Why "Stop Making Sense" Gets Me Every Time
How the Talking Heads concert film wrecked me then put me back together
A few weeks ago, Jake surprised me by taking me to see the A24 re-release of the 1984 Talking Heads’ concert film “Stop Making Sense” at Vidiots in LA. I hadn’t seen it in 14 years, and seeing it again unlocked something inside of me that I wasn’t expecting.
The first time I saw the film was in Reno when I was 19. I hate to get Summer of ‘69 on everyone, but the summer I was 19 was one of the best. I was coming off a particularly awful first year of college, marked with moments whose atrocity I still marvel at. That summer, though, was a blithe reprieve.
For my 19th birthday in May, my best friends at the time and I threw a joint birthday party at my cousin Kelsey’s apartment. Kelsey was not actually my cousin, but our families were so close that we spent holidays together, and a lot of weekends in between. Though I was close with all of the kids in the family, somehow Kelsey and I were the only ones to refer to each other as cousins. Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe I just did that to make it easier to explain a person who knew so much about me and my family.
I had known Kelsey since I was 12 and she was 16. She was effortlessly funny and cool, instantly taking me under her wing when we met. She was one of the first people in our large sewn together family to let me know that our parents and relatives were not perfect, and at times, downright nuts. But even so, that was okay. This was in stark contrast to the “everything is fine” PR in my family, and her honesty was something I trusted implicitly. She also gave me her old ID when I was 18 so I could get into bars. So, that was cool, too.
She was incredibly smart, but with a wild self-sabotaging streak. Which is how she, as a 23-year-old, ended up hosting a birthday party in her one bedroom for the three 19-year-olds. She just wanted us to have fun, even if it wasn’t legal.
At the party, I invited a guy from MySpace I’d been chatting with (take a second to blow the dust off that sentence).
We had never met but had enough mutual friends that he was vouched for and we hit it off. We kissed in Kelsey’s bathroom and didn’t stop hanging out for the rest of the summer. It was that ease that only exists when you have so few obligations that you have no choice but to prioritize fun, and each other because nothing else exists. All we did was drive around, eat cheap food, drink Carlo Rossi at parties with our best friends, laugh and fall asleep. Rinse. Repeat.
We went to see “Stop Making Sense” at a park in downtown. There’s a festival for the duration of every July called Artown, where art from local artists and beyond features prominently around town. The spelling of Artown always puzzled me. I know it’s going for Art Town, but it also doubles as Our Town and somehow also maybe as a guy named Art’s Town? Like many things in Reno, it’s fun as long as you don’t think too hard about it.
When I saw the film for the first time, I remember thinking I hadn’t seen people be so free while having so much fun onstage. It was the first concert film I saw that wasn’t just a shaky, smoky video of the Grateful Dead, so perhaps my expectations were low, but still. The experience embedded itself into my brain, inside the memories of a summer that was memorable for its constant feed of “wow, isn’t this nice?”
Back to 2023: this summer of ease immediately flashed back to me when I saw “Stop Making Sense” again in Vidiots. As the second song in the film, “Heaven” began playing, I knew I was in for it. It being big emotions.
Oh, Heaven
Heaven is the place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens
I started crying. I felt such a punch to the gut. I thought my 19-year-old self mindlessly laughing and strolling around town. It felt so far away. Because so much had…happened.
As the film went on, there was a clarity. For everything I’ve had taken away since I last saw the film, it reminded me what still remained. In “Stop Making Sense,” David Byrne has perfectly encapsulated what it feels like to be at the best party with your closest friends. It starts with a host (David Byrne) alone, joined by all his friends as they discuss all they’ve seen. In the concert’s journey, its conversation topics range from absurd to political to sentimental, but in the end, they all leave together.
If you played back all of my favorite memories, it would just be reels of me doing nothing spectacular with the people I love. It’s all eating, drinking, sleeping, laughing repeating forever. It’s all one summer of ease, and it’s one I feel lucky that I can conjure up on any given night with the people in my life currently. It’s all I ever want to do. I just miss the people I no longer get to do it with.
Last Thanksgiving, Kelsey passed away. Another punch to the gut. Another person that I spent so many of these easy days with—gone. Each time someone dies, a new grief pattern emerges. Each person brings their own set of emotions and memories revisited, but a familiar refrain surfaces. “At least I got to know her.” We aren’t the people we are without the people we lose.
”Stop Making Sense” nails this quest for quiet belonging in a world that demands action. That search for a home that’s outside of the conventional definition. We come into this life with one family, but the joy of life is finding the one we leave with. A better music scholar would lay out all the references to this line by line, but I think you’ll get more from watching it than my attempts to dissect lyrics I paste from Genius here.
One lyric before I go, though. For our New Year’s Eve party, we had a Spotify Collaborative Playlist™ with hundreds songs to shuffle through. In some cosmic technological error during the party, the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place” kept playing every few songs, but no one really noticed or cared. The lyrics “Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there” played in the background. A seemingly perfect bridge from 2023 to 2024.
Love you forever, Kelsey. Thank you for everything. I’ll be on the lookout for feathers.