"Road to Nowhere" (David Byrne, 1985)
The Talking Head’s “Road to Nowhere” provides a glimpse into a life lived unexamined. The opening lines explain, “Well, we know where we’re goin’/ But we don’t know where we’ve been/ And we know what we’re knowin’ / But we can’t say what we’ve seen.” This is a great ironic celebration of the meaningless journey taken on autopilot. The video, directed by Byrne and Stephen R. Johnson, visually echoes the endless recycling of the mundane life. It’s classic David Byrne. About “Road to Nowhere”, he said, “I wanted to write a song that presented a resigned, even joyful look at doom. At our deaths and at the apocalypse…(always looming, folks).”