[On More Songs About Buildings and Food, David Byrne gazes] wide-eyed at the universe, absorbing and accepting. Byrne is determinedly childlike; he picks up pieces but either refuses to assemble them or applies his own para-rational analyses. In "The Good Thing," he hints at some weird combination of messianism and futurism….

Distance—the distance of a bewildered child—seems to have become the major fact of the Heads' world. On their first album, they were "happy," "carefree," optimistic; now, they're only separate…. Byrne doesn't seem upset by it, though; at least, he's no more upset than he is in general. It's just one more thing he finely observes. "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls" could almost be a [Jean] Piaget cognitive-development treatise: The first verse is all one-syllable words, the second allows two-syllable words ("common sense"), the third goes into "intuitive leap." The tinker-toy music on...