(Credits: Far Out / A24 / ABC Records)
Sat 27 December 2025 20:45, UK
As an art form, music is rightfully labelled as a subjective medium. One where there is no real right or wrong way to do anything, and the essence of its beauty is in its ability to emotionally connect.
However, there are some technical parameters that prevent it from being viewed solely as such, and it was bands like Steely Dan who ensured those values were upheld.
They were truly masters of the studio, who painstakingly eked out every possible moment in there to ensure they achieved as close to perfection as possible. This meant rapidly blasting through a catalogue of chords during any given verse, firing session guitar players at free will, and making even the virtuosic Mark Knopfler feel deeply inadequate in their presence.
Steely Dan had an acute understanding of music writing and simply weren’t afraid to let it be known, even to the likes of David Byrne, who, like Knopfler, had a premier level of musical experience that was well proven through Talking Heads’ myriad of textural music.
But nevertheless, when Byrne presented one of Talking Heads’ soon-to-be top hits, Steely Dan weren’t convinced and instead lent a rather backhanded piece of advice to the songwriter. While many critics ripped apart the elusive nature of the song’s lyrics on ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’, Steely Dan turned to the arrangement as Byrne revealed:
“I think one of the Steely Dan guys at one point was quoted as saying, ‘Your songs have one, maybe two chords. Maybe you might think about learning a few more.’”
The song did indeed have just three chords to it, and so to the fine-tuned ear of Steely Dan, it was likely a repetitive number. But it was wrapped up in something exciting and futuristic, thanks to its rhythm section and shimmering reverb.
Ultimately, though, it tapped into something that Steely Dan regularly missed through their dogged pursuit of musical perfection. That not all good music has to display a mind-bending amount of technical proficiency; instead, it’s about ideas being executed to their most faithful degree. And all it took was a simple look at the song’s title to understand that Byrne and co weren’t in the hunt for musical mastery, but instead an experiment to see how far they could take simplicity in a song.
He continued to explain, “That’s why we called it ‘Naive Melody’,” Byrne said. “We decided to experiment by playing not our usual instruments. I think I played the synthesizer, and I think Tina [Weymouth] played guitar. We thought, ‘Let’s see what happens if we all kind of move around and play something different.”
The result was something truly brilliant, and the test of time has gone on to prove that. Perhaps alongside ‘Psycho Killer’ and ‘Once In A Lifetime’, this song holds up as one of the band’s greatest of all time. Perhaps somewhere amidst the incessant firing of musicians and endless pursuit of tone, Steely Dan forgot that a great song isn’t measured in its chord quantity.
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