David Byrne - True Creatures Demos (1984)

In 1985, the Talking Heads put out the studio album "Little Creatures," which turned out to be their best seller. In 1986, they put out the album "True Stories," which was linked to a movie of the same name largely created by the band's main singer-songwriter, David Byrne. It turns out Byrne wrote most of the songs for both albums by 1984, and recorded demos of them. This is the entirely unreleased album of those demos. 

These demos have long been nicknamed the "True Creatures" (or "True Creature") demos, combining the titles of the "Little Creatures" and "True Stories" album. But that was almost certainly just an idea of some clever bootlegger, and not what they were actually called. They just as easily could be known as the "Little Stories" demos, I suppose. But I'm sticking with the name.

This album is also widely credited to the Talking Heads. But I'm changing that, because it's obvious to my ears that the only person on them is Byrne. Mind you, these aren't simply solo acoustic versions. He had incorporated drum machines into his songwriting since early in his music career, and there are drum machines all over this. Plus, he fleshed it out with backing vocals and other instruments. But still, it sounds like it's all him. For instance, the backing vocals sound like his voice as well.

These aren't radically different versions from the final ones. But still, it's interesting to hear how these songs originated. Plus, the sound quality is excellent. I'd had this in my music collection for many years. But I was inspired to finally post them after I saw a new version recently (April 2024) shared by someone named Mr. Sifter. This person used the recently developed AI tools of programs like Izotope to clean up the recordings. So even if you've had this already, this version sounds better than ever before. 

There are nine songs on "Little Creatures" and nine more on "True Stories." This has 12 songs. So it has a majority of songs from those albums, but definitely not all of them. I presume some were composed later.

This album is 54 minutes long. 

By the way, fun fact: the band Radiohead got their name from one of the songs here, "Radio Head."

01 Wild Wild Life (David Byrne)
02 Puzzlin' Evidence (David Byrne)
03 Love for Sale (David Byrne)
04 The Lady Don't Mind (David Byrne)
05 Hey Now (David Byrne)
06 Road to Nowhere (David Byrne)
07 Hey [Instrumental] (David Byrne)
08 Papa Legba (David Byrne)
09 People like Us (David Byrne)
10 City of Dreams (David Byrne)
11 Radio Head (David Byrne)
12 Give Me Back My Name (David Byrne)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16519362/DAVDBRYN1984TruCreturDmos_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is actually two images combined. I started with a photo of David Byrne, taken at a New York City party in 1986. The background was bland, so I came up with the idea of putting part of the cover to the "Little Creatures" album behind him.