All Four Talking Heads Reunite to Write a Coffee-Table Book

'New Feeling' runs 368 pages and starts at $65, topping out at a $350 edition with a photo all four members signed.

The four members of Talking Heads sat in the round for an Instagram video on Wednesday to announce something they'd made together, Rolling Stone reported. It isn't an album. It's a coffee-table book.

The book, Talking Heads: New Feeling, comes out May 18, 2027, from Abrams Books, as Pitchfork and other music outlets reported. It's billed as the first book authorized by all four members. David Byrne pointed out in the video that it's timed to the 50th anniversary of the band's first album, Talking Heads: 77.

Those 50 years include a long stretch of not working together. The band's last studio album, Naked, came out in 1988, and Byrne left three years later, Billboard noted. The other three kept going, first as the Shrunken Heads and then, in 1996, as the Heads, with an album called No Talking, Just Head.

So the key line in the video belongs to bassist Tina Weymouth: "for the first time, the four of us have come together to write and curate a comprehensive coffee table book on Talking Heads," she said, Billboard reported.

The thaw started with Jonathan Demme's 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. Its 2023 return to theaters is when the four began showing up together again, Rolling Stone noted, though they still haven't made music together.

Since then, everything they've put out has come out of the vault. In September they sat down with Este Haim to launch a SiriusXM channel, Talking Heads Radio. Rolling Stone counts a set of early demos and live recordings, Tentative Decisions, from the past year, and a super deluxe reissue of 1979's Fear of Music arrives Nov. 13, Consequence reported. New Feeling is the next thing out of it.

The book follows three Rhode Island School of Design students to the stage at CBGB and on to Stop Making Sense. The publisher's description on the book's Amazon listing promises an essay from each member, the handwritten lyric sheets for "Psycho Killer" and "Life During Wartime," annotated set lists, album-cover sketches and behind-the-scenes storyboards from True Stories and Stop Making Sense. Outside writers chip in too, among them Lorde, Questlove and Debbie Harry.

Some of those private photos, lyrics and sketches "haven't left our archive in over 40 years," guitarist Jerry Harrison said in the video, according to Rolling Stone.

It comes in three editions, Consequence reported: $65 standard, $150 for the collector's edition and $350 for the limited one. Abrams' own page lists the $65 edition.

The top edition makes it plain. According to Consequence, the $150 and $350 editions both come in a deluxe box with a 19-piece wooden puzzle set into the cover, and the $350 one adds a reproduction of a Mick Rock photo signed by all four members. Four signatures on one picture of the band: right now, that's as much Talking Heads togetherness as money can buy.

Source: Rolling Stone, retrieved October 22, 2026. Other sources: Billboard, consequence.net, amazon.com, abramsbooks.com.