‘This Must Be The Place’: How David Byrne wrote one of the greatest lyrics about love of all time
It’s a fact often overlooked by literary scholars, but William Shakespeare makes a high percentage of the population gag. Most of us are not romantics; we’re just fools floundering our way through the world. David Byrne is one of us. In fact, he’s one of the most foolish, and the height of his charm is that he has never pretended to be anything else.
Most songwriters address their chosen subjects with a sense of confidence and certitude. They want to convince the listener that they are in command of whatever crumby tale is unfurling. Even when they are uncertain, they’re usually confidently uncertain. ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’ makes no attempts to play such a hand.
Byrne addresses the topic of love with all the skittishness of a shy deer. He easily admits that he wants to be home and that love’s delicate infancy has not emboldened his spirit but rather made him sure that he was “born with a weak heart”. Bruce Springsteen would never write that—Springsteen, even in his most vulnerable moments, would write that he was “tougher than the rest”.
Springsteen is not alone; just about every writer in history has followed a similar path. Shakespeare set the literary tone that love must be grand, bold, and full of bravado. Romanticism is the realm of extroverts. However, Talking Heads’ humble decree is a very rare artefact, an aloof example of what happens when a staunch introvert earnestly tries their hand at the thorny issue of love—plucking the rose with kid gloves.
Recorded in 1982, a year before its eventual release as a single from Speaking in Tongues, Byrne was only 30 when he ushered the song into the studio. He made no attempts to hide his inexperience with the subject matter: romance. In fact, he carried that inexperience through to the ‘naive’ melody, making the band swap their usual instruments to capture a sense of fitting nervousness, embodying the tentative invigoration of the protagonist.
A handful of indie films and books might have played the same hand, but all too often, they make the following mistake: they honour the notion that love is a fearsome beast to the woefully inexperienced, but once the protagonist gets a sniff of it, they become overnight Latharios despite never even talking to a prospective partner in the many years prior to some grand chance encounter.
Byrne subverts that trope. He is clearly “head in this sky”, intoxicated by the delirium of “the passing of time” in the presence of someone who fits you as well as a Thermos flask fits Sunday’s frozen pitch, but he still makes no attempt to airbrush the counterpoint of frosty discomfort and uncertainty that comes along with it. Nor does he neaten the whole thing up into some linear narrative as though life falls in line when love comes to town.
As he explains himself, “That’s a love song made up almost completely of non-sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities. It’s a real honest kind of love song.” And yet, it kind of does have a narrative quality by virtue of how resonant that honesty proves. At no point does he mention awkwardly holding an empty drink at a party with “eyes that light up” and looking right through the person in the room you are actually give a shit about, but we can infer such scenes from the fully formed feeling that his abstract quips convey.
That’s the key to what makes ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’ a masterpiece. It captures the true feeling of falling in love for most people more faithfully than just about any song or artwork, period. Byrne’s bumbling honesty is a beautiful thing to behold—emboldening and life-affirming for those of us who aren’t Romeo or Juilette but rather awkward office workers catastrophically asking, ‘So, do you come here often?’ at a house party.
