Psycho Killer

The Artistics, the band Byrne and Frantz formed at the Rhode Island School of Design, first performed it in 1974. An early version on a three-song demo recorded in Providence in the spring of 1974 was rediscovered in the school museum's archives in 2025 and appeared on the compilation Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live in late November 2025. Talking Heads played prototype versions as early as December 1975. Byrne said he started it imagining Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad, and early lyric sheets show a semi-narrative of the killer committing murders. Weymouth supplied the French bridge and the chorus line Qu'est-ce que c'est, which Frantz said took her a little over an hour, and Frantz wrote a couple more verses.

It was the first song to get vocals at the Talking Heads: 77 sessions, where Byrne would not sing with producer Tony Bongiovi watching. The single came out in December 1977, reached 92 on the Hot 100 and 11 in the Netherlands, and was the only song from the album on the Hot 100. The band always insisted it had nothing to do with the Son of Sam murders, and Byrne said he wrote it years earlier. Pitchfork called it the catchiest song ever written about a sociopathic murderer, and heard it as more disquieting in early CBGB footage than on record.

Live

Talking Heads played it on the BBC2 programme The Old Grey Whistle Test on 31 January 1978. A 1977 radio version with an extra verse is on The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Stop Making Sense opens with Byrne alone with an acoustic guitar and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. An acoustic recording with Arthur Russell on cello also exists. On 5 June 2025, the 50th anniversary of the first CBGB show, the band released a video directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan. The band said they loved what it was not: literal, creepy, bloody or violent.

The song has been covered by Velvet Revolver, the Bobs, Wet Leg, Miley Cyrus and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, who played it at the 2009 BBC Proms. Selena Gomez sampled its bassline on Bad Liar in 2017.