Once In A Lifetime

Posted byEthan 15 Comments on Once In A Lifetime

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 layers. 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 drums have a lot of delay on them, turning the eight note groove that Chris Frantz played into a sixteenth note groove. Some of the guitar and keyboard tracks are noticeably out of tune with each other. I suspect that things were recorded at slightly different speeds? I remember reading that stuff was sped up in the mixing stage for greater anxiety. Certainly David Byrne’s voice was sped up; compare the timbre on the studio version to the live versions from the same time.

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.

Here’s my best effort at transcribing the song. There’s a lot of sonic nuance that can’t be captured here, but at least it gives you an idea of the notes involved. To get the pitches of the speak-singing parts, I put Auto-Tune on the lead vocal and wrote down what it gave me.

Here’s a radial MIDI visualization of the chorus:

Here’s the bridge:

I enjoy seeing the symmetries and asymmetries of the grooves represented this way.

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 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. Here’s a Twitter account that algorithmically generates new lyrics:

Since writing this blog post, I keep seeing books whose titles reference the song.

“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. It takes courage to commit your unfiltered intuition to tape, but it really does work for making art that reaches people.

15 replies on “Once In A Lifetime”

    1. My understanding is that Jerry Harrison is playing those on distorted organ. But it’s unclear. Maybe Jerry Harrison came up with the riff in the original jam, but Adrian Belew played it on the final recording?

  2. Thanks for this! What a great song, what a great album.

    Are the stems available for the whole album? I learned a lot from the two MLITBOG tracks that were available as stems for remixing from the remaster/reissue. I think it’s amazing all those songs are essentially loops of a few bars for the whole track and the verse and chorus are differentiated by which loops and melodic parts are “on” and off. It is hypnotic and gets better with every listen.

    And Tina Weymouth is a national treasure. Between Eno , Byrne, Busta Jones, whoever else, her playing is the rock of that whole band on album after album.

    1. The only stems I have been able to find are for “Once In A Lifetime” and “Psycho Killer.” They aren’t official releases, they were probably ripped from the Rock Band games. But yeah, those MLITBOG stems are pretty extraordinary and revelatory.

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  4. I have loved this song for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never stopped to think about why. Thank you for writing this and reintroducing me to this masterpiece.

  5. Man, I would love to hear those stems! It’s significant to me that you note how loose the timekeeping is. I think we’ve all become so accustomed to the grid in digital recording to the point that we forget how loose, off-time elements can make a track sound funkier.
    There was a period where I decided to learn the bass lines of some classic Fela songs and play along with the recordings. It’s a real mental and physical exercise to try and lock in and play a static bass line for 10, 20, 30 minutes. The thing I really learned with that is that over the course of the song, the time moves around a lot! I’ve always loved how Tina’s bass line didn’t change throughout the song, but I didn’t really understand why until I learned those Fela lines. If anything, I think she understood how to play in that quasi-Afropop style better than anyone on that record.

  6. Another performance you might like is this one from a Byrne concert in Zagreb in 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI9C51rCPlo&t=4590s

    The treatment of the verses is a lot more stripped down than in most performances, but it still really works. (Along with the few-sentence intro which doesn’t sound improvised, but doesn’t feature even in other performances from the same tour.)

  7. What a song. You didn’t even mention the most interesting thing (to me), which is the way the chorus half-pretends that the downbeat has shifted out of phase. I wrote about it at https://dfan.org/blog/2014/06/30/once-in-a-lifetime-and-the-case-of-the-mysterious-shifting-downbeat/ and I see that Eno mentions it in that Uncut article. (The fact that you didn’t mention it leads me to assume that you’re one of the people who always heard it as 4/4 all the way through.)

    It’s interesting that you say it’s in D Mixolydian. I don’t hear any sevenths, even implied ones, until the coda, which is definitely Mixolydian. I actually think that the lack of that seventh until then is part of what keeps the song sounding so bright and burbly. But if I did have to put a seventh in there, I would use a major one. Imagine a harmony vocal under “letting the days go by”: would you sing D-D-D-C-D-D or D-D-D-C#-D-D? Similarly, if I had to put a dominant chord under “down” in “let the water hold me down”, I’d play an A, not an Am.

    1. Yeah, I thought about mentioning it, but whatever Eno might have been hearing, the final song does seem to pretty unambiguously follow the band’s hearing. I do think it’s significant that Eno tried to browbeat Tina Weymouth into leaving the first note off the bassline; he had a point there, it is very cool without it.

      You’re right, the tune does studiously avoid the seventh until the very end. If I had to sing a vocal harmony, I would stick to D major pentatonic plus the fourth, which is what the various Talking Heads and David Byrne backup singers do. But when people melodicize the verses, like Angélique Kidjo and PM Dawn, they use Mixolydian. I hear the leading tone as sounding pretty weird in the tune, in a chord or by itself, just because of the conventions of this kind of groove. But it’s ambiguous enough that I have to recognize that Angélique Kidjo, PM Dawn and I are filling in a blank with our own sensibilities.

      1. Ah, I hadn’t listened to the covers yet! It is interesting to have those additional data points of how people hear it. After recently being exposed to Philip Tagg’s writing, my usual reaction of “Whatever the seventh is, they don’t play it, I wonder what it is?” is slowly ceding ground to “Their mode explicitly doesn’t have a seventh”.

        I still really have to make a conscious effort to hear the chorus the “right” way, after perceiving it the other way hundreds of times over the years. XTC’s “That Is the Way” is another song that I always thought had a hiccup going into and out of the chorus before I consciously worked it out.

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