Cover Story

Another song I use this tuning for is This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) by Talking Heads. Balance of Power (one of the bands I was in during the early eighties) played a pretty straightforward version of this and it was a lot of fun to do. Musically, the song is very simple … two beats each of the following progression:

It repeats endlessly and that’s part of the charm of the song … a celebration of home and normalcy. On the record, the rhythm guitar is free to play on the high end of the guitar since the rest of the band is there to hold the bass in place. For years I lumped this song into the “I really like it but I’m not sure I can carry it off by myself” category. And then one day I heard Shawn Colvin play it and I said “Hey! I could do that!”

This is my take on her take. We use the same tuning we used in Rain but we’ll put a capo on the seventh fret, so that we’re still playing G chords on the guitar:

Here we’ll use the open G and D strings as a drone to give more body to the single acoustic guitar. This actually changes the chords somewhat but it still works out very nicely:

One last thing I do is to play a slight trill on the first Am chord, like this:

This mimics the synthesizer part in the original recording and helps jazz the arrangement up a bit (as well as bring a bit of familiarity to those who know the song). So here’s what the first verse of this song looks like:

My brother throws this party every fall. It’s basically a thank you to his tax clients (number crunching runs in the family…) as well as a chance for old and new friends to meet and have a good time. I’m billed as “some form of musical entertainment.” And I shouldn’t admit this, but playing for this probably gets me more nervous than anything else. The first time I did it, I was a last minute fill-in for a fairly well known local Irish singer/guitarist. I wasn’t sure what to play because I knew what the crowd was used to and I knew that it was not my forte. But by the time I closed the first set with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here I knew it was going to be okay. Sometimes people appreciate getting new or different arrangements just because they are unexpected. You see a guy with a twelve-string guitar and you might get yourself set for some Paul Simon or Steve Goodman. If you get some XTC or the Cure or Pink Floyd, well, hey, life is good that way.

It really can be all in the presentation. Two years someone asked for “newer” Pink Floyd, so about three months before the next party I was me scurrying through my CDs to see what could be done. I liked On The Turning Away but thought it was too much like Wish You Were Here (sometimes these days I do the intro of Wish and go straight into Turning). Eventually I took a shot at Take It Back from The Division Bell album and thought that there were indeed possibilities. At about the same time I was trying to learn Jimi Hendrix’s Angel and was having the devil of a time getting good chord voicings. I knew which notes I needed but couldn’t get my fingers to reach the proper frets. “Deja vu all over again,” I thought. Which, of course, made me think about trying a retuning. To make a pointless story even longer, I found that by tuning my G string down to F#, I could make the chord voicings that I wanted for one part of Angel and totally screwed up the last part. However unintentionally, I did find a great way to play Take It Back.