It’s hard to get a clear read on Talking Heads’ "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)", the closing track on their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues. David Byrne sings with such dry detachment that I always think of him as an alien who has landed on Earth to observe the mating rituals of human beings. Even as he describes the customs, he lacks an understanding of the emotions that motivate them, so what should be mundane imagery comes across as foreign and strange: "You got a face with a view," he offers as a compliment, then adds, "I’m just an animal looking for a home." Yet, the song is so well-observed, so wide-eyed and naïve that it never comes across like a parody of marriage and commitment. Instead, that alien sounds like he might envy us humans and our needs. This must be the place, indeed.
On Sam Beam and Ben Bridwell’s rendition of the song, which opens their new joint covers album, they remove all ambiguity and alienness from the original. The setting is folksy, with an acoustic guitar, a gentle percussive thrum, and Beam’s yearning vocals replacing the original’s burbles of Afropop percussion. The main character is no longer an outsider looking in on humanity, but an insider looking outward. It’s as straightforward a cover as you could imagine, removing a layer of meaning from the original, and you know what? It actually works. Maybe it’s the upbeat tempo and the jumpy guitar licks, which evoke a certain kind of domestic contentment. Or maybe it’s the way Beam sounds like a dude trying to say something just beyond his range of expression, without resorting to pop-song clichés: kiss, desire, love, marriage, life. In their reading, the song becomes a testament to the impossibility of saying anything new, even if the vividness of emotion is endlessly renewable. And here’s the catch: Beam and Bridwell aren’t bemoaning those creative limitations, but celebrating the overwhelming complexities of simple human connection.
Presumably, the album sprung from this particular cover, which also serves as the source of its title: Sing Into My Mouth. But none of the 11 songs that follow sounds quite so well conceived or executed; nothing is nearly as daring in its interpretation. There are moments when the project brings out the best in both Beam and Bridwell, whose day-job acts have been on a run of ho-hum albums for several years now. Without the reverb of early Band of Horses, Bridwell sounds particularly animated on Ronnie Lane’s "Done This One Before" and especially on Cale’s "You Know Me More Than I Know", which features some of his most robust vocals—to the point where he’s unrecognizable. Likewise, Beam has a set of strictly structured songs to rein in some of the more elaborate arrangements that have dogged recent Iron & Wine albums. It suits him well on Sade’s "Bulletproof Soul", with its barroom noir ambience and side-scrolling pace. It’s not hard to imagine Sing Into My Mouth pointing the way forward for both artists.
And yet, Sing Into My Mouth is never quite the sum of its most interesting moments, mostly because there seem to be just as many clumsy or complacent moments. Beam’s take on El Perro del Mar’s signature "God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)" sacrifices the rhythmic thrust of the original as well as its essential melancholy, which leaves him with nothing beyond an awkward, even ugly vocal melody. And somehow Bridwell manages to make "There's No Way Out of Here", penned by David Gilmour but originally recorded by Unicorn, sound as pallid and dippy as America. As ungainly as these covers are, at least they stand out. Too many of these songs strike the same tone of beery introversion and chummy camaraderie—both of which could be defining aspects of the pejorative genre known as bro rock. It’s an odd flaw considering the diversity of the source material. It’s not surprising to hear them tackle Bonnie Raitt, JJ Cale, or the Marshall Tucker Band, but it’s a bit more of a stretch to hear them apply their voices and laidback sports-bar folk-rock to Sade, Spiritualized, and the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series.
What works so well for "This Must Be the Place" has a flattening effect on these other selections. Instead of opening up new possibilities in the originals, Beam and Bridwell unwittingly demonstrate how limited certain songs can be and therefore how unsatisfying certain covers can sound. Essentially they have taken tunes from a wide variety of genres and rendered them all as blah folk rock. Or, to take a page from the bottles on the album cover: They’ve taken a flight of regional microbrews and made them all taste like PBR.
