The five best covers of Talking Heads song ‘This Must Be the Place’

Posted On June 29, 2025June 29, 2025

It’s easy to feel like the Talking Heads are an emotionally cold band. Most of the time, they are. Dispassionate, precise, more built around making you think than making you feel. To be clear, these are absolutely not criticisms of the band. They’re one of my favourites for all of those reasons, and that commitment to pushing boundaries with what a rock band can achieve is only possible with a group of people as smart as they are talented.

However, they are a band whose back catalogue does have more than a few moments of heart-bursting emotion in it. None more so than this, one of the best love songs of the entire 1980s, ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’. A song as profound as it is (as the title suggests) simple, built around a single guitar line and with singer and songwriter David Byrne purposefully singing in non-sequiturs to get around the fact that writing about love is, in his words, “kinda big”.

While it was no chart hit the way that ‘Burning Down the House’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ were, the song has gone on to become arguably the most beloved in the band’s back catalogue. The first dance at thousands of hipster weddings, the title of a Paolo Sorrentino picture, and a song covered by many, many people in awe of one of David Byrne’s most adored creations.

Covering any song is a big task. One as beloved as ‘This Must Be the Place’ could conceivably be an act of hubris unless pulled off spectacularly. However, a few people have done it justice and more. So, let’s have a look and find the five best covers of ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’!

Five of the best covers of ‘This Must Be the Place’

Related Topics