Fear of Music

After a first attempt in a studio without a producer was shelved, the band rehearsed in the Long Island City loft of Frantz and Weymouth and called Eno back. On 22 April and 6 May 1979 a Record Plant van parked outside the building and ran cables through the loft window to capture the basic tracks. Pitchfork's Jayson Greene wrote that the band entered the studio cold and jammed rather than working from Byrne's compositions. Eno suggested the table-of-contents tracklist of proper nouns and supplied Hugo Ball's poem Gadji beri bimba when Byrne had writer's block. It became the nonsense lyric of the opener I Zimbra, which has guitar by Robert Fripp and chanting by assistant engineer Julie Last.

Byrne credited life on Avenue A in the East Village as the inspiration, and wrote his characters alone in dystopian situations. Harrison designed the black sleeve, embossed to resemble tread plate, which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Recording Package. The original LP credited every song but I Zimbra to Byrne, and after complaints from the others the credits were changed on later CD issues. The album reached 21 on the Billboard 200 and 33 in the UK, and went gold in the US in 1985. NME, Melody Maker and the Los Angeles Times named it album of the year, and Pitchfork placed it 31st among the albums of the 1970s in 2004. Jon Pareles wrote in Rolling Stone that it was foreboding, inescapably urban and obsessed with texture. The singles were Life During Wartime, I Zimbra and Cities.