Since my kids continue to be obsessed with David Byrne’s American Utopia, I have Talking Heads on the brain. Here’s one of their best songs ever, produced by the band members themselves.
Here’s the delightful version from Stop Making Sense. As David Byrne says in his interview with himself, “I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.”
Here’s a good life goal: learn to enjoy doing anything as much as Alex Weir enjoys playing the guitar.
The American Utopia version has nice crisp drumming and synth playing.
Denise Sullivan tells the story of the song:
“This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” isn’t cluttered with nervous energy or tics; rhythmically it’s in pocket, and the whole jam is comforting and warm—words that aren’t generally associated with Talking Heads. It might just be the best song they ever made, and best of all, this “home” isn’t asking you to buy it, though you can live there as long as you like it.
“This Must Be the Place” earned its parenthetical “naïve melody” for the way it was recorded: The band used instruments that were otherwise not assigned to them. Tina Weymouth traded her bass for Jerry Harrison’s guitar, who in turn cradled the bass; David Byrne plays the keyboards.
The track also features Wally Badarou on synth and David Van Tiegham on percussion. Their parts are not naïve at all; Badarou’s synth parts in particular are exquisite.
Here’s my transcription.
What the heck key is this in? All the pitches are within the G major scale, and the vocal melody certainly sounds like it’s in G major. But the bassline only glances at the note G; it seems to spell out a chord progression of D, Em, C, Em. That implies either D Mixolydian mode, because D is in the strongest metrical position, or E minor, because that’s the chord where the bassline spends the most time. If you add the main guitar loop on top, the chords are more like Dsus4, Em11, Cmaj7, Em11. Wally Badarou’s lead synth bends down to D-flat as a chromatic neighbor in measures 23, 27 and 28, and in measure 28 it also bends to an extremely challenging A-flat. After that bit of harmonic excitement, the vocal melody gets back to the naïve major-scale feeling promised by the title.
What are the lyrics about? I hear them about being reunited with your loved ones after you die:
Home is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
I can’t tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I’ll be, where I’ll be
Most of Speaking In Tongues is the Talking Heads’ take on nervous club music, and it arrived at a moment when nervous club music was in the zeitgeist, which led to Talking Heads getting actual nightclub play with that. But “This Must Be The Place” is the one Speaking In Tongues track that diverges wildly from all that — that creates its own strange and placid little world. Decades later, it’s the Speaking In Tongues track that’s resonated the longest…
Breihan calls the tune “a strange, repetitive, hypnotic groove — a bloopy and comforting post-disco lullaby.” That is exactly right. He says that the band sound like “tiptoeing”, which seems like too delicate a word for this groove, but it gets at the lightness and restraint. And he describes David Byrne’s vocal performance as “an affectionate quaver that never loses its nervousness.” He goes on:
Byrne sounds faintly terrified on nearly every Talking Heads song, but on “This Must Be The Place,” he allows some starry-eyed fondness to creep his way in. He sounds like a newly sentient robot who is just starting to discover the idea of happiness, and who seems to be at least a little bit afraid of it.
I have heard this song about a hundred thousand times, and I have sung it to my kids at bedtime too many times to count, and its oddness has not worn off. What genre would you put it in? It’s too groove-oriented and unstructured to be rock and too straight to be funk. It has elements of reggae and Afrobeat, but it doesn’t fit squarely in those styles either. It’s too artsy to be a love song, but is not overtly nonsensical either. It’s catchy and fun, but not structured like a pop song – the instrumental intro is too long and unpredictable, and there is no chorus. It exactly straddles the line between a song and a groove. I guess if my mind could resolve all the contradictions, I wouldn’t still be so interested in the song after all this time.