Once In A Lifetime
 

(I wrote this for Reddit but figured everyone could see it)

In my opinion, Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" is one of the best singles ever created.

When you listen carefully to it you realize that there are all kinds of sounds happening at once, a lot of the drum parts are way ahead of the beat, and Byrne is talking not singing. Yet somehow it comes together. The two-note bass part somehow holds it together, despite avoiding the root note. That is amazing. That is genius.

And then they do that same kind of cut-up on the lyrics, as he's singing "Remove the water, carry the water" so words are treated like the instrumentation is treated: cut up, moved around, altered to create something bigger. Not entirely making sense, but creating patterns of meaning where you are encouraged to bring your own understanding to the song.

And it's all Brian Eno singing on the chorus, which is the first time you realize the song has any key at all, 42 seconds in and it's just 8 bars long. And that's the first time you sense those bass notes were in the key all along.

Listen to it again and you may ask yourself, what is it about water in the song? Is it a metaphor? Does it mean passage of time, does it mean the heaviness of life, why is it flowing underground? This is the stuff of the best poetry, metaphor that gives you a sense of things, but doesn't spell it out for you.

GENIUS GENIUS GENIUS!

I missed even encountering Talking Heads in the '80s while I was an exhausted medical student/intern/resident buried deep in the bowels of the Toronto hospital system. I ran across 'Burning Down the House' just recently, and now this single - and I agree! Pure genius.

All that may be true, but his dancing is almost as bad as that of Peter Garret from Midnight Oil.

Seriously, true brilliance often comes when someone has mastered the rules so well they can judge when to break them. A bass riff that doesn't use the root note? WTF? Oh, okay, Picasso, you're going to paint it from every side at once, are you? Didn't you learn "perspective" in art school?

Great Song , DB is a Different kind of Cat , most artist are , im cool with that

Awesome, Undertony.

I feel like this is like the thing where I said 'Subdivisions' was the 'greatest rock drumming ever' and deconstructed why, and you went back and listened to it.

Because I went back and listened to 'Once in a Lifetime' --a song I am by no means unfamiliar with, I've played plenty of Talking Heads at gigs, just not this one-- and I noticed something. The bass notes are almost always preceeded by a single tom note.

It's like the toms are being used for no other purpose than as part of the bass line.

And this is what you'e supposed to do with instruments. Use them on purpose.



Like, watch this video:

Gavin Harrison - When To Play Fills

"Ropert Fripp said to me ... I know where the 1 is ... you don't have to make it so obvious!"

I don't get your review of the song at all UT.
Through sheer musical ignorance.

I know I like the song, and I've always loved the lyrics. Water flowing underground and under the rocks and stones has always seemed to me a message of truth and vitality. Undercutting the confusion of someone who is unsure of whether what they have achieved is really an achievement, or someone who has not achieved the mundane that they aspired to.

I didn't hear the cut up of the lyrics. I shall listen again.

Thread noted as smart.

It's all about the rule-breaking here!

The drum and bass parts are mostly a loop. Most of the rhythm section is a 2-bar loop. There is no way in hell, ever, that a 2-bar loop can be interesting for four minutes. But the Gavin Harrison bit points out, yeah, it gets interesting when things are not where you expect them. Listen to Once In A Lifetime for the cymbal crashes and you find them at exactly the wrong place! The single out-of-place tom beat is such a rule-break and to have it be consistently "wrong" is just weird. It throws you just slightly out of kilter and that's the entire point of the song. Where does that highway go to?

I think his outfit/glasses are genius! He's twenty-five years early!

and then I must throw my lot in with Sundae and admit to sheer musical ignorance. I just know what I like. That's probably pretty pedestrain of me, but I do like the Talking Heads. Always have. I also liked the Flying Lizards of the '80's.

I've always loved this song too, but I really like when musicians point out musical thingys to me. My ex did that, and learned a bit about arrangements and about listening for this or that.

But I'm mostly really ignorant. I'm alone in the office listening to this song in my earphones and it was really neat: no other sounds or distractions. I'd never heard it quite that way before.

And BTW Flint I listened to all of Aja several times because you were pointing stuff out...

Yes! Aja Aja Aja.

I was so envious of a girl I knew named Aja. When she first told me her name I asked "like the continent or like the Steely Dan song?"

But. Black Cow. Wow, Black Cow.

A lot of people don't realize that Picasso was firmly rooted in academic training before he went off on his own.

Somewhere in my files, I have a few academic Picassos that I photographed for some museum. this is from the web.

I have this print. I think it's beautiful. From his 'blue' period.

The other one must be from his Burnt Sienna period

lmao!

Song analysis isn't really me either but I could sit and watch Tina Weymouth play all day.

David dancing

Type "Peter Gar" into youtube and the first suggestion is "Peter Garret Dancing".



The interruption at 2.52 is because Peter Garret is now a federal politician, and the other side were taking the piss.

