The five best covers of Talking Heads song ‘This Must Be the Place’
It’s easy to feel like the Talking Heads are an emotionally cold band. Most of the time, they are. Dispassionate, precise, more built around making you think than making you feel. To be clear, these are absolutely not criticisms of the band. They’re one of my favourites for all of those reasons, and that commitment to pushing boundaries with what a rock band can achieve is only possible with a group of people as smart as they are talented.
However, they are a band whose back catalogue does have more than a few moments of heart-bursting emotion in it. None more so than this, one of the best love songs of the entire 1980s, ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’. A song as profound as it is (as the title suggests) simple, built around a single guitar line and with singer and songwriter David Byrne purposefully singing in non-sequiturs to get around the fact that writing about love is, in his words, “kinda big”.
While it was no chart hit the way that ‘Burning Down the House’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ were, the song has gone on to become arguably the most beloved in the band’s back catalogue. The first dance at thousands of hipster weddings, the title of a Paolo Sorrentino picture, and a song covered by many, many people in awe of one of David Byrne’s most adored creations.
Covering any song is a big task. One as beloved as ‘This Must Be the Place’ could conceivably be an act of hubris unless pulled off spectacularly. However, a few people have done it justice and more. So, let’s have a look and find the five best covers of ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’!
Five of the best covers of ‘This Must Be the Place’
Car Seat Headrest
Considering that Will Toledo once released music under the name Nervous Young Men before he took on the moniker Car Seat Headrest, is it any wonder that he’s a die-hard Talking Heads fan. In fact, this isn’t even the only time Toledo’s band has taken a song by the Heads for a spin. His band spent a lot of 2018 jamming through a pretty faithful cover of ‘Crosseyed and Painless’, so it’s really no surprise that they also gave this classic love song a spin as well.
In fact, their version of ‘This Must Be the Place’ became their go-to encore for a number of shows in 2016. They were on the road with Seattle-based indie rockers Naked Giants (a 2010s band name if there ever was one), and the two bands would join together to play this fizzy, guitar-based version of the track as the opening number of Car Seat’s encore. For such a mature song, it’s a lovely change of pace for it to feel as youthfully energised as it does here.
MGMT
One wonders how it must feel to be MGMT these days. Coming up to 20 years ago (Christ), you have three gargantuan hits off your debut album and spend the next 15 years comfortably running the album and touring treadmill, never coming close to that level of mainstream popularity, but still a consistent draw on the live circuit. Then you get a burst of relevance again when a clip of yours goes viral…from your very first concert, when you were still in college. The four albums they released since their debut never got half the coverage.
Yet, you must still get it. Everyone can see just how charming it is. Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser (with a tie wrapped around his head, natch) bopping through their early hits, barely able to contain their glee. Before everything comes together with a surprisingly confident run through of ‘This Must Be the Place’, the harmonies Vanwyngarden and Goldwasser offer show a sign that this is a lot more than some frat boys larking about.
The Lumineers
The Talking Heads have never sounded like anyone other than themselves. From their beginnings as an awkward, energetic post-punk band to their funk-pop peak and everywhere in between, they were a band that basically no one could imitate. A lot of this came from the sheer scope of their sound, but also from David Byrne’s typically characteristic songwriting. There was quite simply nobody out there who could match Byrne’s voice as a writer, and woe often betided folks who tried.
Thus, it’s a serious achievement to take not only a Talking Heads song, but arguably the most beloved of their catalogue and turn it into something entirely different. The Lumineers managed to do just that with their take on ‘This Must Be the Place’, spinning a heartwarming song of love into a windswept, alt-country ballad. Almost melancholic due to the cello that backs singer Wesley Schultz as he unlocks the yearning behind Byrne’s lyrics: “Home”, after all, is not where he is but “where [he] wants to be”. Hauntingly beautiful.
Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell
As the opening of the peerless Stop Making Sense shows, Talking Heads songs work when you strip them down. Byrne takes to the stage with an acoustic guitar and a tape he wants to play you, then launches into a truly captivating version of ‘Psycho Killer’. If the man could make a song that robotic work acoustically, then surely, one of the great love songs of our time must also work when stripped to its bare bones, right?
As the opening track of Iron & Wine‘s collaboration album with Band of Horses singer Ben Bridwell shows, it absolutely does. Over lush acoustic guitar and pedal steel, the two folk-rock greats strip everything computerised and rigid away from the song and let it live in all its warmth and humanity. An inspired choice that lets the song do what it does best, tug at everyone’s heartstrings.
BadBadNotGood and Nora Jones
As inspired an idea as the Stop Making Sense covers record was, the results were mixed. When it was good, it was absolutely sensational. Miley Cyrus‘ frantic, Born This Way-esque take on ‘Psycho Killer’ and Lorde’s effortlessly seductive version of ‘Take Me to the River’, an Al Green classic the Talking Heads themselves covered, were utter joys. Most of the time, though, folks stuck pretty faithfully to the originals, making a listener wonder why they wouldn’t just go back to the originals.
However, BadBadNotGood’s Nora Jones-assisted tribute to ‘This Must Be the Place’ is the perfect midpoint between the two extremes. The Toronto instrumental group lays down a backing similar enough to the original but with their own unmistakable spin on it. This is to set things up for Nora Jones to really steal the show here with an absolutely sensational vocal. One that has all the easy charm of the original with a jazzy twist that only a vocalist like Jones could add. The harmonies that bring the track to life have never sounded better in her hands.
