1. This track is a live recording from what I consider one of the greatest recorded concerts ever.
2. Tomorrow I am going home...and that is at the moment 'where I want to be' (which is very naive).
3. This blog's name was inspired by the following song (also probably naive).
This has always been my favorite Talking Heads song, but until tonight I honestly never listened to the lyrics...but tonight they seem to make sense. The 1984 concert/film Stop Making Sense (turned DVD which my amazing sister bought me for my 20th birthday) is a must watch and will surely make a fan out of most Talking Heads skeptics. Try not to burn any flags this weekend.
Talking Heads - 'This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)' (live 1984)
5 comments:
We've talked about this album before, right? Hands down my favorite live album ever, and I got into it before they released the special version that had the entire show (which, obviously, is much better). It's a classic.
I consider this song to be one of the greatest love songs of the past 50 years. I also consider David Byrne to have intentionally masked the real emotional power of the song with the arrangement.
Fortunately for me, Shawn Colvin stripped away that cool remove on Cover Girl and laid it bare in old-fashioned confessional singer/songwriter mode (well, plus some overdubbed strings from David Kahne).
With the areseven rating habit on my mind, the Talking Heads version is a solid 3 stars. But the Colvin version is 5, unhip as that may be, and would be on the short list of candidates for Last Song I'd Want To Hear. Say goodnight ...
But "Stop Making Sense" isn't even the best *Talking Heads* live album! That honor must go to the earlier "The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads"... ;)
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with your police work there, Christian.
The Name of This Band is the work of the younger Heads, and it's just not as tight. Stop Making Sense, on the other hand, is a huge statement. It's more than a live album: it's an entire concept for a show, and the backing musicians are absolutely incredible. "Once In A Lifetime", "Found a Job", "Burning Down The House" and "Life During Wartime" hit incredible, frenzied heights that even their album counterparts can't match, let alone The Name Of This Band. I'll take the cool acoustic version of "Psycho Killer" over the full band version any day.
I would say that almost every song (minus "Crosseyed and Painless") improves on its album version. The Name Of This Band feels like what it is: a good live album. Stop Making Sense feels like a band rediscovering their own songs and reveling in how good they are. It's perfect.
Maybe I need to spend more time with Stop Making Sense. Or acquaint myself with the newer, un-edited version. But I loves me some "The Name of This Band...". The fact that it's the work of a younger, less tight band is what makes it preferable to me, I think.
I think for me the bottom line is that if I had a time machine, I'd much rather go back to 1977 to see Talking Heads at CBGB's than stroll back to the early 80's to see the band perform a theatrical show that pulled most heavily from what was, to that point, easily their worst record. (Not that it's bad...but it can't touch any of ones that preceded it. And I'm actually coincidentally just now in the process of formulating this opinion, as I've picked up copies of the early LP's recently.)
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