Creativity Quote by Tina Weymouth

There is a quiet rebuke in Weymouth's phrasing: the myth of the lone genius evaporates, replaced by a band behaving like a lab. "We were jamming" sounds casual, almost anti-heroic, but it names the real engine behind Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light: process over epiphany. The intent is practical - describing workflow - yet the subtext is political in the way Talking Heads always were. Jamming is democratic. It redistributes authorship, letting groove and accident outrank any one person's "vision."

The second move matters even more: "taking the best bits". That's the edit. It's where spontaneity gets disciplined into something repeatable, sharable, and ultimately saleable. Weymouth is pointing to a paradox at the heart of those records: they feel like nervous, live-wire discovery, but they're built through selection, splicing, and layering. Improvisation becomes a resource mined and curated.

Context does a lot of work here. Remain in Light is inseparable from early-80s downtown New York, from the studio-as-instrument arms race, and from the band's controversial, generative relationship to Afrobeat and funk structures. "Recording and improvising on top of those" hints at that collage logic: loops, interlocking parts, overdubs that turn a jam into architecture. It's also a subtle claim for the rhythm section's centrality. In a band often narrated through David Byrne's persona, Weymouth reminds you that the music's most radical idea was collective: build the song after the moment, without pretending the moment was ever pure.