Know The Score: Heather McIn­tosh on the strange charm of True Stories

Depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, David Byrne’s sur­re­al­ist 1986 musi­cal, True Sto­ries, is either a satir­i­cal film that takes great pride in mock­ing America’s mid­dle class­es or an inno­cent cel­e­bra­tion of every­thing that makes liv­ing in the sub­urbs so bizarre and unique.

Set in the fic­tion­al Tex­an town of Vir­gil, the film sees the Talk­ing Heads front­man observe the locals as they pre­pare to host a con­cert mark­ing Virgil’s 150^th anniver­sary. Rock­ing a cow­boy hat, Byrne’s unnamed char­ac­ter watch­es on intent­ly as each of the res­i­dents gets fat, binges on bad tele­vi­sion, and falls in love with one another.

True Sto­ries bot­tles the mun­dan­i­ty of white, small town Amer­i­ca, with one char­ac­ter (Miss Rollings, hilar­i­ous­ly played by Swoosie Kurtz) nev­er leav­ing her bed, seem­ing­ly con­tent with the tele­vi­sion act­ing as her entire uni­verse. There’s also a preach­er (John Ingle) who likes to sprout laugh­able con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, a local los­er (John Good­man) who is unlucky in love, and a mar­ried cou­ple (Annie McEn­roe and Spald­ing Gray) who only com­mu­ni­cate to one anoth­er through oth­er peo­ple. Byrne, mean­while, finds mag­ic in the ordi­nary, trans­form­ing every­day fam­i­ly din­ners and trips to the mall into quirky musi­cal num­bers tai­lored to the MTV generation.

The film’s sound­track made a big impres­sion on com­pos­er Heather McIn­tosh, a one­time bass play­er in Gnarls Barkley who has scored the likes 2013’s Com­pli­ance and 2015’s Z for Zachari­ah, both of which are filled with grandiose strings and quirky synths. ​“My uncle gave me the film as a birth­day present,” McIn­tosh recalls, ​“the music broke my brain, but in a good way! It’s so charm­ing and I love how wide-eyed all the songs are. They’re all very patri­ot­ic and bot­tle this idea of Amer­i­cans hap­pi­ly skip­ping a long to the beat of con­sumerism and not real­ly ques­tion­ing anything.”

McIn­tosh was par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by one icon­ic fam­i­ly meal sequence, where the din­ner table starts spawn­ing psy­che­del­ic lights and a plate of lob­ster gid­di­ly spins around. It made her realise, even as a child, that the most bor­ing inter­ac­tion in a film can be trans­formed into some­thing mag­i­cal sim­ply through the right choice of song.

“That scene is just so ahead of its time,” she says. ​“There’s a spin­ning lob­ster and bright­ly coloured pep­pers. All the dif­fer­ent food is like a dif­fer­ent cog in the wheel. When the small girl says, ​‘Where is the music com­ing from?’ and David Byrne’s char­ac­ter says, ​‘Is she okay?’ – it’s just such a twist­ed sense of humour. He turns a mun­dane sit­u­a­tion into a music video and shows you can find fan­ta­sy in nor­mal­i­ty. The string arrange­ment that plays over the scene real­ly takes you to anoth­er world. It inspired me to become a musi­cian as I want­ed to cre­ate that same feeling.”

Anoth­er musi­cal num­ber, ​‘Peo­ple Like Us’, sees John Good­man beau­ti­ful­ly chan­nelling the idea that human beings work best when they’re around oth­er peo­ple. Singing over a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly 1980s pop pro­duc­tion, he croons: ​“We don’t want free­dom / We don’t want jus­tice / We just want some­one to love.”

“That song shows that even in this odd­ball pock­et of the world, cut these peo­ple to their core and they’re just like the rest of us: they want to be loved,” McIn­tosh adds. ​“It’s such a goofy song, so charm­ing in its deliv­ery and kind of cap­tures the weird­ness of Texas, which is quite a lone­ly place to dri­ve through. I’ve heard peo­ple say Byrne is pok­ing fun at small town folk, but I think he’s rev­el­ling in their eccen­tric­i­ties. The music real­ly finds the joy in these odd­ball char­ac­ters, who might be weird, but are ulti­mate­ly sin­cere and just try­ing to find their place in the world.”

After Good­man sings the song, the reclu­sive Miss Rollings char­ac­ter calls him back­stage and asks him to be her hus­band. The film then cuts to their wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny, which is con­duct­ed right from Miss Rollings’ bed. The pair choose to spend their hon­ey­moon in bed togeth­er watch­ing tele­vi­sion. This could be read as a bleak piece of social com­men­tary from Byrne, who appears to sug­gest that Amer­i­cans pre­fer alter­nate real­i­ty to actu­al­ly going out and liv­ing their lives.

Yet McIn­tosh, whose most recent film work includes the Jesse Eisen­berg black com­e­dy The Art of Self-Defense, doesn’t see it that way. ​“It’s absolute­ly a hap­py end­ing; every­body wins! Miss Rollings gets to watch TV and John Good­man gets a wife. There is some­thing odd­ly joy­ous about it. Scenes like that helped me get through my own mun­dane life in the sub­urbs and taught me that I could still be hap­py even in the most ordi­nary situations.”

True Sto­ries ulti­mate­ly made McIn­tosh realise that being uncool could be the coolest thing in the world. In Byrne she found a kin­dred spir­it, some­one whose music made being weird seem like a lot of fun. ​“True Sto­ries shows that if just use your imag­i­na­tion, sit­ting in bed or hav­ing a fam­i­ly din­ner can be the most excit­ing thing in the world. The film changed my life, and I hope more peo­ple can be won over by its charms. The music is about cel­e­brat­ing the small details in life and real­is­ing how won­drous they can be.”