3 album covers in our archive
Behind the Covers currently documents 3 Talking Heads album covers from 1979 to 1984. Read together, the entries show how the artwork changed from release to release, with each story identifying the designers, photographers, source material, and design decisions behind the sleeve.
Cover evolution
A man in an oversized cream suit caught mid-motion, his head cropped clean off the frame by a black half-circle. Talking Heads turned a body in a too-big jacket into one of pop's most recognizable images, now hanging in MoMA. Here is the story behind the big coat.
Tibor Kalman's design obscures the band members' faces with red-tinted blocks, reflecting the album's themes of dissolving individual identity — influenced by Afrobeat, Brian Eno's theories, and West African polyrhythmic music.
David Byrne created this stark, unsettling cover by photocopying his own face repeatedly until the image degraded into a haunting, pixelated portrait that perfectly captured the album's paranoid themes.
