Richard and Linda Thompson
“A Heart Needs a Home”
1975
The story goes that when the Thompson’s were halfway into the recording of their second album, Hokey Pokey, Richard was struck by some form of emotional crisis. The despair that filled so much of his music had overtaken him, and he felt that it was pointless to go on. The songs he’d written for Hokey Pokey were full of people engaging in random, frantic, meaningless activity, taking their pleasures in the earthly and ignoring the spiritual, looking for anything to fill the holes in their lives. Thompson, by all accounts, was beginning to feel the same way about his music. It was about this time that he and Linda attended a performance by a group of Islamic musicians. Thompson was entranced by the music, and speaking to the musicians afterwords, was equally entranced with their beliefs, founded in Sufism, the most artistically and intellectually open-minded of the Islamic sects. Shortly thereafter, Thompson converted to Islam and, rejuvenated, returned to work on Hokey Pokey. The first song he wrote after his conversion was “A Heart Needs a Home”, a prayer to Allah that, like much Islamic devotional music, took the form of a love song.
That’s the story, anyway. The reality is probably somewhat different (Thompson now says he’d been reading up on Sufism for a couple of years beforehand, so you can’t say that his conversion came as a bolt out of the blue), but the result is the same: one of the most stunningly beautiful songs ever written. I tend to prefer the live versions that have been released, partly because that’s how I first heard it (on Richard’s (guitar/vocal) compilation), and partly because the studio version is a little too heavily arranged. The song doesn’t need decoration, it stands up perfectly on its own—especially when Linda is singing it.