TALKING HEADS - AND SHE WAS

Released: August 1985

Charts:  US: #54 UK: #17. 

“And She Was” is a bright, buoyant moment on their 1985 album “Little Creatures” that disguises its strangeness behind jangling guitars and pop accessibility. Written and sung by David Byrne, the track became a modest chart success, reaching No. 54 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No. 17 in the UK. At heart, “And She Was” is about escape without leaving, transcendence without grandeur, and spiritual awakening blooming in thoroughly unglamorous surroundings.

Byrne has repeatedly traced the song’s inspiration to a real woman he knew in Baltimore—someone who used to take LSD and lie in a grassy field bordering a Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink factory. The image struck him as absurd yet deeply resonant. “It seemed like such a tacky kind of transcendence,” Byrne wrote in the liner notes for Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads, “but it was real! A new kind of religion being born out of heaps of rusted cars and fast food joints.”

Crucially, Byrne has always insisted that “And She Was” is not a drug song. Instead, he framed it as a depiction of spontaneous, unprovoked revelation. The girl doesn’t escape from the world—she floats within it. The sublime emerges not from nature untouched, but from highways, factories, schools, and backyard fences. This tension—between beauty and banality—is pure Talking Heads.

Musically, the song mirrors its theme. It floats rather than drives. The rhythm glides, the melody lifts, and Byrne’s vocals are wide-eyed and observational, as though he, too, can’t quite believe what he’s witnessing. 

Drummer Chris Frantz framed the narrative as a slightly unbalanced love story: a man watching a woman who can literally rise above her surroundings, while he remains rooted below—both admiring her freedom and wishing she’d be just a little more ordinary. She drifts past rooftops, schools, and yards, while the narrator stays grounded, emotionally and physically. It’s a classic Byrne perspective: the outsider fascinated by someone who refuses to adhere to gravity, social or otherwise.

“And She Was” is inseparable from its music video, directed by Jim Blashfield, whose work drew heavily on the surreal collage techniques of Terry Gilliam. The video marked Blashfield’s first collaboration with Talking Heads and introduced a visual style that would become hugely influential: cut-out animation, layered imagery, and disorienting scale shifts that perfectly mirrored the song’s sense of weightless wonder.

MTV took notice. The video earned nominations for Best Group Video and Best Concept Video, opening the door for Blashfield to bring the same dream logic to other landmark clips, including: Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble”; Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love” and Michael Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone”.

In a catalog filled with jittery paranoia and intellectual density, “And She Was” remains one of Talking Heads’ most generous songs. It doesn’t mock its subject. It watches her float, slightly bewildered, slightly in love, and quietly changed by what he’s seen.