As we said, you have to master the rules first, then you can judge when to break them.

All comments noted. Good thread.

I was at a get together this weekend, a former bandmate asks if I can identify the song playing on his tablet. I listen to the layers of instruments (described here by UT) and say 'sounds like Once in a Lifetime' --yep, 'same album' he says.

Regarding Picasso, his comic art equivalent is Bill Sienkiewicz--another guy who mastered strict classical art, and then "went off the deep end" --and the lesson is, you can't go crazy and "freestyle" really effectively until you know your basics extremely thoroughly.

Like jazz drumming. One of Tony Williams favorite exercises for the drums was to play single strokes completely simultaneously with every limb. That's it. Both hands and both feet just going "bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump" over and over, at various tempos. Why? This very basic pattern revealed the micro-inconsistencies that would be hard to detect while playing fancy patterns. Complex artists can be absorbed in simple tasks.



And now, this (song comes in at 24 seconds):

Side story. Hanging at the bar back in the day with ex and a bandmate. We'd each drink an unspecfied amount of beer from our bottles and see if one of them could come up with a song to match the sounds made when you blow into the top of your bottle. Depending on your level of beer (the tone) and what order, they came up with some good ones. I didn't, I don't know from notes but it was fun when I heard what they meant. Does this even make sense? ;)

oddly enough, to me, it does.

Yes, I get it. Sounds like fun!

Now what I do is blow down against the far edge of the top of the bottle, and it whistles.

Interestingly, your youtube clip loops. I don't know why it does this.

Hey, UT! Would you please analyze this in the same way?

The Cure massively overuse reverb in their usual way in order to seem more mystical and big. It's a two-note song and the two notes sit on 1 and 3 and don't move at all, with 1 being the root note. The drumming consists of huge snare (large cannon snare instead of bright chirpy small snare) manually playing the same two bars over and over again. This creates the doomy gloomy funeral procession tempo -- we are "locked in" and won't move anywhere for 6 minutes. We must not rock whatsoever; we must slowly sway and share our painful lives. The only relief is the interesting guitar effects that serve as a side dish to Smith's painfully depressed lyrics.

Still, it's all eaten up by the gloomy teens of the day, looking for something real away from both the corporate classic rock of the time and the "Walking on Sunshine" bright pop they had been forced to consume -- including some made by the Cure. Thus an entire generation wears black, and it's original for its time, a pioneering attitude, but not all that musically interesting.

Thanks.:beer:

Dude,

your calling emerges.

music critic.

go forth and prosper.


but just to make sure you can do more current stuff.... what do you make of this one?
(this is not exactly new, but ....)

The orgasm. It's just awesome, but only lasts a few seconds. So what if it could be ALL orgasm? Well, how you do that is you turn the compression way up, multitrack the same guitars to death, have a terribly confident "cock-sure" lead vocal, and only take the whole thing down a step for the first half of the third verse. Basically have all the instruments and vox in a big cage match for who can get the most attention. And if you land on a particular riff, switch it out for a new one before anyone has time to enjoy it or react.

Trouble is, this doesn't allow for anything particularly memorable. If everything's out front, nothing's out front. So there is no opportunity for a hook here. And it turns out the orgasm is an orgasm because it lasts seconds. If the orgasm lasts minutes, it becomes something different and we are probably looking for relief from it. That's why this song is 2:45, because if it was 3:00 we would be annoyed and if it was 4:00 we would be pissed off.

Musicians learn that the space between the notes is where the special is. Well, here there's no space at all. That's not good.

If you* want to understand this song and what I'm saying about it, try to whistle it alone. If you can't whistle it, you can't identify a melody. Now remind me what you hate about rap/hip-hop. Right.





*not you Jim, but the editorial you, meaning everyone

Seriously.

You're bloody good at this.

Thanks you guys. I would love to write professionally but there's not much call for it.

yeah, it's one of those jobs like Video Game Tester, or Porn Star Casting Director, or Car&Driver reporter. The job exists, but the lucky sonofabitch that got it isn't letting it go for nuthin.

Can you make a living from a blog? If you get a following, and sell advertising, or something?


I forgot how good talking heads are. I have to go back and listen to their stuff again. I can remember More Songs About Buildings And Food being in my car cassette player for about a month straight. Friends of mine saw them at Haverford College in '78 ish.

The top blogs now make good money, but they all have multiple writers, and are more like the replacement for major magazines than they are blogs.

You'd be surprised. It's actually a reasonably easy job to get because 1.) the job itself actually sucks, it's not fun like you would think it would be, AT ALL, 2.) it pays shit, 3.) the hours are shit, and 4.) it's mostly done by young guys who tend to be irresponsible and not show up to work more often than the average person, thus getting fired and needing replacement.


