Talking Heads have a book coming in May, with all four members contributing to the account. New Feeling is due from Abrams on May 18, 2027. David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth each supply original essays, joined on the page by material from the group’s own archive.

David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth together in 2026
Talking Heads pictured in 2026. Photo: Cindy Ord / Getty Images for SiriusXM.

There is a good reason for the date. Next year marks 50 years since Talking Heads ’77, their debut album. But the book does not stop with that first record. The publisher describes a loose journey from the Rhode Island School of Design to New York’s CBGB, through albums and touring and into the band’s film work.

A song before and after the record

Handwritten lyrics for “Psycho Killer” and “Life During Wartime” are among the promised items. So are annotated concert playlists, sketches for sleeves and storyboards, including material from True Stories and Stop Making Sense. Photographs come from personal collections as well as studios and performances.

For someone who usually meets this music through a recording, those objects offer several ways of looking at the work. A lyric sheet makes the writing physical. A concert playlist records a choice about what follows what in front of an audience. A storyboard takes a filmed moment back to the point when it was still being planned. They belong to the same musical history, but tell us different things.

It is the combination that makes the idea of an archive book appealing here. Talking Heads’ sleeves and performances are part of how people recognise the group, just as their songs are. Seeing a sketch beside a familiar image could make some of those visual decisions easier to follow. That remains a prospect for the finished book, rather than a judgement from having read it.

More than one account of the same band

Byrne, Frantz, Harrison and Weymouth are not the only writers listed. Debbie Harry, Lorde, Questlove, Jeff Bridges, Dave Eggers, Karl Ove Knausgaard and James Wolcott also contribute essays. Their presence adds people responding to the music alongside the people who made it. It should be possible to read those responses against the members’ own accounts.

The current hardcover details specify 368 pages, full-colour photographs and graphic design by Eric Skillman. That is the page count to use when looking at this edition, rather than assuming that every early description of a forthcoming title will match the publisher’s latest specifications.

The story reaches Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Stop Making Sense and its return to cinemas in 2023. The film lets a performance run; a book lets the reader linger over a face, a note or a drawing. New Feeling is another route into that history. It is an archive publication, with a May release ahead, and carries no announcement of new recordings or a concert tour.