"Once In A Lifetime" by Talking Heads, from the album "Remain In Light" (1980).* Written by David Byrne, Phoebe Esprit, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, Christopher Frantz, Brian Peter George Eno and Ronald Amanze. Lyrics source:
Musixmatch. "Once In A Lifetime" lyrics © WB Music Corp., MCA Music Ltd., E.G. Music Ltd., Index Music Inc., Universal/MCA Music Ltd., Universal Music MGB Ltd., Hanseatic Musikverlag Gmbh, WC Music Corp., Status One Music, Index Music, Inc., Wolfsheim Musikverlag Peter Heppner Und Markus Reinhardt GBR. Watch the Official Music Video
here.
*This song deals with the futility of not being happy with the things you have. Like trying to remove the water at the bottom of the ocean, there's no way to stop life from moving on. The forces of nature (like the ocean) keep you moving almost without your conscious effort - like a ventriloquist moving a puppet. David Byrne shed some light on his lyrical inspiration when he told
Time Out: "Most of the words in 'Once in a Lifetime' come from evangelists I recorded off the radio while taking notes and picking up phrases I thought were interesting directions. Maybe I'm fascinated with the middle class because it seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can't imagine living like that." Some of these evangelist recordings also made their way to a 1981 album called
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by David Byrne and Brian Eno. This stalled at #103 in February 1981, but when MTV launched that August, they played the video a lot, giving the song much more exposure.
David Byrne's choreography in the video was done by the Toni Basil, who had a hit as a singer with "Mickey." It was a very odd video, and for many viewers it was the first look they got at the Talking Heads (or at least Byrne - the full band didn't appear in a video until "Burning Down The House" two years later).
As you watch David Byrne spasm like a malfunctioning robot interspersed with gesturing in Martian sign language, ponder this excerpt from the book
MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, in which Toni Basil fills in some details about the choreography for this video: "He [Byrne] wanted to research movement, but he wanted to research movement more as an actor, as does David Bowie, as does Mick Jagger. They come to movement in another way, not as a trained dancer. Or not really interested in dance steps. He wanted to research people in trances - different trances in church and different trances with snakes. So we went over to UCLA and USC, and we viewed a lot of footage of documentaries on that subject. And then he took the ideas, and he 'physicalized' the ideas from these documentary-style films."
Basil adds: "When I was making videos - whether it was with Devo, David Byrne, or whoever - there wasn't record companies breathing down anybody's neck, telling them what to do, what the video should look like. There was no paranoid A&R guy, no crazy dresser that would come in and decide what people should be wearing, and put them in shoes that they can't walk in, everybody with their own agenda. We were all on our own."
Some critics have suggested that "Once In A Lifetime" is a kind of prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s. David Byrne says they're wrong; that the lyric is pretty much about what it says it's about. In an interview with NPR, Byrne said: "We're largely unconscious. You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'"
Brian Eno produced this song and wrote the chorus, which he also sang on. David Byrne wrote the verses, which he talk/sings in an intriguing narrative style. "Remain In Light" was the fourth Talking Heads album, and the third produced by Eno, whose artistic bent and flair for the unusual were a great fit for the group.
Unlike their previous album, the songs on "Remain In Light" were mostly written in the studio (Compass Point, the Bahamas) and all credited to the four band members plus Eno.
(Knowledge courtesy of Songfacts.com)
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