[11] They collaborated with the British producer Brian Eno on the acclaimed albums More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978), Fear of Music (1979), and Remain in Light (1980), which blended their art school sensibilities with influence from artists such as Parliament-Funkadelic and Fela Kuti.

For these performances, they were joined by Worrell, guitarist Alex Weir, percussionist Steve Scales, and singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt.

[14] In 1973, Rhode Island School of Design students David Byrne (guitar and vocals) and Chris Frantz (drums) formed a band, the Artistics.

More Songs About Buildings and Food included a cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River", which brought Talking Heads into the public consciousness and gave them their first Billboard Top 30 hit.

[28] The collaboration continued with Fear of Music (1979), which mixed the darker stylings of post-punk rock with white funkadelia and subliminal references to the geopolitical instability of the late 1970s.

[31] Remain in Light (1980) was heavily influenced by the Afrobeat of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, whose music had been introduced to the band by Eno.

It explored West African polyrhythms, weaving these together with Arabic music from North Africa, disco funk, and "found" voices.

[33] To perform these more complex arrangements, the band toured with an expanded group, including Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell, among others, first at the Heatwave festival in August,[34] and later in their concert film Stop Making Sense.

[36] Byrne and Eno released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which incorporated world music, found sounds and a number of other prominent international and post-punk musicians.

Three more albums followed: 1985's Little Creatures (which featured the hit singles "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere"),[47] 1986's True Stories (Talking Heads covering all the soundtrack songs of Byrne's musical comedy film, in which the band also appeared),[48] and 1988's Naked.

[50] Naked explored politics, sex, and death, and showed heavy African influence with polyrhythmic styles like those seen on Remain in Light.

"[52] Their final release was "Sax and Violins", an original song that had appeared earlier that year on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until the end of the World.

The album featured a number of vocalists, including Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes, Debbie Harry of Blondie, Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde, Andy Partridge of XTC, Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Ed Kowalczyk of Live, Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays, Richard Hell, and Maria McKee.

Harrison produced records such as the Violent Femmes' The Blind Leading the Naked; the Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked; General Public's Rub It Better; Crash Test Dummies' God Shuffled His Feet; Live's Mental Jewelry, Throwing Copper, and The Distance to Here; and No Doubt's song "New" from Return of Saturn.

[60]Talking Heads reunited to play "Life During Wartime", "Psycho Killer", and "Burning Down the House" on March 18, 2002, at the ceremony of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, joined onstage by former touring members Bernie Worrell and Steve Scales.

[66] With regard to the possibility of a reunion tour, Harrison told the Los Angeles Times: "Right now, we're concentrating on Stop Making Sense and how much fun we're having revisiting the film.

[68] AllMusic stated that Talking Heads, one of the most celebrated bands of the 1970s and 1980s,[3] by the time of their breakup "had recorded everything from art-funk to polyrhythmic worldbeat explorations and simple, melodic guitar pop".

"[69] Media theorist Dick Hebdige said the group "draw eclectically on a wide range of visual and aural sources to create a distinctive pastiche or hybrid 'house style' which they have used since their formation in the mid-1970s deliberately to stretch received (industrial) definitions of what rock/pop/video/Art/ performance/audience are", calling them "a properly postmodernist band.

[72] Talking Heads have been cited as an influence by many artists, including Nelly Furtado,[73] Eddie Vedder,[74] LCD Soundsystem,[75] Foals,[76] the Weeknd,[77] Primus,[78] Bell X1,[79] the 1975,[80] Kesha,[81] St. Vincent,[82] Danny Brown,[83] Trent Reznor,[84] Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos,[85] and Radio 4.

[88] Italian filmmaker and director Paolo Sorrentino, receiving the Oscar for his film La Grande Bellezza in 2014, thanked Talking Heads, among others, as his sources of inspiration.