Talking Heads

"Once in a Lifetime" the biggest iTunes hit

Their biggest charting US single is Wild Wild Life

"Burning Down the House" hit the top ten while WWL barely crawled into the top thirty.

the other iTunes finalists:

Burning Down the house
And She Was
Psycho Killer
Take Me to the River

iTunes ranking:

1. Once in a Lifetime
2. Burning Down the House
3. And She Was
4. Psycho Killer
5. Take Me To The River
6. This Must Be The Place

My contention that Talking Heads "live on" through "Once In a Lifetime," "Burning Down the House," and "Psycho Killer" at least as much as through This Must Be the Place is LOOKING GOOD

oops xp

oh yeah the NYer definitely overstated their case (esp at the cost of pretending "Burning Down The House" doesn't still get played anywhere) but the general gist is true

what's interesting to me is that "Place" was a single in the '80s not once but twice -- first as the follow-up to "Burning" and then off Stop Making Sense, and both times it failed to gain the kind of following it enjoys now.

the general gist is true

you mean about david byrne being a funky white man?

At this moment I'm dreaming that I live in the world where Living Colour's cover of "Memories Can't Wait" elevated that song to the level of cultural import that Arcade Fire did for TMBTP

'hipsters really like this song' seems like a reasonable statement to me

it's funny to go from listening to this TH song back to listening to stuff for my Bee Gees poll ballot, while reading in that article how David Byrne was "a one-man rebuke to the Gibb brothers"

yeah, i guess the piece waffles about whether it's talking about the song's standing among "young people" or "everyone who's not hardcore into postpunk like Jonathan Lethem" or "the American songbook" or whether it just means "hipsters in Williamsburg know it even though they don't know who Talking Heads are."

for most of the nineties "And She Was," "Stay Up Late," and "Wild Wild Life" got massive airplay on my local AOR station.

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, June 14, 2012 11:14 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

and she was + wwl still get the most radio airplay around here

everyone i've ever met knows "burning down the house" and "once in a lifetime" at least as well as they know "naive melody", if they know any of it at all, but i guess i am going to the wrong bars. also what's with the new yorker's scare quotes around "love song".

This is all very improbable. “This Must Be The Place” is a love song only in spite of itself (it dispenses about as much hope as Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”)

what on earth

TMBTP became ubiquitous at hipster parties i went to between 2004-2006.

Road to Nowhere though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7FKVAuDv8M

i can vouch that in Manchester it seemed like TMBTP was permanently on in every bar for a good few years c. the mid-late 00's.
also there's a v popular club here called.. http://www.naivemelody.co.uk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTiFNQBRwwU

i'm glad i've never heard any of these covers of the song and i hope i never will. what i like about it feels very tied to the TH arrangement and not adaptable to just any voice or set of instrumentation.

So weird. I had no idea TMBTP was a popular TH song. I don't think I've ever heard it other than when I play it myself. I would have thought Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down, And She Was and WWL were way more popular.

i have a vague memory of hearing it in the trailer of some 80s or 90s movie, possibly at the beginning of a VHS rental, years and years ago, but i can't figure out what movie and it wasn't mentioned in that article or anywhere else.

also features prominently in your mainstream rom-coms a lot these days too; a quick rummage on IMDB reveals it's in both Crazy Stupid Love and He's Just Not Tht Into You.

then there's this of course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zppYSFPKrQ8

"This Must Be The Place" is the sentimental favorite, maybe, like "Solisbury Hill." But I don't know anyone who would call "Solisbury Hill" their favorite Peter Gabriel song.

Of course, "This Must Be The Place" is such a lovely track, totally wistful and simple. There are very few Talking Heads songs in its mode.

FWIW, on the radio I hear "And She Was" more than any other Talking Head song, save perhaps "Burning Down the House" and the Al Green cover. Sometimes "Psycho Killer," sometimes "Once in a Lifetime."

I wish "Road to Nowhere" and "(Nothing But) Flowers" got more airplay, as far as late-era Heads goes.

