‘Once In A Lifetime’: the Talking Heads song that will outlive ‘Psycho Killer’
The Talking Heads’ breakthrough hit, ‘Psycho Killer’, forms from the narrative of a murderer, with a creeping melody that amplifies the high-stakes danger of the song.
In the liner notes to the Talking Heads’ 1992 “best-of” compilation, frontman David Byrne explains that when he initially began writing ‘Psycho Killer’, he “Imagined Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman–type ballad. Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies.”
The song was completed in 1977, at a harrowing time for popular culture, when the American serial killer Son of Sam sparked fear across New York City. Amid the murmurings, Talking Heads insisted that the track was not written with the events in mind, as Byrne’s initial concept was written years prior; the timing was chillingly coincidental. Not only did the Talking Heads usher in their bass-driven approach to new wave, but their lyricism revealed an exemplar display of shock value in art that compels ‘Psycho Killer’ to persist as an unforgettable anthem of its age.
Of course, the haunting tune may be one of the Talking Heads’ biggest hits, known by even the most resistant listener, but of all of the group’s songs, many of which have taken on lives of their own, one may well stand to outlive its predecessor: ‘Once In A Lifetime’.
Like many of the Talking Heads’ songs that were destined to become hits, ‘Once In A Lifetime’ was born from a jam session with producer Brian Eno, who adopted a method of recording such moments, splicing them apart and designating portions for the musicians to learn in repetition. This song, in particular, took heavy influence from early hip hop and Afrobeat rhythms, notably the Nigerian Afrobeat innovator Fela Kuti.
As quoted in Uncut in 2007, Byrne explained that they attempted to produce a funk melody but failed, creating a new sound in the process, while calling himself and his bandmates “human samplers”.
The result was a wildly complex array of rhythms, from the bubbling effect of the synthesiser to the crawl of the bassline and all in-between, each forming a groove that, as Byrne suggested, was uniquely immersive, creating a portal into their surreal, existential vision.
Lyrically, ‘Once In A Lifetime’ confronts what would otherwise be an imposing sense of doom and transforms it into a euphoric rally against time. With nearly every line prefaced with the assertion, “And you may find yourself,” Byrne poses hypotheticals of lives concrete in routine, “behind the wheel of a large automobile,” for instance, or “in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife”. Reckoning with the hand life has dealt, he’s compelled to posit, “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
“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?'”, the singer asserted to NPR in 2000.
The question is a wake-up call to break from conformity, the repetition of “Same as it ever was,” becoming an evocative drone. Vocally, Byrne and Eno approached the former’s performance as though he were a preacher, spreading his wisdom to the disaffected. As Byrne explained to Uncut, “It worked as a call-and-response pattern, like a preacher’s conversation with his congregation. I improved lines as if I was giving a sermon.”
As the chorus breaks into a raucous cry of, “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down,” the bubbling synths submerge us even further into the Talking Heads’ dystopia, one that is, after all, not that far from reality. The difference, however, is that Byrne approaches the subject with a relentless optimism.
“Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us,” he enthuses, secure in the fact that, no matter how trite life can become, there is a sheer joy to be found in the simple act of being alive.
