It’s a Friday afternoon in Chester, New Jersey, back in June 1985. Picture this: the entire student body of Black River Middle School packed into the cafetorium for an assembly. We, the captive audience, are perched on fold-out chairs, all eyes on the slightly elevated stage. The student council president steps forward to announce the highlight of the afternoon: a live set by five recent graduates who’ve decided to start a rock band.
That rock band? That’s us. Truthfully, we were more of a garage band in the most literal sense. Until that moment, our performances were confined to the drummer’s garage. Our only audience had been the drummer’s mother – and that was just a fleeting, accidental show during one of her grocery runs from the car, which, ironically, couldn’t fit in the garage.
We’d only been “jamming” together for a mere four months when we had the audacious – some might say delusional – idea to write to our old middle school. We asked if they’d be interested in having us play at an assembly, and, even more boldly, if they’d be willing to pay us $200. In a move that still baffles me, the middle school agreed. To both requests.
So there I was, a bundle of nerves behind my keyboard, waiting for the curtain to rise.
Outwardly, I probably didn’t look much different from the kid who’d graduated from that very school a year prior. Still lanky, still sporting long hair that perpetually fell over my thick glasses, obscuring my face. My shoulders still hunched, my arms still twig-like, and the acne? Still thriving. High school had amplified my shyness, my confusion, my anxiety. But on this day, returning to familiar territory, I was attempting to embody a new persona. Or at least test-drive one for size. Today, I wasn’t just me. Not the me of then, or even the me of just moments before.
Today, I was the keyboard player in a rock band, ready to perform the Burning Down The House Song, or so I hoped.
I’d even made a stab at dressing the part. White cotton pants, a flowing white shirt with blue stripes, grey ankle boots, and the pièce de résistance: a white fedora. My clumsy attempt at channeling Duran Duran. This was a far cry from my usual attire. For this middle school assembly, I had constructed a new version of myself.
From behind the curtain, I heard the student council president’s introduction.
“Please welcome… The Midnight Mists!”
That wasn’t our name. We were Midnight Mist, singular, no “the.”
Talking Heads, a band synonymous with innovative sounds and David Byrne’s quirky stage presence, unleashed their fifth studio album, Speaking in Tongues, in 1983. The opening track? The explosive “Burning Down the House.” This iconic burning down the house song begins with a frenetic acoustic guitar riff, raw and rhythmic, almost primal in its energy. It sounds like the friction of sticks trying to ignite a flame. As this tension escalates, a spectral synthesizer emerges, adding a layer of smoky atmosphere to the nascent fire. Then, a powerful drum fill detonates, setting everything ablaze. David Byrne’s voice enters with an ascending sigh, and the conflagration is underway. For the next four minutes, we are completely consumed.
Byrne’s vocals are delivered like a rambling monologue from an awkward party guest, launching into a story unsolicited. “Watch out, you might get what you’re after. Cool babies, strange but not a stranger. I’m an ordinary guy, burning down the house.” What does it all mean? Who is this enigmatic figure? What house is he burning down? And why?
There’s an undeniable urgency pulsing through this burning down the house song. It’s about combustion, it is combustion. The lyrics propel you relentlessly forward, the destination unknown, yet you’re compelled to follow. You find yourself scrambling to keep pace, tripping over your own feet. Hold tight. Pack your bags. Time for jumping overboard. All wet. Shakedown. You have not seen nothing yet. Fighting fire with fire. It’s a lyrical onslaught, a sonic torrent, yet somehow utterly exhilarating. What could possibly come next?
Then, midway through, a keyboard solo erupts. A funky, percussive clavinet takes center stage, groaning, sputtering, and squealing, like an instrument grappling to articulate something urgent, something just beyond its grasp. Around it, tom-tom drums crash and tumble, mimicking the sound of collapsing rafters.
This burning down the house song ignites a desire within you, a primal urge to burst into flame yourself.
Our band name, in reality, was Midnight Mist. No “the.” No plural. Throughout our brainstorming sessions, the five of us had been steadfastly against becoming a “The” band (the reasoning, in retrospect, is a bit hazy). And now, with a single, declarative sentence, the Black River student council president had transformed us into precisely what we’d strived to avoid: The Midnight Mists.
