Honey, I'm Home

In the "Self Interview" on the DVD of the concert film Stop Making Sense, Byrne states that it is a love song, a topic he tends to avoid because it is "kinda big." He also said of the song:

That's a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don't have any narrative qualities. It's a real honest kind of love song. I don't think I've ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a sort of reservation, or a twist. I tried to write one that wasn't corny, that didn't sound stupid or lame the way many do. I think I succeeded; I was pretty happy with that.

According to the Stop Making Sense commentary track, the title "Naive Melody" refers to the music. On the track, the guitar part and the bass part are doing the same thing throughout the whole song. According to David Byrne, many professional musicians would not play a song written in that fashion, and that is what makes the melody naive. Byrne played the lead keyboard solo.

Bassist Tina Weymouth stated in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads that the song was created through "truly naive" experimentation with different instruments and jamming. Weymouth played guitar, guitarist Jerry Harrison played a Prophet synthesiser (including the bassline) Wally Badarou used the same synthesizer to add the stabs, and Byrne switched between guitar and another Prophet synthesizer, the latter of which he played using the pitch modulation wheel and "campy" piano glissandos.