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This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Music critic Malcolm Jack wrote this about the band The Talking Head Sung Once in a Lifetime. Quote, It's a thing of dizzying power, beauty, and mystery.
sounds like nothing else in the history of pop. Musician Travis Morrison selected Once in a Lifetime as a perfect song, saying, quote, the lyrics are astounding, they are meaningless and totally meaningful at the same time. That's as good as rock lyrics get. Here's Greg Hengler with the story of the Talking Head song. Once in a lifetime.
In 1973, two Rhode Island art students, David Byrne and Chris France, formed a band named the Artistics. Here's David Byrne. I was in a band with Chris the drummer for a while. And we sort of drifted into New York and and then thought we'd Have a s a serious try at a band. Unable to find another band member in New York, they convinced Chris's girlfriend and future wife.
Tina Weymouth to learn how to play the bass guitar and enlisted her into the band. With David on guitar and vocals and Chris on drums, the three played their first show as the Talking Heads in 1975, opening for the Ramones at CBG's. The epicenter of New York punk rock. In late 76, Thire Records founder Seymour Stein stumbled onto one of their shows. Here's Seymour Stein.
I went down at CB's and I'm standing out there and all of a sudden I hear, when my love stands next to your love, you know, and I said, what is this? This music was so hypnotic. I was being sucked into the room. Then I ran up after they were over. They had no crew, they had nothing.
And I helped Tina, this beautiful young girl. you know, take the the the s stuff off the stage. I said. You have to be on my label. During a tour in London in nineteen seventy seven.
The talking heads met Brian Eno. who would go on to produce their next three albums. Eno's production resulted in tighter and funkier songs. One such song included an eyebrow-raising cover of Al Green's Take Me to the River. which became their first top 30 hit in the US.
Then, in October 1980, the Talking Heads released their fourth and most popular studio album, Remain in Light. Their ability to mix punk ideas with funk and world music, along with their general weirdness and unique social commentary, was unparalleled. And despite how strange their music was at times, they were able to create pop hooks that turned into earworms that stuck in your head for days. The one song that best pulls all this together is Once in a Lifetime. Inspired by Afrobeat legend Felakuti, the band drew inspiration from their song iZimbra off their first album.
Fear of music. Not cheap. Maybe it's fine. With that funky foundation, they came up with a number of concepts and songs during their jam sessions. One of their unfinished grooves, working titled Right Start, would become the groundwork for Once in a Lifetime.
The music is a different variation from the final piece, but you can hear Tina Weymouth's bass rift. Which is the heart of once in a lifetime in it. Clear as day. Weymouth says the bass line was conceived by her husband and drummer Chris France during one of their jam sessions. I went up and I picked up the bass and you were yelling in your corner and I couldn't quite hear what you were saying, but you were yelling something at me.
And uh and I thought you were saying Ba-dom-bum bump, bum bum bump. And as soon as I started doing that, you said, that's more like it. After weeks of jamming, David Byrne and producer Brian Eno came into the studio to start adding arrangements and lyrics to the musical pieces.
However, when Eno approached the piece, he started counting it differently than the band. Here's Brian Eno. I immediately misheard it and I still mishear it to this day and I I always think the one of the bar is in a different place from from them. This created a kind of dissonance and syncopation with his phrasing and Eno leaned into it. He'd encourage one musician to hear it his way.
while he'd let another hear it the band's way. This misheard counting became a key part of the song. It makes the music feel off-kilter and strange. But the same thing that gives a song its musical strength. also makes it difficult to write to.
Eno nearly scrapped the track entirely, but Byrne insisted that he could find lyrics that would work. Byrne's determination eventually led to a breakthrough for Eno, who wrote the classic call-in-response chorus melody. Letting the days go by. Let the water hold me up. Letting the days go by.
Water flowing underground. Into the blue again. After the fun is gone, once in a lifetime. Water flowing underground. Here's David Byrne and Brian Eno.
Brian Eno had an idea for a vocal melody for the chorus. And he sang it as both of us were doing at the time. We would s if we had an idea for a melody, we would just sing nonsense syllables. Da la da di da da di duda di da di duti da. Like that.
So I I had some sense of the Melody in the syllabic content of Of that thing. The way I always write my own songs, actually, I always start from. syllables and rhythms and what sort of vowel sounds I'd like there to be. The band listened to Byrne's lyrics and thought it sounded like a preacher speaking to his congregation.
So Byrne channeled this in his lyrics and delivery. Here's Bern. For this last record, I got a lot of ideas from listening to evangelists on the radio here. He employed the common device preachers use of repeating the same phrase at the beginning of each sentence. Byrne's repetition of the phrases, you may find yourself Or you may ask yourself Were, as Burns says, straight lifts from a radio preacher he was listening to.
And you may find yourself Living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house. With a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself Well How did I get here? All these factors stitched together created a trans-like state of routine existence. Here's burn. We're largely unconscious. We you know, we operate Half awake.
or on on autopilot. And end up what whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else and we haven't really st stopped to ask ourselves, how did I get here? Once in a Lifetime was released on February 2, 1981. just six months before MTV first hit airwaves. With limited music videos to choose from, Once in a Lifetime became a staple for the channel in its early years.
And this play helped the song gain some much-deserved recognition that would later become imitation by the likes of television shows like The Simpsons. Kent Brockman, everybody. And you may ask yourself, how do I work this? And you may ask yourself, where is that large Ben Tom Hanks? And you may find yourself.
Without a beautiful house? without a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself...
Well How did I get here? Kermit the Frog. Letting the days go by. Letting the water hold me down. Letting the day.
And even a guy who had an incredible amount of time on his hands and crafted a video cover of Once in a Lifetime by sampling President Trump's own words. You may ask yourself. What is that beautiful house? Can we ask yourself, where does that show you? Maybe that's yourself.
Am I wrong? And you may say to God yourself, my God, what have I done? Today, Once in a Lifetime is known as one of the finest works of this legendary band, the song is the symphonic embodiment of all that the Talking Heads were. It's cutting edge. It's strange.
and it's utterly brilliant. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Engler. And a terrific job on just bringing us back in time to a song that many of us, most of us, know. but didn't know how it came to be hearing those tracks picked apart. It was just joy.
And then there were those great outtakes which you got to hear and where he got them from, the source of the inspiration, the televangelist that he just, well, learned a lot from and then applied it to his heart and to a song. The story of Once in a Lifetime here on Our American Stories. Hey Donald, we're really flying on that treadmill. I'm trying to run as fast as T-Mobile 5G home internet, Zach.
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Mm-hmm.
