It happened again. I was hanging out in a chic pizza place run by a well-known chef, and I heard the same bouncing bassline and whistling synths that have lived in my heart ever since my dad showed me Stop Making Sense when I was 14. “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” by the Talking Heads was on.
Or was I even at that pizza place? I could have been at the bar under the Manhattan bridge where I recently heard it, or at brunch in Philadelphia, or a wine bar in LA. I have heard it in restaurants in New Orleans, New Paltz, Minneapolis, and Tokyo. I have heard it in new and old places, places where drinks are $5 or $20. Recently, I didn’t even hear the song, I just saw the lyrics blocked in white neon on a wall of fake plastic greenery inside an all-day “Californian” restaurant on the Upper West Side, ready for Instagram. Cool restaurants may have similar playlists, but this is the one, eternal, restaurant song.
I can’t complain. Gun to my head, the Talking Heads are probably my favorite band, and like plenty of millennials, “This Must Be the Place” was my wedding song. Whenever it comes on, my partner and I squeeze each other’s hands, and instinctively reach for the matching tattoos we got on our fifth anniversary; they’re of the lamp David Byrne dances with while performing the song in Stop Making Sense. And aside from my personal connection, it is just a good song. But what makes a good song a good restaurant song?
According to Simon Vozick-Levinson, the deputy music editor at Rolling Stone, the Talking Heads in general signal a particular kind of cool. “They’re a band that in their era managed to be very popular, but always retained that arty, outsider perspective,” he says. “It’s heady and arty but also very accessible music.”
In an interview with the magazine, artist Blondshell, who covered the Talking Heads song “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel,” said “their music isn’t in a specific genre. People will say New Wave or whatever, but it doesn’t feel boxed in, and that’s part of the legacy.” That combination of popularity and genre-defying artistic integrity has ultimately given the Talking Heads a lot of staying power, allowing them to remain cool to younger generations of both musicians and listeners, who may not have even been born before the band broke up.
The art of creating a restaurant playlist is something more restaurants are becoming intentional about. “They put so much attention to detail in the design and the menu and the space that they don’t want to shortchange their customers by playing music that feels awful,” Alec DeRuggiero, music supervisor of Gray V, a company that will literally make playlists for restaurants, told the New York Times. Putting the Talking Heads on the playlist allows a restaurant to absorb a sense of timeless cool. Like the band, it signals that what you’re eating is not hyper-contemporary, not defined by trends, singular but still deeply enjoyable.
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You’ve probably heard multiple Talking Heads songs on restaurant playlists. But “This Must Be the Place” works particularly well for a few reasons. One, unlike the itchy postapocalyptic beat of “Life During Wartime” or the background staccato of “Girlfriend Is Better,” “This Must Be the Place” is maybe their calmest, chillest song. There’s no tension that may unsettle diners, just sweetness. Two, “it’s literally a song about finding a place where you feel like you fit in, where you feel comfortable,” says Vozick-Levinson. “That’s a feeling restaurants are trying to create.”
And it’s a song about love, at once something millions of people fall into and out of every day, and yet to each person a singular, fantastic feeling. In a restaurant setting, those feelings get mapped onto a meal. You’re eating, another completely commonplace activity, and any restaurant wants you to feel like this is the most special meal in the world.
There is also a trickling out of trends happening here. In 2016, John Birdsall wrote about the Brooklyn-ification of restaurants and cities around the world. The aesthetics of mid-2000s Williamsburg — craft beer, third-wave coffee, artisanal ingredients served with a punk-lite ethos — seeped into youth culture around the world, resulting in at once a desire for “local” sourcing and a style that “astonishingly, looks and feels the same no matter where you are.”
Part of the locality of Brooklyn was the Talking Heads, a fundamentally New York band. In New York, playing them places a restaurant within the city’s cultural history, signaling that like the band, this place is too of the terroir. But as so many restaurants became infused with at least a hint of Brooklyn, so did their playlists. Of course, you don’t have to be from New York to listen to the Talking Heads. But hearing “This Must Be the Place” in a craft beer bar serving homemade pickles and locally-sourced pork belly by a guy in a too-small beanie has morphed from a hipster New York experience to a general vibe, which has now ricocheted around the world enough that it’s been imported back into New York in the form of things like that Upper West Side restaurant’s Instagram wall.
The song is better than almost all of the restaurants it winds up being played in, it will outlast its current trendiness. But every time it comes on as I’m sipping a cocktail or biting into a sandwich, I think not of the singularity of the restaurant I’m in, but the commonality of everywhere else I’ve heard it. Singular experiences, tied together by the pure whole of a good song. I can’t tell one from another.