That aside, Tony, you are damn good at this and I mean that as someone who knows professional writers. Most significantly, your analysis is interesting even to people who don't know anything about music, or aren't familiar with the song in question. That's the mark of a truly good writer in this field.

Write up a dozen of them, and start sending your sample portfolio to Rolling Stone, Wired, Spotify, Pandora, everyone. When people read these, they want to read more.

Meaning they may take on another from time to time.

And ...what Clod said.

And you aren't going to argue with her brain, now, are you? :D

Yeah. I'd never even heard the term "root note".You made me want to know more.

Rolling Stone, Wired, Spotify, Pandora

Three of those don't do reviews and the remaining one I despise...!

It's Pitchfork or nothing, but really, I know a guy who has written for the next tier down of these kinds of places, and the almost-zero money is not worth it. The blogs are making a little money, but not the writers.

Well then your only choice is to keep posting them here, and draw new dwellars who may eventually hit the tip jar...

You are correct, that was a successful model for a while when I was putting serious time into writing IotD.

Undertony, I'm dying to hear your write-up on this track:



I have a definite, very strong impression of this song (which can be summarized in ten words or less). I'm curious to know how you hear it.

I will, but first, I actually came here to talk about...



One of the finest old saws from one of the best bands not to be in the Not Rock and Roll Not Hall of Fame.

Some songwriters use a trick of suddenly changing keys, one note up, near the end of the song. It feels like switching to a new top gear. For example, "Morning Train", below. Jump to about 2:35 of the song, and wait until at 2:47, the song goes a full step up in key. And, if you wait through the chorus again, the song goes right up another full step.



This is so hack. This is overdone. If you look around you will notice many more songs that use this trick. In "Morning Train", it's like moving to top gear in a Ford Fiesta. You didn't like the song to begin with, and now there will more of it in new higher keys.

You want another song that does it at 2:47? Here's a guy who uses this trick every time, watch for it at 2:47. And then realize how HACK it is.



BUT... "Surrender" does this at the BEGINNING of the song. Nobody does that! There are four bars of Intro and then then song moves up a half-step. The song starts in A# and moves to B.

And then -- in the MIDDLE of the song, after Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus, they reply the Intro in that key of B... and then subtly move one half step up AGAIN, to the key of C, and into the next Verse-Chorus. Outrageous!

By the end of the song, when this trick is usually employed, the band is in top gear because they're shouting and rollicking, not because they've jumped keys again. It's not necessary. We're all alright! We're all alright!

Now that you're aware of it, you'll hear it every time.

The other thing about "Surrender" is that there is NO rhyming. At all. On purpose. Did you ever notice? Now you will.

interesting. there ARE actually rhymes interspersed, just not at the end of lines like a typical song. ( Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright) ( Mother told me, yes she told me.../ She also told me......)


and they use the intonation to create a pseudo rhyme instead. like.... they stretch that last word in the sentence and raise the pitch....which creates ..not a rhyme, but a device that ties the two sentences together just as a rhyme would.

Raising keys at the end goes beyond being a modern hack, it is/was a standard device in most old school hymns.

If I had to guess what ten words or less, it would be:

Insistent snare tells us we are working very hard.

In this song, there is time spent working, and then there is time spent thinking about work. The snare is there all the time, reminding you of what work is. But then the flat eighth notes on snare come in, and they demand that you NOT relax; you are literally AND figuratively "on the clock". Your asshole tightens, only to relax a little when the song "goes acoustic", when the lazy, uncertain verse comes around and you are pondering your fate.

Of course, percussion representing a mine was pioneered here:



Midnight Oil was always all about the message. I like how he names the mine "Blue Sky" because that's exactly what you would never see, working in a mine, and so the struggle is made poetic right from the title.

My ten words or less was going to be "this comes very close to being the perfect rock song."

This is more of a 'feeling' I get from the song than anything else, but if I had to specify the reasons, I guess it would be the slow, simmering intro that unfolds in layers, then explodes into full, urgent intensity. The harmonica is wailing, mournful, and this sets the stage for the message of the lyrics, which is painful, difficult. This is all perfect. The urgency never subsides until the final resolution, the blessed relief we are allowed, as the "rain comes down" and "washes clean" the tenseness and prolonged agitation. This is rock!

The track is very "produced" but it never sounds that way. It feels raw and dirty. It feels real--you empathize with this man. This is rock. It's timeless.

"Who's gonna save me? Who's gonna save me?"

I do like the harmonica which is his wailing, and the way the first "who's gonna save me" section is entirely a different song piece.

It is a fine piece of work, wouldn't be in my top 10 I expect but it is a fine thing. It's so weird what works for each of us, what each of us finds genuine is so different.

Perfect will be so different for everybody. For me I like complicated music and rock is not that. It's a little imprecise. Has to hit you deep. Depends on mood. Some days this'll do it for me, because it's a story. Bruce and the band caught something special when they came up with this.