The curtain went up. Before us lay a cafetorium packed to capacity. That afternoon, we were slated to play five songs. “Burning Down the House song” was on the setlist.
When you’re a musician and you undertake the process of learning a song, you essentially inhabit its very essence. You meticulously dissect its component parts, then reconstruct them, effectively taking up residence within the song itself. This act of musical appropriation, however, comes with a certain trade-off. There’s an undeniable thrill in deciphering a piece of music, in unraveling its intricacies and then recreating it note for note. But it’s also a slightly unsettling, perhaps even melancholic experience, because you irrevocably alter your relationship with that song. You diminish its mystique. You’ve performed a kind of musical autopsy.
Previously, the song existed as a mystical, organic entity, an almost magical incantation that you experienced as an abstract concept, a feeling, maybe even a shift in your emotional landscape. Now, post-dissection, the song is reduced to a series of notes and chords, layers and combinations, a blueprint, a recipe laid bare. You’ve learned the magician’s secret – a revelation that can be electrifying in itself – but it fundamentally changes your connection to the song’s alchemy.
I know the inner workings of “Burning Down the House song.” I’ve known them intimately since I was fifteen. Now, whenever I hear that song, without fail, I mentally place my fingers on the keyboard keys, I visualize the G, F, and A minor 7th chords, I see my left hand manipulating the joystick on my synthesizer as I execute that funky solo. Over and over, my experience of the song is filtered through muscle memory and key signatures.
But I also experience it as that middle school assembly.
In a revealing 1984 interview with NPR, David Byrne offered some insight into the meaning of “Burning Down the House song.”
“I didn’t really know at the time, but to me…it implies ecstatic rebirth, or transcending one’s own self…like in classic psychology, the house is the self, and burning it down is destroying yourself, and the assumption is that you get reborn, like a phoenix from the ashes.”
Something transformative happened to me on that cafetorium stage.
From the very first beat of our opening song – a rendition of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” that, against all odds, wasn’t entirely terrible – I was in constant motion. Though physically anchored to my keyboard, I made every conceivable effort to move within those constraints. I jutted my chin, gyrated my hips, even lifted a hand from the keys to wave theatrically. All the while, my legs were engaged in some kind of frantic flapping motion beneath the synthesizer, as if performing a clandestine thigh workout. At one point, I even stopped playing altogether, turned sideways to the audience, gazed intensely at the floor, and began jogging in place.
None of this had been pre-planned. My stagecraft preparation had extended no further than donning a fedora. Cheers – or were they screams? Cries for help, perhaps? – began to erupt from the assembled middle schoolers.
My bandmates, in stark contrast, stood as if petrified. They were laser-focused on their guitars, heads bowed in concentration, feet seemingly cemented to the stage. This was entirely unexpected. I’d always assumed they would be the performers, the showmen. After all, in our garage rehearsals and in the broader social landscape of our high school, the guitarist-singer, the other guitarist, and the bass player had always possessed a level of extroversion, self-assurance, and easygoing playfulness that felt light-years beyond my reach. Yet here, under the spotlight, they were reserved, static, almost invisible. And, inexplicably, I was the one filling the kinetic void.
I was combusting, channeling the very essence of the burning down the house song.
Three hundred sixty-five degrees…
Now it was time for “Burning Down the House song.”
I was bringing the song to a crescendo with another keyboard solo, my synthesizer emitting an ethereal, haunting tone that I manipulated and vibrated with the joystick. This otherworldly sound emanated from the stage, washing over the sea of middle schoolers and our former teachers. It permeated the entire room as our drummer relentlessly pounded his tom-toms. The notes I was playing resonated within the very hall where I had once eaten my packed lunch with my solitary friend. They spilled out into the hallways where I’d scurried between lockers and classes, clad in corduroys and a threadbare sweat jacket, desperately avoiding eye contact. They echoed in the classrooms where I’d sat, consumed by anxieties about whether high school could possibly be worse…
I extended my solo, improvising, venturing off script. I cranked up the volume. My legs pistoned, my shoulders revolved. The whoops and applause intensified. I was no longer the me I had been just moments before. I’m an ordinary guy…
In a moment that has become indelibly etched in my memory, I was both the trick and the magic, embodying the spirit of the burning down the house song.
Image from the music video for “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads.
