Flower Top Ten: (Nothing But) Flowers (#2)

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Howdy! Based on the weather report it looks like I’m putting these flowers to bed in the nick of time. Yep, they’re having a blizzard in the western U.S., and we’re looking and cold and possibly sn*wy weather next week. Oh, well, here’s another song with “flower” in the title to brighten your day. #2: (Nothing But) Flowers - Talking Heads Oh, sure, I was going to leave these guys off. I love Randy Newman’s sarcasm. But you know something? David Byrne has a few sarcastic bones in his body, too. Take “The Big Country,” from 1978, where he detailed the day-to-day life of the small towns he imagined as he looked out of an airplane window…then said, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” He was really on sarcastic fire with this song from Talking Heads’ final album. Here he protests the environmental dangers the world faces by “taking the other side.” “The highways and cars were sacrificed for agriculture,” he moans, adding, “I miss the honky tonks, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens.” It’s hilarious…except it’s not. It gets the point across very well. The video the band released (linked below) makes the point even clearer, with some facts presented by each band member’s talking head (that’s where the name came from: the name of the shot of newscasters from the shoulders up is called a “talking head”) during the line “you got it, you got it.” And this video dates to 1988, so that stat about nearly 184,000 privately-owned machine guns in the U.S. is way outdated (a web site says the number was closer to 700,000 in 2017). If you’re wondering, the cities listed beneath each person at the beginning of the video is their birthplace. Yes, Chris Frantz is from Kentucky!!! Oh, and speaking of Chris, he announced on his Facebook page earlier in April that he and Tina (for those who don’t know, drummer Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth have been married for 45 years) were hit head-on by a drunk driver in March. They have some broken bones, but otherwise survived the crash. (Nothing But) Flowers Written by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth Recorded by Talking Heads From Naked, 1988 I’d pretend that I was a billboard: