The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads

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For younger listeners, and for older ones who never shared Lethem’s infatuation, Talking Heads live on principally in one track: the sad, sweet “love song” titled “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” When was the last time you heard “Burning Down the House,” the band’s biggest single? Probably not recently. But chances are good that you’ve heard “This Must Be the Place” very recently, whether you knew it or not.

 

Thirty years old this year, the song has slowly but surely embedded itself in the American songbook. You can’t walk into a good bar between Williamsburg and Silver Lake without an even shot that it will come on the stereo in some iteration. Lately, it’s been covered by Arcade Fire, MGMT, and the jam band The String Cheese Incident, among others. There are books named for it. Hip brides march down the aisle to it. It’s quoted in mawkish editorials. And last year, “This Must Be the Place” was made into a movie.

 

This is all very improbable. “This Must Be the Place” is a love song only in spite of itself (it dispenses about as much hope as Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), and in its time it was not a hit. Rolling Stone’s review of “Speaking in Tongues,” the 1983 LP on which the song appears, hazarded that the album “finally obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep black funk,” but doesn’t mention “This Must Be the Place.” Perhaps because it was the most uncharacteristic thing the band had recorded to that point.

 

The parenthetical title, “Naive Melody,” comes from the fact that the bandmates switched instruments when they composed it. Musically, it was one of the sparest arrangements they ever made. The song consists of a simple guitar-chord progression, a four-bar bass figure, and a fluty synthesizer part, repeated over and over again. The polyphony is African sounding, but also vaguely Baroque, creating an ambiance of innocence that’s augmented by the whimsical array of found-object percussion sounds (a wine bottle, scrap metal, ashtrays, a cocktail shaker, a candleholder, and a milk jug).

 

On first blush, the lyrics seem comparably simple. Byrne actually sings them, rather than declaiming, as he often did. In an interview, he called them “The most direct love lyrics that I’ve ever written,” and Chris Frantz added, “In a lot of the songs David’s lyrics didn’t have any personal significance for him. They were from things he heard or read. But in this case it sounded as though he really meant it.” Reviewers who took note of the song agreed. “The turmoil is finally resolved in This Must Be The Place,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Richard Cromelin, who called it “one of the most luminous love songs rock has produced.”

 

And, indeed, “This Must Be The Place” can be taken as an ode to the palliative effects of companionship. “Home is where I want to be / Pick me up and turn me ’round,” Byrne begins. “I feel numb, born with a weak heart / Guess I must be having fun.” All of a moment, this narrator, who has been worrying over the boredoms of affection for a decade, is welcoming it. He may not want to examine it (“The less we say about it the better”), but he’s ready to dive in (“Make it up as we go along”). All of a moment, he is infatuated. “Hiii yo, I got plenty of time,” Byrne croons.

 

 

But the song is not as blissy as it seems. The spurned purists should have listened more closely. The old anxiety is there.

 

“This must be the place”—it’s not a statement of certainty, is it? It’s not “This is the place.” It’s more “This is what someone said the place was.” It’s even a little desperate. “I don’t know what I’ll do if this isn’t the place.” The music, too, starts in a kind of question mark. Very unconventionally for a pop song, the lyrics don’t come in for a full minute, during which time the floating bass line doesn’t play on the roots of the guitar chords but on the fifths, lending the melody what the keyboardist Jerry Harrison calls “an uneasiness.” The whole time, we’re wondering if that propulsive sound that carried the record up to this point will return.

 

It doesn’t, and Byrne arrives instead, but he hasn’t gotten through the first verse before he’s trying to reassure himself he came to the right address. “It’s okay, I know nothing’s wrong,” he sings. “I love the passing of time.” The third verse begins as hopefully as the first does, with the words “Home is where I want to be,” but then a note of disappointment enters his voice, reminiscent of the newscaster-father switch in “Life During Wartime,” as he decides “But I guess I’m already there.” (Note the same non-aligned rhyme on “where” and “there.”) Already, he is bored with the idea of home. Meanwhile, the imagery—“Eyes that light up / Eyes look through you”, “You’ve got a face with a view”—is as spectral as it is numinous. All this as the E-minor chords turn the wistfulness into nostalgia, and nostalgia into a sense of loss, not for things lost, but, the listener intuits from the counterpoint horn-synth stabs in the chorus, for things never found. By the end, the comfort of love is making him think of death: “And you’ll love me til my heart stops / Love me til I’m dead.”

 

The dreadful longing and anticipatory regret are still there. Byrne is more at ease with them, he can even appreciate them, but he knows they’ll never go away. “This Must Be The Place has a lot of sentiment,” Lethem says, “but the thing that energizes the song is that it’s difficult to get to that sentiment.”

 

 

But “Lars and the Real Girl,” from 2007, employs the song to the best and most knowing effect. It comes on in the film’s crucial scene, in which Lars (Ryan Gosling) brings the life-size doll he’s been claiming is his girlfriend to a party. Rather than laugh, everyone graciously pretends she is a real person. (“The best thing is, man, she doesn’t even know how hot she is,” one partygoer says to Lars.) He feels accepted, welcomed for the first time in the story, maybe in his life. Then someone puts “Speaking in Tongues” on a record player, and lays the needle down on “This Must Be The Place.” Instead of dancing with the doll, Lars begins to dance by himself—or, rather, to sway, almost imperceptibly, his fists clenched, one arm tentatively outstretched, chin on his chest. He is holding back tears and smiling. He’s ecstatic and in agony. He’s never been so happy, or so sad. Finally, there’s a party in his mind. He doesn’t know if he wants it to stop.