Collage Lyrics

As we said in the section on rock lyrics, rock songs may be freer in phrase lengths, rhyme schemes, and frames of reference, and do not necessarily follow metrical patterns. Sometimes they create an atmostphere and describe feelings in fragment, rather than develop a story characteristic of pop and country songs.

One way to create collage lyrics is using the cut-up technique, an aleatoric literary technique that can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s, that was popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s by William S. Burroughs, in which a finished text is cut into pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. From the 1970s David Bowie used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. Kurt Cobain was influenced by the technique, and Thom Yorke used a similar methoed in Radiohead's Kid A album, writing single lines, putting them into a hat, and then drawing them out at random to assemble the lyrics. For more on experimental literature, read the article and watch the video clips about it.

The only song The Talking Heads ever got into the Top 10 was "Burning Down the House". The song started to take shape one night during a jam when their drummer, Chris Frantz, who had just been to see Parliament-Funkadelic, kept yelling "Burn down the house!", a chant the audience had been singing at the concert. David Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he arrived a a phrasing that fit the rhythms, a technique influenced by their former producer, Brian Eno, who would write words to fit the phrasing, from phrases he had collected that he thought had something to do with each other thematically. According to Byrne in the NPR interview, phrases he tried but ultimately didn't use in the song included "I have another body," "Pick it up by the handle," "You travel with a double," and "I'm still under construction." As for the title phrase in the chorus, one early attempt (as heard on a worktape) had him singing a different line, "What are we gonna do?", and at another point in the process, "instead of chanting 'Burning Down the House,' I was chanting 'Foam Rubber, USA.'" (Wikipedia).

The repeated refrain "burning down the house" helps connect the verses.

Burning Down the House - David Byrne (The Talking Heads) [ music video ] [ live version ]

Watch out
You might get what you're after
Cool babies
Strange but not a stranger
I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house.

Hold tight
Wait till the party's over
Hold tight
We're in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house.

Here's your ticket, pack your bag
Time for jumpin' overboard
Transportation is here
Close enough but not too far
Maybe you know where you are
Fightin' fire with fire.

All wet
Hey you might need a raincoat
Shakedown
Dreams walking in broad daylight
Three hundred sixty-five degrees
Burning down the house.

It was once upon a place
Sometimes I listen to myself
Gonna come in first place
People on their way to work
Say baby what did you expect?
Gonna burst into flame.
Burning down the house.

My house
Is out of the ordinary
That's right
Don't want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can knock me off my feet
Burning down the house.

No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin' yet
Everything's stuck together
I don't know what you expect stare into the TV set
Fighting fire with fire.

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Ear training check: Write the progression in Roman numerals for the verse from "Burning Down the House" (Hint: it starts on the I chord and uses two borrowed chords)

Verse

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Verse

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