Wet Leg on covering Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer": "It’s an interesting song to take on as a woman"

In a new inerview with Vulture, Wet Leg spoke to David Byrne about songwriting, touring, the Isle of Wight and more, and Wet Leg's Rhian Teasdale also spoke about covering Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" track live.

When asked how he cam across Wet Leg's music, Byrne said, "I don’t remember. It might have been on some website. It might have been in a magazine that mentioned you guys. Like a lot of people, and I’m certainly not alone here, I clicked to listen to the early songs — the two that were released first, "Chaise Longue" and "Wet Dream" — and I loved them. Immediately added them to my playlist of what I was listening to that month. I was not alone there, I soon discovered. It was kind of like, "Get in line!""

Speaking about covering Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer", Teasdale said, "It was just a song that I’d grown up with my dad playing around the house. I think it’s a cool song that’s really fun. It’s an interesting song to take on as a woman. It always immediately hits differently when you take a song that’s written from a male perspective and then a woman sings it. It just sounds different. I think some of the best covers are the ones that somehow you will hear something different in them. That was quite an easy one for us to land on."

Byrne added, "I don’t [perform "Psycho Killer"] very often now. It was the first song I wrote and I kind of did it just to see if I could write a song. And I discovered, Oh yes, I can! And then I started immediately writing songs that were different than that. Even though that one was very popular. I remember I thought, I wanted to write about this dramatic subject in a non-dramatic way. I wanted to write from inside this person’s head. It was not going to be a slasher movie. It was going to be a little bit calmer than that. At least that’s what I was thinking. I originally wanted it to be more of a folk song. We did a version with cellos and acoustic guitars and things like that and that was the way I imagined it should be — this folk song as opposed to a rock song. But that version wasn’t so popular."