip-synching to a typical song they all knew from the music video channel. Life follows art. The video for the song became a staple on MTV for a while. So, while our sensibility is there, none of these songs are typical Talking Heads songs. They’re Talking Heads attempting to sound like other artists.”
The single was released a month before True Stories to help promote the film. The band members dressed as different characters and lip-synched along with actors in the film.
“The song itself becomes a vehicle that can say anything they want it to. Some gestures and movements are obviously derived from well-known sources,” Byrne continues, “Odd to think that some lip-synchers are imitating characters in videos, who are really musicians imitating other characters.”
I’ll wrestle with your conscience
You wrestle with your partner
Sitting on a windowsill
But he spends his time behind closed doors
So check out Mister Businessman, oh-oh-oh
He bought some wild wild life
On the way to the stock exchange, oh-oh-oh
He got some wild wild life
Pick it up when he opens the door, oh-oh-oh
He doing wild, wild life
I know it’s the way you like it, oh-oh
Living wild, wild
The Songwriting
The lyrics mirror the premise of Something Wild, the movie directed by Jonathan Demme and released the same year. Demme had worked with Talking Heads on the concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984, and Byrne contributed music for the offbeat Melanie Griffith/Jeff Daniels action-comedy.
In This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century, author David Bowman reveals Byrne’s lyric writing process, “The band would record a bit, then David would return to Manhattan and begin pacing his SoHo loft singing gibberish into his little tape recorder. Gibberish in the meter of the songs. All day and night, the melody that came up would keep playing in his mind. … Searching for words, typing them down. He would end up typing pages and pages. David was typing in tongues.”
Peace of mind
It’s a piece of cake
Thought control
You get on board any time you like
Like sitting on pins and needles
Things fall apart
It’s scientific
Sleeping on the Interstate, oh-oh-oh
Getting wild, wild life
Checking in and checking out, oh-oh-oh
I got ’em, wild, wild life
Spending all of my money and time, oh-oh-oh
On too much wild wild life
We wanna go, and we go where we go, oh-oh-oh
Ah, doing wild wild life
The Characters
On the Criterion DVD Extras, True Stories production associate Christina Patoski reflected, “You had these incredibly trained actors, and then most of the rest of the film was populated by just normal people that had no training at all. They were just real people. The collision of those two just worked.”
Among the actors casting director Victoria Thomas found was John Goodman, who played country singer Louis Fyne before he became more recognizable from his role in Raising Arizona the following year and even more well-known the year after that in the sitcom Roseanne.
“None of us really knew John Goodman. Every single time John was on camera, he was so into it,” remarked True Stories co-producer Karen Murphy. “He was self-critical, as many good actors are, but he just did it in a way that I think David never imagined that this character who really carries, he’s kind of the central character in some ways.”
I know it, that’s how we start, oh-oh-oh
Got some wild, wild life
Take a picture here in the daylight, oh-oh
And it’s a wild wild life
You’ve grown so tall, you’ve grown so fast, oh-oh-oh
Wild, wild life
And I know that’s the way you like it, oh-oh
Living wild, wild, wild, wild life!
Byrne summed it up, “A song will take you back to the eighties in a more immediate and emotional way than art direction. But here, the songs are sung by the characters themselves, so we’re hearing directly from them, or they’re Talking Heads imitating the styles one might predictably hear on MTV.”
That is the life imitating art.
Byrne continued, “The songs are not used as score or to advance the narrative in a traditional way. When sung by the characters, they give us more information about their world, and the Talking Heads songs similarly describe the larger world and context that these characters live in.”
And that is art imitating life.
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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
