Road to Nowhere

My cover of “Road to Nowhere”, a 1985 Talking Heads tune, started off as a little experiment one Saturday morning. The idea to cover it had occurred to me around the time I purchased my melodica. The original song employs an accordion (or so says this song’s Wikipedia page), but I had the pleasure of seeing this song performed live on Broadway, in David Byrne’s American Utopia, and a melodica was used there.

Substituting the melodica for the accordion wasn’t really the big hurdle to covering this song. The hurdle, or one of them, was the vocal intro: the “white gospel choir”, as Mr. Byrne called it, which he tacked on because he felt guilty that most of the rest of the song is basically just 2 chords. If I couldn’t produce a reasonable facsimile of that intro, covering this number would be pointless.

So on that one Saturday morning, I sat down in my studio, worked out the parts (as I heard them) on keyboard, created a new project in GarageBand, and just sort of started recording my layers, thinking I would do them all over “for real” if I liked where it was going.

I ended up using all those original tracks. I thought they came out OK, and I was too lazy to start all over. Those harmonies, and the ones I sing in the body of the song, are not exact duplicates of those in the original recording. Anyone can hear that there is more going on in the original than what I recorded in my version, but my ear isn’t well-trained enough to isolate the differences and replicate them. And yet I feel like I captured the reasonable facsimile I sought.

As usual, I tapped out the drum tracks in GarageBand. I then added live tambourine, bass, guitar, organ (a couple of tracks), and of course, melodica (also more than one track). I added a little flange effect on the “lead” melodica to get it closer to what I hear on the original recording. There’s also a saxophone part (two harmonizing saxophones, actually) that repeats a few times during the “We’re on a road to nowhere” chorus, and I played that on my keyboard using both the alto and baritone sax samples.

Then came all the vocals. At various points in this recording, there are six simultaneous vocal parts (lead, plus 5 harmonies). Again, not exact as per the original, but close enough.

I journeyed through several iterations of the lead vocals. At first, I did my best David Byrne impersonation. This approach mostly failed. I eventually (wisely) abandoned that for a more straightforward performance, which, while not always exactly where I wanted it to be, eventually landed somewhere near the point of acceptability. I think I get a little screechy in the second half as I reach the limits of my range, but overall I’m pleased with the results. In addition to the whoops and heys and yehaws that you hear throughout, the one remnant that remains from my David Byrne impersonation is in the “baby, it’s alright” line (around the 3:09 mark) just before the vocals kick up an octave.

Special shout out to my good friend Brian who has consistently provided constructive feedback on early drafts of all my recordings and who definitely helped me work out some mastering issues with this one.

One last note: My favorite lyric in this song is definitely “Maybe you wonder where you are, I don’t care.” Perfect, on so many levels.