Once in a Lifetime
by Talking Heads
- 117
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 65
- Danceability
- 6
- Acousticness
Talking Heads and Brian Eno wrote "Once in a Lifetime" through jams. They recorded long sessions, isolated the best parts and learned to play them repetitively. The method came from early hip-hop and from the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, whose music Eno had introduced to the band. David Byrne called the band human samplers. Robert Palmer joined one jam on guitar and percussion.
The song was not at first one of Eno's favorites, and the band nearly dropped it. Jerry Harrison found the lack of chord changes made it hard to divide into verses and choruses. Byrne believed in it. Eno developed the chorus melody by singing wordlessly, and the song fell into place. Harrison added the bubbly synthesizer arpeggio and a Hammond organ climax. Eno heard the third beat of the bar as the first. That gave the rhythm two centers of gravity.
Tina Weymouth said drummer Chris Frantz created the bass line by yelling during a jam, and she copied it on bass. Eno removed the first bass note from the first beat as too obvious, and she rerecorded it. They worked at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. Byrne improvised the lyrics like a sermon, with call and response between preacher and congregation. Released in January 1981, the single reached number 14 on the UK chart in March.
Once in a Lifetime runs at 117 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.05 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 513 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.