After “Wall Street,” the song fell off the radar for a time. Then the up-and-coming singer Shawn Colvin rediscovered it. She had never been much of a Talking Heads fan during their prime, but one day she sat down and listened to “This Must Be The Place” closely. “I was just stunned,” Colvin said, not only by its sweetness, but its melancholia. She could hear in it “the perils of loving someone that much.” Colvin started performing it around the country, and included it on her 1994 release, “Cover Girl.
From “The Meaning of the Talking Heads’ Song ‘This Must Be The Place’” in The New Yorker.
If you’ve never heard the Shawn Colvin version of the song, I highly suggest checking it out. I grew up on the Talking Heads, thanks to my parents and older brother, but I also grew up on Shawn Colvin, because that was the sort of Lady Rock my mom loved. When I first heard Shawn Colvin’s cover of “This Must Be The Place” I was just blown away — she took my favorite song and made it her own, and made it just as hauntingly beautiful, if not, dare I say, more so.
I don’t know how to play the guitar but if I ever did learn, I would only want to learn how to play Shawn Colvin’s cover of “This Must Be the Place.”
