It happened again: I was in a swanky pizza place run by a famous chef, and I heard the bouncy bass line and whistling synthesizer sounds that have stayed with me ever since my dad taught me. Doesn’t make sense I was 14. “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” by Talking Heads was playing.
Or was I at that pizza place? Maybe I was at a bar under a bridge in Manhattan, or at a brunch in Philadelphia, or at a wine bar in LA where I’ve heard this song recently. I’ve heard it in restaurants in New Orleans, New Paltz, Minneapolis, and Tokyo. Old and new, and at places where drinks cost $5 and $20. I didn’t even hear this song recently, just saw the lyrics written in white neon on the fake plastic green walls of an all-day “California” restaurant on the Upper West Side. It was perfect for Instagramming. A cool restaurant might have a similar playlist, but this is a restaurant song like no other.
I can’t complain. Talking Heads are my favorite band of all time, and like many millennials, “This Must Be the Place” was my wedding song. When this song comes on, my partner and I hold each other’s hands and instinctively reach for the matching tattoos we got on our fifth wedding anniversary: the lights that dance when David Byrne sings this song in “The Last Night.” Doesn’t make sensePersonal connection aside, this is just a good song, but what makes a good song a good restaurant song?
According to Associate Music Editor Simon Wojcik Levinson: Rolling StoneTalking Heads, overall, exude a unique coolness. “They were a band that was incredibly popular in their time, but they always maintained an artsy, outsider perspective,” he says. “Their music is thought-provoking and artsy, but also incredibly accessible.”
in Magazine interview“Their music isn’t a specific genre. You might call it new wave or something, but it doesn’t feel boxed in. It’s part of their heritage,” says Blondshell, an artist who covered the Talking Heads song “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel.” This combination of popularity and genre-defying artistic integrity is what gives Talking Heads staying power, allowing them to remain cool to younger generations of musicians and listeners alike who might not have been born before the band broke up.
The art of creating a restaurant playlist is something more and more restaurants are consciously working on: “They’re paying close attention to the design, the menu, and the space, so they don’t want to trick customers by playing music that makes them feel sick,” says Alec DeLuggiero, the restaurant’s music director. Grey Va company that literally creates playlists for restaurants; said The New York TimesPutting Talking Heads on your playlist can help your restaurant exude timeless cool. Like the band, it communicates that what you’re eating isn’t overly modern, but timeless, unique and deeply enjoyable.
Perhaps multiple Talking Heads songs on restaurant playlistsBut “This Must Be the Place” works particularly well for a few reasons. First, unlike the itchy, post-apocalyptic beat of “Life During Wartime” or the staccato background of “Girlfriend Is Better,” “This Must Be the Place” is perhaps their most gentle and soothing song. There’s no diner-uneasy tension, just sweetness. Second, “It’s literally a song about finding a place where you feel at home,” Wojcik-Levinson says. “That’s the feeling that restaurants are trying to create.”
This is a song about love, something that millions of people fall into and lose every day, yet it’s a wonderful emotion that is unique to each person. In a restaurant, this emotion is reflected in the food. Eating is a completely mundane activity, but every restaurant wants you to feel like it’s the most special meal in the world.
Here too, trends are slowly emerging. In 2016, John Birdsall writes: On the Brooklynization of restaurants and cities around the world. The Williamsburg aesthetic of the mid-2000s—craft beer, third-wave coffee, artisanal ingredients served with a punk-inspired ethos—permeated youth cultures around the world, creating a desire for “local” ingredients and a style that “surprisingly looks and feels the same everywhere.”
Part of Brooklyn is the band Talking Heads, a band that is essentially from New York. In New York, playing their music places a restaurant in the city’s cultural history, signaling that the place is as local as the band. But as more restaurants have started to embrace a touch of Brooklyn, so have their playlists. Of course, you don’t have to be from New York to listen to Talking Heads, but listening to “This Must Be the Place” in a craft beer bar with a guy in a too-small beanie serving up homemade pickles and locally-sourced pork belly has gone from a hipster New York experience to a common ambiance that’s now spread around the world and reimported back to New York in the form of the Instagram walls of Upper West Side restaurants.
This song is better than most of the restaurants it plays in, and it will likely outlast the current trend, but every time it comes on while I sip a cocktail or bite into a sandwich, I think not of the specificity of the restaurant I’m in, but of the commonality of every other place I’ve heard it: singular experiences bound together by the sheer wholeness of a good song; I can’t tell them apart.
