Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads: Best. Song. Ever.

David Byrne solved the age-old problem: how can a mild-mannered white man have soul? His ingenious solution is to be his anxious and uptight self, all the way to the hilt. By not even attempting to act cool, D Byrne becomes cooler than any other jive turkey in history. It's the same strategy that gives Max Fischer, Jon Stewart and Napoleon Dynamite their particular zazz. Watch Stop Making Sense and you can't help but be affected by Talking Heads' state of ecstatic transport. D Byrne may not take the same route to his body-centered present-moment awareness as a pentecostal preacher or James Brown, but he's aiming for the same inner state. Once In A Lifetime is the most transporting of many transporting Talking Heads songs, and would go on my short list for best songs by anyone, ever.

studio - Remain In Light

live - The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads

live - Stop Making Sense

The first half-second of the album version is an electronic-sounding 'Voommm!' falling right into the full-on groove, layers of percussion and keyboards and guitars swirling around the central bassline. Here's the bassline in its entirety, a four-bar cell that repeats identically under the entire song:

Rock and pop are all about simplicity and repetition, and this line pushes both qualities as far as they can go. D Byrne et al are well-known for their love of African music, especially modernists like Fela Kuti. Check these epics out:

Confusion pts 1 & 2

No Talking Heads idea shows Fela's musical influence more strongly than OIAL's bass part. What D Byrne learned from Fela is that once you have a good groove happening, people will never get bored of it. Three and a half minutes is barely enough of Once In A Lifetime. On Stop Making Sense, it's five and a half minutes, and on the highly-recommended The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, it's six minutes. It could be forty-six, as far as I'm concerned; it's one of those grooves, like

Chameleon

or

Sex Machine

or

Superstition

that could carry you along as far out as you'd care to go. See also late-period John Coltrane and the Grateful Dead's better performances of Dark Star.

Once In A Lifetime's harmony also has a Fela-like minimalism: the entire song is pretty much just difference voicings of D7sus4. As with the bassline, you're not bored of D7sus4 by the end, any more than you're bored of the sruti box drone during a Ravi Shankar concert. OIAL's structure has verses, choruses and a bridge, like a normal pop song, but the sections barely differ from one another. Each is a sixteen-bar loop of the bass cell under D7sus4. Different combinations of instruments mute and unmute to distinguish a verse from a chorus or bridge. This kind of song structure was radically weird by US pop standards in 1980. Now it's the boilerplate industry standard in hip-hop and other computer musics, and it's rapidly expanding outwards into every world pop music culture from there.

OIAL was 'written' mostly by improvisation in the studio, followed by many hours editing tape together. The band recorded a long, simple, repetitive groove, and you can think of the finished product as the jam's highlight reel. Using improvisation as the basis for songwriting is nothing new; Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman routinely copped improvised licks from their sidemen and incorporated them into their tunes, and some of Miles Davis' best albums are built entirely from edited improvisations by his band. But piecing together songs out of improvisation at the level of single phrases was a radical experiment in 1980. As with the hypersimple song form, OIAL's composition process has become the norm in hip-hop and electronica, and is rapidly coevolving with software like Pro Tools and Reason. Building songs out of live improvisation means your song is 'composed' at its most fundamental level by people focused in the moment, their usual self-consciousness temporarily dissolved. This is the kind of brain state in which people have their best ideas. Who knows which bandmember thought up the OIAL bassline, but I'll guarantee you that they never would have arrived at it sitting alone in a room with a pencil and paper.

Byrne, Eno et al also used technology to change Once In A Lifetime's tempo before adding the vocals. This was yet another radical step back then, and once again, has since become a ubiquitous pop-music practice. D Byrne ran the tape of the band playing sped up while he did his vocals, and the finished product is the sped-up one. It means that the band played their original tracks twenty percent slower than what you're hearing, so they were that much more relaxed and in the groove.

And how about those lyrics? Words are usually the least important part of a song, treated by some of the best composers as an afterthought, like Duke Ellington and the Beatles, and by others as a non-issue, like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. Musicians who focus primarily on verbal communication, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, tend not to engage the body much from the neck down. D Byrne's lyrics, at least during the Talking Heads era, were semi-improvised, designed not by his verbal consciousness but by the combination of his nonconscious mind and random chance. As with the instrumental parts, the finished product was edited together from various very loose performances. Edited vocal freestyling is the basis of hip-hop and is slowly becoming a more accepted practice elsewhere. Talking Heads lyrics, goofy and asymmetric though they may be, always have strong body logic, and they feel exceptionally good when sung, or spoken, or exuberantly yelped.

Verse one:

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself: Well...how did I get here?

The chorus:

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Verse two:

You may ask yourself
How do I work this?
You may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

The chorus again, then the bridge:

Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was

Verse three:

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean

The last line is pretty much obliterated by tape loops of itself. Then we have the chorus again, and then the last verse:

You may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
You may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
You may say to yourself
My god!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Chorus, chorus, bridge over the chorus sung half speed, groove out for however long.

What does any of it mean? It could be gibberish, or it could be a deep and profound statement about the existential crisis facing modern humans, or a zen koan, or a bunch of inside jokes between D Byrne and himself. I think what makes the song so cool is that it works equally well on any of those levels. OIAL is a piece of abstract, conceptual modern art, but it's totally accessible, and it raises the question: why can't all modern art be fun? Why should highbrow culture involve boredom and suffering? Isn't there enough boredom and suffering in the world already? I say, modern artists, follow Talking Heads' example: get to work making us things we can use.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top