Psycho Killer - 2005 Remaster

"Psycho Killer" is a song by the American band Talking Heads. It was released on the band’s 1977 debut album "Talking Heads: 77". The group first performed it as the Artistics in 1974.

In the liner notes for "Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads", Jerry Harrison wrote of the B-side of the single, an acoustic version of the song that featured Arthur Russell on cello, "I'm glad we persuaded Tony and Lance that the version with the cellos shouldn't be the only one."

The band's "signature debut hit" features lyrics which seem to represent the thoughts of a serial killer. Originally written and performed as a ballad, "Psycho Killer" became what AllMusic calls a "deceptively funky new wave/no wave song" with "an insistent rhythm, and one of the most memorable, driving basslines in rock & roll."

"Psycho Killer" was the only song from the album to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number 92. It reached number 32 on the Triple J Hottest 100 in 1989, and peaked at number 11 on the Dutch singles chart in 1977. The song is included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

The song was composed near the beginning of the band's career and prototype versions were performed onstage as early as December 1975. When it was finally completed and released as a single in December 1977, "Psycho Killer" became instantly associated in popular culture with the contemporaneous Son of Sam serial killings. Although the band always insisted that the song had no inspiration from the notorious events, the single's release date was "eerily timely" and marked by a "macabre synchronicity".

According to the preliminary lyric sheets copied onto the 2006 remaster of "Talking Heads: 77", the song started off as a semi-narrative of the killer actually committing murders. In the liner notes of "Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads", Byrne says:

"When I started writing this (I got help later), I imagined Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad. Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies."

The bridge lyrics are in French, as is the prominent chorus line "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" ("What is this/it?")
The French lyrics were supplied by Weymouth. According to Frantz, "I told David that Tina’s mother is French and that they always spoke French in the home. Tina agreed to do it and just sat down and did it in a little over an hour. I wrote a couple of more verses, and within a few hours, 'Psycho Killer' was more or less done."