Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world:
Here’s a red-hot live version from The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads:
Here’s the even more outrageous live version from Stop Making Sense. The choreography, lighting, cinematography and editing are so dazzling that it’s easy to lose sight of what a stupendous musical performance it is; you kind of have to listen to it without the visuals for it to register on that level.
The version from David Byrne’s American Utopia is pretty delightful too. I love the mammoth percussion section:
In this NPR segment about the songwriting process, Brian Eno says that the first time he met with Talking Heads, he played them a Fela Kuti record. Eno felt (correctly) that it was the most exciting music that anyone was making at the time, and he suggested that Talking Heads aim for a similar vibe by recording group jams in the studio and then shaping them into songs afterwards. Uncut Magazine has additional background:
It started as a Fela Kuti-style jam, one that you’ll find as a bonus track on the 2006 reissue entitled Right Start. Eno and the band – inspired by the methodology of Krautrockers Can and Miles Davis’ producer, Teo Macero – then set about ripping that jam session apart, recreating the groove, stripping out certain instruments and superimposing numerous other melodic and rhythmic ideas upon that basic template.
Here’s the rough draft:
In the Uncut interview, David Byrne says:
Most of the tracks on Remain In Light were based around jams. We’d listen to the tapes, isolate the best bits, then learn how to play them over and over again. It was exactly what producers do these days with loops and samplers and sequencers. We were human samplers!
Brian Eno:
The idea for the chorus melody was mine – I started singing a wordless riff over the top of the bassline. “Doo-de-doo-dd-dah”. But the lyrics were all David’s. It was an extension of the stuff we’d been researching for My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. For that, we were listening to recordings of TV evangelists, preachers, the Islamic call to prayer, religious people getting into a trance. We were also fascinated by the way in which politicians and shock jocks spoke. It wasn’t the words they were saying, it was the feverish intensity with which they were delivered. It suggests that people only really enter that intense spirit when they’re talking about religion or politics!
What’s fantastic about David’s lyrics is that he’s using that blood-and-thunder intonation of the preacher, but his words are terribly optimistic. It’s saying what a fantastic place we live in, let’s celebrate it. That was a radical thing to do when everyone was so miserable and grey!
Tina Weymouth:
For that jam session, I remember that Brian and Jerry both played Prophet keyboards. Brian also played little percussion instruments, and Jerry moved between keyboards and guitar. David played a little R’n’B guitar part which was stripped out afterwards. Even the lovely Robert Palmer, who was in the studio with us that day, jammed with us on guitar and percussion. Encouraged by Chris, I came up with the bassline – it was a really dumb bass part, but I had to leave lots of space for the cacophony that surrounded me. I felt like I was pounding away like a carpenter, just nailing away to get it in the groove!
Robert Palmer! The “Addicted to Love” guy! Anyway, that bassline might be simple and repetitive, just the notes F-sharp and A, but there is nothing dumb about it. For one thing, it’s the third and fifth of the droning D7 chord. Tina Weymouth never plays the tonic! Then when the chords change to D, C and G at the end, she keeps playing the same F-sharp and A, both of which clash excitingly with those latter two chords. The whole thing is extremely hip.
Chris Frantz:
Jerry came up with that burbling synth sound, which really changed the mood, and then he used that fantastic, doomy organ sound towards the end. He said he always wanted to use the riff from The Velvet Underground’s What Goes On. It’s a “sample”, I guess.
Various web sources also say that Nona Hendryx sings backup and that Adrian Belew plays guitar, but if they do, I don’t hear them anywhere.
I got my hands on the multitrack stems, and listening to them is a weird experience. The mix seems much greater than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to aurally separate the various guitar and synth parts. David Byrne is singing along with the bassline in a strange doofy voice. I assume that Eno is the one plonking out arrhythmic synth notes. This is a very strange choice, and not one that I would have made, but it’s what makes the groove so off-kilter and unpredictable, and it’s probably the X factor that makes the whole thing fly. The timekeeping is remarkably loose throughout; it’s much tighter in the live versions.
Plenty of people have attempted to cover the song, but they rarely get at its ecstatic vibe. To my tastes, the most successful version is by Angélique Kidjo, from her mind-boggling album-length cover of Remain In Light.
I appreciate that she changes the groove and phrasing so much, the result feels more authentic to the spirit of the original than more literal adaptations usually do. And speaking of divergent covers, I have a special fondness for the PM Dawn version too, especially the melody that they write for Byrne’s spoken parts.
Mike Wofford’s solo jazz piano version combines it with an unrelated showtune of the same name. Very cool.
There are also a lot of remixes out there. I have two favorites. First, here’s Gigamesh’s take.
I also adore the Reflex Revision, which only uses sounds found in the original multitracks.
Ted Gioia says songs should ideally be at least ten minutes long. That is certainly true for “Once in a Lifetime.” When I saw David Byrne’s American Utopia, the song just about levitated the building off its foundations, but four and a half minutes was not nearly enough. I wish that David Byrne followed the example of Fela Kuti and played the song for more like half an hour. He could just keep improvising more verses in between long stretches of groove. I have had a very stressful few days worrying about my kids being murdered at school, and since I couldn’t focus on any work, I soothed my nerves by creating the ultimate stretched-out “Once in a Lifetime” groove, which combines all of the above versions of the song. Enjoy.
At one point in here, I screwed up the warping, and the time gets all weird for a few beats. I considered fixing it, but then figured that leaving it in there would be more true to the Brian Eno spirit. So that can be a fun little Easter egg.
I thought about transcribing the tune, but the transcribe-able parts are so simple that it’s hardly worth it, and all the really amazing parts can’t be notated. If you want to give it a try on your instrument, everything is in D Mixolydian. The textural ambience is the notes A, D and E. The guitar part mostly just arpeggiates D. There’s nothing difficult or complicated about any of it, but getting it to gel and cohere probably took a lot of hours. I have been chewing on the song for many years now, and I expect to keep chewing on it for many more.
But why is this song so good, anyway? It’s an incantation, it has dream logic, it’s a koan. It’s easy to make fun of, and many people have, including David Byrne himself during the opening minutes of American Utopia. Many people have searched for hidden meaning in the song, seeing critiques of capitalist conformity, Biblical imagery, a metaphor for schizophrenia, and much else. David Byrne himself has said that the lyrics don’t mean anything in particular, he just scat-sings a rhythm and then chooses phrases that fit the rhythm on an intuitive and unconscious basis. If the song did have a single unambiguous meaning, it would be easier to assimilate and forget about. It’s the impenetrable illogic of it that makes it such an endless source of fascination. “Once in a Lifetime” was not the Talking Heads’ biggest hit, or even one of their five biggest, but it’s the one that has saturated the collective unconscious the most deeply, and a hundred years from now, it’s probably the one that people will still be listening to.