“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads

"Once in a Lifetime" was the first single Sire pulled from Remain in Light, Talking Heads' fourth album (1980), and it plays less like a rock song than like a trance. Brian Eno produced it with the band and shares the writing credit with David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth, and the song grew out of jams inspired by Afrobeat players such as Fela Kuti. Weymouth's bass and Frantz's drums lock into one hypnotic groove that never lets up, Harrison's keyboards shimmer overhead, and Eno and Nona Hendryx add backing vocals.

Byrne sings it like a preacher in mid-sermon, which is exactly what he was going for, and the words circle an existential crisis, a man adrift in his own life and his own unconscious. In the video, which he directed with Toni Basil, he jerks and twitches like a man possessed in front of footage of religious rituals.

It kept coming back. A live take from Stop Making Sense, the 1984 concert film, made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986, and the UK certified it platinum in 2023. NPR put it among the 100 American pieces of music that mattered most in the 20th century, it made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's roll call of 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, and Rolling Stone ranked it number 28 on its 2021 greatest-songs list, with the video at 81.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.