Lately, it’s been covered by Arcade Fire, MGMT, and the jam band The String Cheese Incident, among others. You can’t walk into a good bar between Williamsburg and Silver Lake without an even shot that it will come on the stereo in some iteration. Thirty years old this year, the song has slowly but surely embedded itself in the American songbook. But chances are good that you’ve heard “This Must Be the Place” very recently, whether you knew it or not. Indeed, while Talking Heads can be detected in so much music today, from Radiohead to Vampire Weekend, years-old dust covers most of their catalogue.įor younger listeners, and for older ones who never shared Lethem’s infatuation, Talking Heads live on principally in one track: the sad, sweet “love song” titled “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” When was the last time you heard “Burning Down the House,” the band’s biggest single? Probably not recently. Byrne was the funkiest white man in pop until Flea showed up.) But most of the iTunes generation has never heard it. (A point about Talking Heads not often enough made: they cooked.

In the first line, the front man David Byrne molds his plastic tenor into a paranoiac-newscaster voice to announce, “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons” then, in the second, he steadies it as though to disown his excitement, and, like some repentant father pointing at the family station wagon, avers, “Packed up and ready to go.” (Note, too, that reluctant collusion between the “o”s in “loaded” and “go,” which Byrne emphasizes-a dissociative gulch somewhere between assonance and rhyme.)įor Lethem, “Life During Wartime” is the band’s pinnacle, and the song is still a hell of a thing to hear. Take the opening of “Life During Wartime,” an apocalyptic swamp-funk transmission in four-four time. In the late nineteen-seventies, in primordial downtown Manhattan, the band sonified not just longing and regret (most great musicians do that), but also dread (some do that), and then-this is what made them really special-mingled the feelings in single songs, sounds, and even couplets, while never letting listeners forget they knew what they were doing. Lethem likes this Romantic arc-dreadful longing, the regretful revision that follows-and in Talking Heads he has the perfect subject and mirror.

Weird swamp song