Music | Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

This odd-sounding tune is one of my favorite songs ever; it's from Talking Heads' 1983 album Speaking in Tongues, which is better known as the album that made them mainstream artists; prior to this they were mainly considered as an alternative band.


This Must Be The Place was the second single to be released from Speaking in Tongues, following the huge commercial success that was Burning Down The House (another of my all-time favorite songs). Unfortunately, the song didn't do that well, and peaked at number 62 on the Billboard Hot 100. I was also dismayed when this song was prominently used in Wall Street, a movie that I hated.

What made this song so appealing to me was its uniqueness--the melody, the instrumentation, and the overall weirdness all combined to make it a pleasant-sounding song. The lyrics are similarly bizarre, but normal for a Talking Heads song though, heh. Years later I would read that David Byrne wrote it as a love song, LOL.

The video is equally strange, and features a little bit of Byrne's unusual singing-dancing antics that made Talking Heads distinctive during its heyday, heh.