This Must Be the Chord

In the church band I've been playing with for the past decade, we regularly expand our repertoire beyond the hymnal and spirituals to include songs by everyone from Prince to Dolly Parton, Lou Reed to Danzig. Today's Zoom service, on Mother's Day, opened with a rendition of Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," possibly the most moving song inspired by a Chinese menu, and included a Little Richard-inspired version of "God Is Real." (If I may say so, our Bowie tribute was a particular a high point in this vein, not least because it happened to feature no less a personage than Donny McCaslin on flute.)

One Sunday a year or two ago, I don't remember the occasion or the inspiration, I decided to try the Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)," arranged for guitar, violin, and piano. A cry for love as blunt as it is mysterious, it was much easier to justify as a church offering than it was to figure out how to play it. The weirdness starts with its bass ostinato: As this music blog points out, much of the scale of the song sits in a sort of G major/E minor harmony, but its bass line runs through an oddly unrestful progression of the notes D, E, C, E (with some ornamentation), over which a guitar-like plucked ostinato repeats pairs of notes that add up to some very open-sounding chords. This is how I hear the parts:

You could name those chords G over D, E-minor sus4, CMaj7, back to the E-minor. And the splintery openness of the chords, a quality I attribute to the song's open fourths and suspensions, might explain a paradox of the song's arrangement: Though a number of layers are added over these ostinatos, all affirming the song's G-ishness (a flutelike synth part in thirds hovering around G, bits of guitar chords, also in G, other synth ornaments in the same ballpark, the seagull-like synth trill, a vocal melody that starts on a D, jumps up a lot to G, and finally ecstatically, wordlessly flutters up to a B), the whole thing still feels sparse, spindly, uncrowded. And that space makes room for the genuine feeling in Byrne's vocal and lyric to surge into, all without feeling in any way heavy. Indeed the way the bass keeps arriving at that C chord but neglects to rest on its G root gives the song a certain weightlessness, as if it is leaping in mid-air, then hitting the sprung floor of that C chord, only to bounce back up again.

This sense of unsettled repetition, of familiarity made strange, befits a song built from jams in which many of the Heads tried out instruments they didn't normally play: bassist Tina Weymouth is on guitar, Jerry Harrison plays the bass part on the keyboard, Byrne dabbles in some synth parts. And it both sees and raises a lyric Byrne intended as a sort of sidelong approach to a love song, using evocative non-rhyming non sequiturs that somehow add up to a moving and poetic whole. Needless to say, the song killed at church, though I'm not sure what chord we ended on (we couldn't just fade out, as the record does).

"I'm just an animal looking for a home," he sings. Or a home key.