1985 · Behind the Songs
The girl who floated above the field.
“And she was floating above her head,” David Byrne sings, and in the gentlest song Talking Heads ever made, the image is pure wonder. Byrne described the lyric as the story of a girl who detaches from her neighborhood and rises, calmly, above the rooftops — a child’s vision of freedom, sung without a trace of irony.
Musically, it’s a surprise: a breezy, almost country-pop tune with jangling guitars and one of Byrne’s sweetest melodies, from Little Creatures (1985), the band’s most tuneful album. After years of polyrhythms and paranoia, “And She Was” sounded like a band exhaling.
The video mixed childhood photographs with levitation effects, the band floating along with her. Released as a single, the song gave the band another radio hit and showed a side of Byrne — tender, unironic — that few had expected.
It’s the rare song about transcendence that sounds like it too: weightless, bright, and gone before you know it.