"Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads

Kirk Hamilton (0:01)

The sequential Prophet 5 synthesizer was designed in 1977 by Dave Smith and John Bowen, and it remains sought after even today. But when they say that the music industry has long been too Prophet motivated, I only wish they were talking about the synthesizer. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad you've joined me to talk about music made by Prophet 5, music made with an Oberheim OBX, a Mo grandmother, a Juno 6 or maybe a DX7. Strong Songs is entirely listener supported, and if you help out and back the show on Patreon, you'll get early access to episodes, monthly bonus episodes on each song I cover, and really you'll just be making it possible for me to keep making this show. I really, really appreciate everyone who supports the Patreon. And speaking of the Patreon, on this episode, our second helping season continues as we return to a band that the Patrons chose for me to revisit this season. This is a beautiful song with layers of possible meanings, so let's plug in the Prophet, put on our glasses, and spread the word.

I am fascinated by the role of repetition in music. It's an essential aspect of music from the nitty-gritty, measure-to-measure construction of a song all the way out to the looping, repeating chain of musical inspiration that connects each generation to the last. Every piece of music involves some form of repetition. Verses repeat with new lyrics, choruses repeat with new textures, and whole songs repeat on a playlist, accompanying us day to day, even as our routines may change. What starts as a loop repeats and becomes something more.

All our lives were carried by repetition. We drift on our routines and habits, moving as if by water. We do this thing, and then that thing. Finish this project, and then that one. And eventually we look back and take stock of where we're standing. Maybe we haven't even gone that far. Or maybe we've ventured so far into uncharted waters that we can't even see where we started. And in those moments we ask ourselves, where am I? What is this? My God, what have I done? In 1980, Talking Heads released Remain In Light, an album that was evidently, manifestly something new. In the decades since its release, this album, and one song from it in particular, has remained with us.

Running on a loop in the back of our collective subconscious, year after year after year, asking questions that we're still asking today.

On this episode, I am thrilled to be taking a deeper look at Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime, a song that, like so many songs that I cover on this show, I thought I knew, and then I really learned it, and I realized I knew nothing. Same as it ever was, I guess.

Once in a Lifetime was written by Talking Heads in collaboration with producer Brian Eno for their 1980 album Remain In Light. It was the quartet's fourth studio album and was released at a point when they had already found some success, following on 1979's Fear of Music, which featured a favorite of mine, Life During Wartime. 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, which featured their widely loved cover of Al Green's Take Me to the River. Both of those records were also produced by Eno, who would return a third and final time to produce Remain In Light. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris France, and lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter David Byrne were always shifting and changing how they approached songwriting. And after Fear of Music, they realized that they wanted to take a more collaborative and improvisational approach to songwriting. As they worked on the music that would become Remain In Light, they began to explore working with looping sections, building grooves and musical ideas and repeating them, writing the trance and seeing what came of it. You can hear the beginnings of this approach in some of the songs on Fear of Music. In particular, the album's opening track, I Zimbra, which was, according to some members of the band, one of the songs they use as the basis for these new exploratory jams. At the same time as he had been working with Talking Heads, Brian Eno was spreading the word about an exciting new music he was hearing, coming out of Nigeria. That style was Afrobeat. As Afrobeat musicians, most notably the legendary Fela Kuti, repurposed African-American soul and funk music into something new.

Fela's songs were longer. They embraced repetition. They were trance-inducing, fearless, and politically revolutionary. This was a music speaking directly to the young people of Nigeria in the years following the end of British colonial rule. But it would prove to also be a music that spoke to people around the world.