Songfacts®:

• "Memories Can't Wait" is a track from Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music. Co-written by David Byrne and Jerry Harrison and produced by Brian Eno, the unsettling and intense track is built around a sense of internal overload.
  
  "Looking back on it now, the lyrics seemed to be about a person whose memories keep overflowing and flooding up," Bryne told Uncut magazine in 2025. "They need to move on from the past that keeps bubbling into view. 'There is a party in my mind...' It's like, can you get this thing to stop? Despite Eno's sounds, it was not really a drug song. It was just the sense of being overwhelmed - either at a party or by your own memories, or everything that is going on around you."
• In their pre-Talking Heads days, David Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz played in a band called The Artistics, formed while the pair were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. One of their cover attempts planted the seed for one of Talking Heads' most viscerally powerful songs.
  
  "This was our version of a metal song," Byrne told Uncut magazine. "Chris and I were in a band before Talking Heads, and we attempted to do a cover of 'Communication Breakdown' by Led Zeppelin. I can't imagine what it sounded like, but we attempted it. So 'Memories Can't Wait' was more our version of that kind of thing."
• Fear of Music was recorded principally at Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's rehearsal loft in Long Island City, Queens, New York, during April and May 1979. Byrne described how working in a familiar environment transformed the sessions:
  
  "We recorded a lot of the backing tracks in our rehearsal loft, where we were used to the sound," he told Uncut. "There was a lot of leakage, all the things that you weren't supposed to do in studios, but if you played well enough, and weren't going to replace it everything bit by bit, you could do it. We liked that Eno wouldn't interfere that much with our songs, but he'd add layers of odd sounds, and spooky things on top of it, which was fine with us."