What And She Was is about depends on which member of the Talking Heads you ask.
In an interview with WCNX, drummer Chris Frantz interpreted the song literally, explaining that “It’s a story about a woman who has the power to levitate above the ground and to check out all her neighbors from a kind of bird’s eye view. And the guy who’s writing the song is in love with her and he kinda wishes she would just be more normal and, like, come on back down to the ground, but she doesn’t. She goes floating over the backyard and past the buildings and the schools and stuff and is absolutely superior to him in every way.”
David Byrne, on the other hand, said that it was a song about a “blissed-out hippie chick” that he knew in Baltimore who once told him about an acid trip that she had while lying in a field next to a Yoo-hoo chocolate soda factory. Byrne explained, “Flying out of her body, etc etc. It seemed like such a tacky kind of transcendence… but it was real! A new kind of religion being born out of heaps of rusted cars and fast food joints. And this girl was flying above it all, but in it too.”
As for the video, it was created by experimental filmmaker, Jim Blashfield. Blashfield previously pioneered collage-animation style with his short film, Suspicious Circumstances. The members of Talking Heads were fans of the film and asked Blashfield to create a similar video for their song. Blashfield, who cited Terry Gilliam as being his number one influence, went on to direct similar videos for Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, Tears For Fears, and Weird Al Yankovic.
Through the Shattered Lens 