Songfacts®:

• This song is about telepathy: "Baby your mind is a radio, got a receiver inside my head." It's not the first Talking Heads song to touch on otherworldly experiences - "And She Was" does as well.
• David Byrne wrote this for the 1986 movie True Stories, which he directed. In the film, it's sung by Tito Larriva, who plays a worker at a computer factory convinced radio signals are sending messages to his head. Byrne often takes on odd personas when he writes, so composing songs for the quirky characters in the film came easy for him.
  
  True Stories was the first film Byrne directed, but he had done Talking Heads music videos and he conceived the stage show that became their highly acclaimed 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.
• The band Radiohead took their name from this song. Originally, they were known as On A Friday.
• True Stories, the film, was a David Byrne solo effort, but he used his band, the Talking Heads, to record the songs, flying them to Los Angeles to do so. In the movie, many of the songs, including "Radio Head," were sung by the actors, but Byrne sang the versions that appear on the album True Stories, which serves as the soundtrack.
  
  The big hit from the album was "Wild Wild Life," which is used in the film as part of a lip-sync contest in which members of the band compete.
• The Brazilian session musician Paulinho Da Costa added percussion on this track.
• The song was inspired by Stephen Tobolowsky, a writer on the True Stories film whom David Byrne met during the production. Tobolowsky claimed that he had telepathic powers. He seemed to truly believe this, and people would pay him for psychic services. Tobolowsky is best known for playing Ned Ryerson in the movie Groundhog Day.