The Talking Heads song Tom Hanks considers a favourite
As entertainment industry members, movie stars often also have a keen interest in music. For the likes of Bruce Willis, Russell Crowe and Keanu Reeves, a passion for music has even led to fruitful side careers. While Tom Hanks can’t claim to have played in a touring band or cut a solo LP, he did appear in the music video for Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘I Really Like You’ and boasts a rather refined taste in music.
Like many of his generation, Hanks is a huge fan of The Beatles, but unlike many, he was actually a close friend of George Harrison in the 1990s. While visiting Fiji with his wife, Rita Wilson, to shoot Cast Away, the couple were joined by their friends George and Olivia Harrison. Following the Beatle’s death, Hanks joined Monty Python on stage at the memorial service to sing ‘The Lumberjack Song’.
During his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2016, Hanks selected some of his favourite tracks of all time, including his favourite by The Beatles. Although it wasn’t a Harrison composition, Hanks chose a rather special hidden gem in ‘There’s a Place’, the B-side to ‘Twist and Shout’.
Elsewhere among Hanks’ music selections was his favourite song by the New York new wave giants, Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’. Before selecting the classic Remain In Light hit, Hanks reflected on his marital life. Hanks married his first wife at 21 and was already a father at the time. Sadly, this young marriage ended just a few years later, but soon after, he met the love of his life, Wilson.
“You end up meeting that other person that you’re like, ‘She gets it’. I don’t think I’ll ever be lonely any more; that’s how I felt when I met my wife,” Hanks reflected thoughtfully. Introducing his next track, Hanks revealed that his first date with Wilson was going to the theatre to watch Talking Heads’ landmark concert film Stop Making Sense.
Around the same time as his Desert Island Discs interview, Hanks appeared in Tom Tykwer’s comedy-drama movie A Hologram for the King. As it happens, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ is also one of Tykwer’s all-time favourite songs, and the director decided to open the movie with Hanks singing and dancing to a comically adapted version.
“It happened during the writing process,” Tykwer recalled of the scene’s genesis in a 2016 conversation with The Telegraph. “I was sitting there trying to work out the right way to start this movie because it felt like the movie would have a slightly more upbeat energy than [Dave Eggers’ original] book.”
“Luckily, [David] Byrne was a friend of Eggers, and it was convenient to get in touch with him,” he added. “So then it was just a case of dialling the number and calling one of the most relevant icons in my whole pop cultural upbringing, and one of the five bands that really left an imprint on my artistic development, and suddenly I have the guy on the phone, and asking him, ‘Can I change the lines on your song, do you mind?’
“I was scared of it. But of course, he couldn’t have been more generous and lovely. He had just seen our previous film, Cloud Atlas, and loved it and was incredibly supportive. He said, ‘Oh no, I would love to hear Tom Hanks re-invent a song I’ve been listening to for 40 years’.”
Watch Tom Hanks’ perform ‘Once in a Lifetime’ in A Hologram for the King below.
