This Must Be The Place(Naive Melody) [Live] – David Byrne

Happy Friday! The Talking Heads have more recently become one of my go to bands to listen to on regular rotation. If you haven’t seen their concert film, Stop Making Sense, I highly recommend it. There was a recent remastered version released by A24, I’ll link the trailer below.

I thought about featuring a song from the Stop Making Sense concert but decided to go with a more unique and perhaps charming version of one of their most well known songs, performed at Austin City Limits festival by David Byrne without the rest of the Heads. Byrne has quickly become one of my favorite creatives, and I really enjoyed the entire show. He end the show with a great cover of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by the legendary Whitney Houston. I’ll link that below as well.

“This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” is my favorite Talking Heads song, and I have to say I think it’s one of the best love songs ever written. I’ll default to the first hand account for the explanation of that, with David saying –

“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. I don’t think I’ve ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a sort of reservation, or a twist. 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.”

I chose this particular version because I love the incorporation of the strings and there’s something about this rendition that stands out to me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it just feels very relaxed? Maybe it’s the strings, or seeing how laid back Byrne is in the video of the performance. It reminds me of a sunset over water.

Link to performance – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIbrrAbsDpw

Link to Stop Making Sense trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rjMwSTeVeo

Link to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” cover – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izx8J6U7xzo