But I don't know anyone who would call "Solisbury Hill" their favorite Peter Gabriel song.

i might, actually

Solisbury Hill is a good analogy.

"In Your Eyes" probably fits better tbh -- on a big album but initially a major hit, slowly became a pop culture touchstone through covers and movie placements etc.

but NOT initially a major hit

Oh YEAH. Definitely.

I associate all these songs with age 10/11 mixtapes, before anybody our age knew anything about Peter Gabriel/Talking Heads but heard TMBTP and "In Your Eyes" on the radio and found they fit in nicely as a segue between "Iesha" and Timmy T "One More Try"

i'm a little too young to have been listening to the radio when it was new, but i've never head "Place" on the radio ever.

also, i must say it's pretty funny to be discussing one of the central bands of the indie canon and tar any one track with the "song that hipsters like" brush. ESPECIALLY since the song in question is essentially the gooey ballad from their pop breakthrough.

MTV showed the video for "Place" in fairly light rotation, but I never heard it on the radio either.

last.fm stats, last six months:

1. psycho killer
2. once in a lifetime
3. burning down the house
(big drop)
4. road to nowhere
5. this must be the place

Oh man, reading this in half-awake mode, at first I thought maybe there was a Skrillex remix I was unaware of...

I did happen to see a weird screamo-with-vocoders duo mangle "Psycho Killer" at an open mic a few nights ago, so it made more sense than it should have.

I like Talking Heads, was a pop-devouring kid when Speaking In Tongues was new, & didn't ever hear of "This Must Be The Place" until adulthood. I've listened to it a few times today & I can't remember how it goes still. The hook is like "Genius of Love" but not as good (def. remember GOL from the radio as a kid though). so I'm puzzled too that TMBTP is held in esteem now.

"Solsbury Hill" might be my favorite Gabriel song too – but in its 1982 live incarnation (also released as a single iirc).

Yeah, "This Must Be the Place" is only their #14 seller on iTunes. I never even heard the song until this year whereas I've been hearing "Psycho Killer", "Burning Down the House", and "Road to Nowhere" since childhood, "Once in a Lifetime" at least since adolescence. I'm not buying yet that "This Must Be the Place" is held in great esteem by the general public.

xposts

I was wrong. It's their #8 seller. Still.

Statistics 1 Oral history 0

I will say that the performance of "This Must be the Place" plays an important roll in "Stop Making Sense."

Also, fwiw, Arcade Fire covered it a bunch during their first big tour, back when people were inexplicably comparing them to Talking Heads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-900xpiI0

Anyway, a reminder of a lovely rendition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqg_ZGcuybs

(lamp dance)

Tina playing gee-tar too.

The story goes that the song got its title because everyone swapped instruments for it in the studio, right?

that's what they say but in the credits the only swapping is Tina playing guitar and Byrne keyboards.

From Wiki:

In the "Self Interview" on the DVD of the concert film Stop Making Sense, Byrne admits that it is a love song, a topic he tends to avoid because it is "kinda big". He also said of the song:

"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."

According to the Stop Making Sense commentary track, the title "Naive Melody" refers to the music. On the track, the guitar part and the bass part are doing the same thing throughout the whole song. According to David Byrne, many professional musicians would not play a song written in that fashion, and that is what makes the melody naive. Byrne played the lead keyboard solo.

Which also gets at what I was saying, that it's the rare "love" song in the band's catalog.

Love song outlier is certainly a quality it has with "In Your Eyes." I want to say Gabriel up until then had specifically avoided using the word "love" or writing in the first person, as an anti-cliche exercise.

But I can see why some people so many years down the line might confuse both "This Must Be the Place" and "In Your Eyes" for the hits that they weren't.

My initial exposure of "This Might Be The Place" came from deciding to check out the performance from Stop Making Sense because he alluded to it in his self interview and I wanted to watch him sing and dance with a lamp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-mxVxFXLg

R.I.P. mywalloftapes.blogspot.com

why'd it go down?