Lyrically Speaking: exploring ‘This Must Be The Place’, Talking Heads’ unusually honest love song
Talking Heads sang about a wide array of topics, from psycho killers and wartime landscapes to futuristic dystopias and beyond. But with ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’, they dared to tackle perhaps the biggest topic of all: love.
Generally speaking, David Byrne and his band didn’t seem interested in grand, universal themes. Their songs, more often than not, dealt with a very specific place, time and situation. Talking Heads pieces tend to be more narrative-based, telling a story about characters or a place, with those two things usually being fictional or, at least, not super relatable. They didn’t seem to care about that, focusing more on creating a vibe their listeners could get into rather than a lyrical ode they could easily apply to their own lives.
The 1983 track ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’, from their beloved album Speaking in Tongues, is a love song. As the title suggests, ‘Naive Melody’, David Byrne cast off his usual left-field approach and delved into the familiar, warm, and fuzzy feeling of love that makes everyone feel a bit foolish. This shift is also reflected in the instrumental arrangement, as the band moved away from their typically complex and genre-bending sound to create a song centred around a simple, repetitive melody. The same bars and chords loop throughout, allowing the lyrics to take centre stage.
However, the lyrics purposefully don’t really do the talking. Even though this is clearly a love song, told vividly in grand gesture phrasings like “And you love me ’til my heart stops / Love me ’til I’m dead”. The majority of the lyrics cast off typical lovey-dovey sentiment to instead capture the images and emotions involved. In typical Byrne fashion, he wanted to write a love song without any of the trappings of the genre.
In his self-interview for the Stop Talking Sense DVD, Byrne said he’d previously avoided the topic of love because it was “kinda big”. So instead, ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’ seems to zoom in so close that the thing is unrecognisable but still distinctly felt. “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,” he said.
The images found in the lyrics attempt to capture the feeling. Byrne sings about the idea of home before resolving that home can be a person as he sings, “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”. Also, in that same section, the image of angel wings casts the person he loves as this supreme, godly being without using any of the cliched metaphors of adoration being transcendent. It also ties into the lyrics to do with animals, with Byrne singing, “I’m just an animal looking for a home, and share the same space for a minute or two.” By stripping himself back to nothing but an animal, he touches on the idea that all beings are programmed to seek out love and safety without having to say that.
Really, the entire song is built on that idea. The band codify a series of images that are vivid enough to be understandable and give the song a clear, emotive energy but aren’t so obvious that they become typical or exhaustive. So then when the song does occasionally veer into the realm of big declarative statements of love, like the climax of “You got a face with a view”, or “And you’re standing here beside me / I love the passing of time”, it’s allowed to be even more powerful because the rest of the song builds the atmosphere of the emotion, without explicitly stating it over and over.
In Byrne’s eyes, he said that the track is “a real honest kind of love song”. He attempts to capture the feeling at its purest, dealing with the idea of love being safe and comforting and making you feel generally better about existing in the world. But as he does it all in his own typical fashion, he allowed himself to finally tackle a topic he’d once run from. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a sort of reservation or a twist,” he said. But when it comes to ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’, he finally managed it, stating, “I tried to write one that wasn’t corny, that didn’t sound stupid or lame the way many do. I think I succeeded; I was pretty happy with that.”
