‘Once In A Lifetime’: The weirdest song of David Byrne’s career
Cultural familiarity can make even the most baffling things make sense. Think about the first time you heard the singing voice of Bob Dylan, or listened to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ the whole way through. Everything about Star Wars is intensely, almost defiantly, weird until you consider that most of us have been familiar with The Skywalker Saga since before we could talk. Thus, we get the curious case of arguably the single most popular song that David Byrne ever wrote.
It may sound strange to say that ‘Once In A Lifetime’ is the weirdest song in the back catalogue of one of the most esoteric and eccentric musicians to ever reach the level of national treasure. In a vacuum, I’m almost certain it’s not. I’m sure you could dig out a Talking Heads B-side or an offcut from a solo album of his from the 1990s. The kind that might feature him singing operatic arias about the joys of clapping over a hook sampled from the mating call of the yellow-throated toucan.
In a strange way, I find that less weird than ‘Once In A Lifetime’. Of course, the contents of some lesser-spotted rarity would be strange and off-putting. That’s the easy way out. The drawing board where you can experiment with new sounds, where only your die-hard fans can find them, ready to prep them for mainstream consumption if they work and pretend they never happened if they don’t. As you might have guessed, with a band like the Talking Heads and an artist like David Byrne, they never took the easy way out.
That’s when you get a song like ‘Once In A Lifetime’. A song so omnipresent that we forget just how baffling it is. The sheer statement of intent was not only to make this a single from an album whose intention was to break the Talking Heads into the mainstream, but the lead single to boot, makes sense in hindsight. After all, it is built around a deathless hook, but look at it without the benefit of familiarity and you’ll see something genuinely boundary pushing.
What makes this David Byrne classic so strange?
The single they chose to catapult Talking Heads to stardom was one where a post-punk band got their stiffly endearing brand of white boy funk on. All the while, a discordant, trickling keyboard line floats in the background, sounding for all the world like an errant windchime in a soft breeze. The backing isn’t what makes the song so great or so strange. There could be many pop hits made out of Tina Weymouth‘s blissfully simple bass line. No, what really sets this apart is everything David Byrne does in the song.
Yes, this was a breakout hit where the singer is mainly delivering his lyrics as a spoken word poem, evoking the preachers of the day in his passionate, yet controlled delivery. The history of spoken-word pop hits is vanishingly thin on the ground, as you can expect, with a few novelty hits popping up from the 1940s to the 1960s, mainly provided by radio DJs and other people who would already be familiar with a person’s speaking voice specifically.
Not so here. Byrne was the lead singer of an up-and-coming indie band who might as well have been an unknown even to the larger post-punk scene at hand. Then, there’s what Byrne is speaking about. The vast majority of those spoken word pop hits have been right-wing dreck like newsman Victor Lundberg’s genuinely humiliating 1967 hit ‘An Open Letter To My Teenage Son’. Shameful works of audience-baiting that shrewdly prey on the pressure points of middle America to sell records from outrage, the way that the like of ‘Try That In A Small Town’ do today.
David Byrne couldn’t be further from that. Actively commenting on the Reagan-era, “Greed is Good” culture by inhabiting a man surrounded by a life that he thought he wanted and being confused by it. Unable to see how he earned it and unsure whether he actually wants it now. This is a song that, in so many ways, couldn’t have gone against the culture it was created in more, and yet it’s one of the most beloved songs David Byrne ever made.
Truly weird. Truly wonderful. Could anything be more David Byrne?
