Why “This Must Be the Place” is the perfect song for a restaurant playlist

It happened again. I was in a fancy pizzeria run by a well-known chef and heard the same throbbing bass line and whistling synths that have lived in my heart since my father showed me It stops making sense When I was 14, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” by Talking Heads was playing.

Or was I at that pizza place? I could have been at the bar under the Manhattan Bridge where I heard it recently, or at brunch in Philadelphia, or at a wine bar in Los Angeles. I’ve heard it in restaurants in New Orleans, New Paltz, Minneapolis, and Tokyo. I’ve heard it in places new and old, places where drinks cost $5 or $20. Recently, I didn’t even hear the song, I just saw the lyrics blocked out 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 You can have similar playlistsbut this is the restaurant’s only and eternal song.

I can’t complain. With a gun to my head, Talking Heads are probably my favorite band, and like many millennials, “This Must Be the Place” was my wedding song. Whenever it comes on, my partner and I hold 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 It stops making senseAnd, aside from my personal connection, it’s just a good song. But what makes a good song a good restaurant song?

According to Simon Vozick-Levinson, deputy music editor of Rolling StoneOverall, Talking Heads convey a particular kind of style. “They’re a band that managed to be very popular in their time, but they always maintained that artistic and outsider perspective,” he says. “It’s heady, artistic music, but also very accessible.”

In an interview with the magazineArtist Blondshell, who covered the Talking Heads song “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel,” said that “their music doesn’t belong to a specific genre. People will say new wave or whatever, but it doesn’t feel pigeonholed, and that’s part of the legacy.” That combination of popularity and genre-defying artistic integrity has ultimately given Talking Heads a lot of staying power, allowing them to remain popular to younger generations of musicians and listeners who may not have even been born before the band broke up.

The art of creating a restaurant playlist is something that more and more restaurants are becoming more aware of. “They put so much attention to detail in the design, the menu and the space that they don’t want to harm their customers by playing music that feels horrible,” said Alec DeRuggiero, music supervisor at Gray Va company that will literally create playlists for restaurants, He told the The New York TimesPutting Talking Heads on the playlist allows a restaurant to imbibe a sense of timeless freshness. Like the band, it signals that what you’re eating isn’t hyper-contemporary, it’s not defined by trends, it’s quirky but still deeply enjoyable.

You’ve probably heard several Talking Heads songs on restaurant playlistsBut “This Must Be the Place” works particularly well for several reasons. First, unlike the raunchy, post-apocalyptic beat of “Life During Wartime” or the staccato background of “Girlfriend Is Better,” “This Must Be the Place” is perhaps their most laid-back and relaxed song. There’s no tension to unsettle diners, just sweetness. Second, “it’s literally a song about finding a place that feels like home, where you feel comfortable,” Vozick-Levinson says. “That’s a feeling that restaurants are trying to create.”

And it’s a song about love, something that millions of people feel and experience every day, but it’s a unique and fantastic feeling for each person. In a restaurant, those feelings are reflected in a meal. You’re eating, another completely ordinary activity, and any restaurant wants you to feel like it’s the most special meal in the world.

There is also a trend that is spreading in this area. In 2016, John Birdsall wrote about the Brooklyn-ification of restaurants and cities around the world. The mid-2000s Williamsburg aesthetic (craft beer, third-wave coffee, artisanal ingredients served with a punk-lite spirit) seeped into youth culture around the world, resulting in a desire for “local” sourcing and a style that “surprisingly, looks and feels the same no matter where you are.”

Part of Brooklyn’s locale were the Talking Heads, a quintessentially 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 also part 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 hear the Talking Heads. But hearing “This Must Be the Place” at a craft beer bar serving house-made pickles and locally sourced pork belly to a guy in a too-small hat has gone from a New York hipster experience to a mainstream sensation, which has now ricocheted around the world enough that it’s been imported back to New York in the form of things like that Upper West Side restaurant’s Instagram wall.

The song is better than almost every restaurant it plays in, it will outlive its current popularity. But every time it comes on while I’m sipping a cocktail or biting into a sandwich, I think not of the uniqueness of the restaurant I’m in, but of how common it is to all the other places I’ve heard it. Singular experiences, united by the utter purity of a good song. I can’t tell one from the other.