This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)

The closing track of Speaking in Tongues, recorded in 1982, with lyrics by Byrne and music by all four. Byrne said in 2025 that they chose to experiment by not playing their usual instruments, and that this is where the subtitle Naive Melody came from. Weymouth played rhythm guitar and Byrne lead guitar and a Prophet-5, adding pitch-bent piano glissandos and the keyboard solo, with Frantz on drums, Wally Badarou on synth stabs and David Van Tieghem on percussion. Guitar and bass each repeat one figure from start to finish, which Byrne said many professional musicians would not play. The musicologist Ethan Hein hears it sitting in G major, moving through Dsus4, Em11 and Cmaj7.

Byrne usually avoided love as too large a subject, and called this an honest love song, one "made up almost completely of non sequiturs." He also said he tried to write about small things. Released as a single in November 1983 with Moon Rocks on the B-side, it reached 51 in the UK and 62 on the Hot 100. Pitchfork placed it 22nd among the best songs of the 1980s, Rolling Stone 123rd of all time in 2021, and Paste first among the band's songs in 2024.

Live

Talking Heads played it 60 times, from Hampton Coliseum in Virginia on 1 August 1983 to Christchurch, New Zealand, on 6 February 1984. In Stop Making Sense Byrne sings beside a standard lamp and dances with it, a nod to Fred Astaire's coat-rack dance in Royal Wedding, and that live version was a single in 1986. It is the third most played song of Byrne's solo career, and part of American Utopia.

A live version by Arcade Fire with Byrne appeared on a 2005 single, and Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell opened their covers album Sing Into My Mouth, named from its lyric, with it in 2015. BADBADNOTGOOD covered it for the 2024 Stop Making Sense tribute, and the Lumineers, MGMT and Shawn Colvin are among others who have sung it. Paolo Sorrentino took the title for his 2011 film starring Sean Penn, in which Byrne appears. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official music video, which shows the expanded 1983 to 1984 band playing in a basement after a run of home movies.