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Post by pieter on Dec 8, 2017 14:48:39 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 8, 2017 14:50:15 GMT -7
The original which I was fond of as a teenager
Love this live version of 1983
"Once in a Lifetime" is a song by new wave band Talking Heads. It was released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, Remain in Light (1980), on February 2, 1981 through Sire Records. The song was written by David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth, and produced by Brian Eno. It was named one of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century by National Public Radio and is also included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
Background and production
The creation of the sound
Brian Eno introduced Fela Kuti's multiple rhythm music style to the band, and during production, Eno used a different rhythm count for some members of the group than others, starting on the "3" instead of the "1." It gave the song what Eno called "a funny balance within it. It has really two centers of gravity: their '1' and my '1.'" This rhythm imbalance was exaggerated in the studio, and is present throughout the song. Jerry Harrison developed the synthesizer line and added the Hammond organ climax, taken from the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On".
As the song essentially consisted of a repetitive two-bar groove (with the pattern reversed between the verse and chorus), Eno decided to approach the production by allowing each of the band members to record overdubs of different rhythmic and musical ideas independently of each other, with each member being kept blind to what the others had recorded on tape. In the final mix, Eno faded between these independent ideas at different parts of the song. This is very much in keeping with his production technique of Oblique Strategies.
Lyrics
At first, Eno sang nonsense verb sound blocks, which Byrne then converted into lyrics in the "call-and-response" style of American radio evangelists on the theme of moving through life with little awareness or questioning. On the way he spoke them, Byrne has said: "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 onto the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Byrne and Eno.
This speaking style was also the basis for his approach of starting several consecutive lines with the same phrases "And you may find yourself ...", and with the chorus singing in part "letting the days go by, let the water hold me down," the song presents an existential mood to it. According to AllMusic critic Steve Huey, one of the main themes of the lyrics is "the drudgery of living life according to social expectations, and pursuing commonly accepted trophies (a large automobile, beautiful house, beautiful wife)." Although the singer has these trophies, he begins to question whether they are real and how he got them. This leads him to question further the reality of his very life, providing the existential element.
Eno was not particularly fond of the song, and it was almost dropped from the album before he came up with the vocal melody for the chorus, which "saved" it.
The song contains extensive repetition of the phrase "Same as it ever was". The phrase was later used as the title of a 2009 Talking Heads compilation album (and a 1994 album by House of Pain).
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