It's very up and, like, looking out to the world and saying, 'What a fantastic place we live in. "It had all been done," Eno says, "and the only thing left worth doing was some sort of urban pessimism of some kind, and that record is terribly optimistic in a way. "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?' "Įno says the album still stands out as an antidote to the jaded attitudes that dominated the pop world in the 1970s. Byrne says they're wrong that the lyric is pretty much about what it says it's about. Some critics have suggested that "Once in a Lifetime" is a kind of prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s. To Byrne, Talking Heads' members were human samplers. Now, producers call it "sampling" and "looping," and they tend to do it with computers. The process of picking a good bit and repeating it is an essential element of rap music. Singer David Byrne says that somebody probably noticed that bass riff as they were listening back to one of the tapes of the sessions. Nobody is totally clear on when "Once in a Lifetime" emerged, but Tina Weymouth told drummer Chris Frantz, her husband, that she thinks he actually wrote the bass riff that's the heart of the song during one of their jam sessions. They'd try to spontaneously create the kind of grooves that are the foundation of Kuti's music and capture that creative process on tape. "I thought that was just the most exciting music going on at the time."īrian Eno and Talking Heads decided that the way to get to that future was to ditch their old technique of writing songs and then recording them, and replace it with improvisation in the studio. "The first time I ever met Talking Heads, I played them a record by Fela Kuti, the African-Nigerian musician who'd invented that thing called Afro-beat," Eno says. Meanwhile, Brian Eno, who'd been the band's producer for two years, had turned his attention to Africa. Recordings Used: Once in a Lifetime, The Talking Heads "It influenced us in different ways to realize that things were shifting."Īrtist: Words/music by David Byrne, Brian Eno, the Talking Heads "Just the year before, there had been the beginnings of hip-hop," bass player Tina Weymouth says. But, as they were getting ready to make Remain in Light, their fourth album, the group realized that pop music was changing. Granted, its members were quirky, but like most other bands, they'd write and arrange their songs before they went into the studio to record them. Until 1979, Talking Heads was pretty much a normal pop band. NPR's Rick Karr prepared this history and anatomy of "Once in a Lifetime." The record, which sold modestly, contained the song "Once in a Lifetime," which is one of The NPR 100, our list of the most important pieces of American music of the 20th century. In 1980, Talking Heads released "Remain in Light," the band's last collaboration with producer Brian Eno. "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads (from "Stop Making Sense") "It's Alright" by Jay-Z, 1998 (features a sample of "Once in a Lifetime")
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