Talking Heads – "Stay Up Late" (1985)

Mommy had a little baby

There he is, fast asleep

He's just a little plaything

Why not wake him up?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you obviously don’t have any children.

The only thing about babies that makes them tolerable is that they usually sleep a lot – like 15 or 16 hours a day.

I've never forgotten how depressed I was when my identical twin daughters stopped taking a morning nap.

They still took long afternoon naps and slept a good ten hours every night.  But I needed that morning nap!

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Speaking of identical twins . . .

In the last 2 or 3 lines, you learned about identical twin sisters from Cape Cod whose first babies were born less than 24 hours apart.

Today I’ve got another amazing story about Cape Cod twins.   

Last November, Emily Peterson delivered twin sons at Cape Cod Hospital.  Samuel was born at 1:39 am, followed a short time later by Ronan, who entered the world at 1:10 am.

The Peterson twins

That’s no typo, boys and girls.  

You see, the Peterson twins were born on the night that Daylight Savings Time ended.  Samuel was born 21 minutes before the end of Daylight Savings Time, while Ronan was born ten minutes after standard time went into effect and the clocks were rolled back an hour.

So Samuel was born first – but Ronan’s birth certificate makes it appear that he is 29 minutes older. 

(I told you it was an amazing story.  A-m-a-z-i-n-g!)

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Today’s featured song was released in 1985 on Little Creatures, which was the biggest-selling studio album ever released by the Talking Heads.  

My oldest son was two years old when I bought that album, and my twin daughters were born the year after the album was released.  I played it to death back then – especially “Stay Up Late.”

Jack can stay up late whenever he wants

And when my first grandchild was born last year, “Stay Up Late” was one of the first songs I thought of.

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The Talking Heads’ bass player, Tina Weymouth, is married to the band’s drummer, Chris Frantz.  She gave birth to their first child – a boy – not long before the band started work on Little Creatures.  

I have to think that their experiences as parents of a baby boy may have inspired some of the lyrics for “Stay Up Late,” which was written by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne:

Cute, cute little baby

Little pee pee, little toes

The song’s lyrics also reflect the fact that Byrne had no children at that time he wrote them:

Cute, cute as a button

Don't you wanna make him stay up late?

(HELL, no!)

Here’s “Stay Up Late”:

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