(Credits: Album Cover / Sire Records)
Fri 15 August 2025 22:00, UK
As much as you might like to think you’d be good at compiling a greatest hits album for your favourite artist, there are some for whom it proves to be a near-impossible task.
If you were to assume this role for Talking Heads, for example, trying to whittle things down to a concise 20 songs is going to feel like an insurmountable job, and even telling yourself that you can’t pick every song from Fear of Music or Remain in Light is going to feel harsh.
With a catalogue so deserving of praise, and one that it’s hard to find any fault in, you’re going to struggle to decide which songs have more right to claim their inclusion. What you have to remember in situations like this is the ubiquity of the songs, how unavoidable they were at the time of release, and how fondly they’re seen now. You might have nightmares about having to leave out ‘Cities’, but let’s face it, nobody else is going to care if it means ‘Psycho Killer’ still makes the cut.
But, that’s a case of narrowing things down to a selection of the band’s best work. If push came to shove, would you really be able to pick the ‘definitive’ Talking Heads song, or would you crumble in a heap, crying as though you’ve been asked to choose who your favourite child is?
It might seem impossible to you, but Jerry Harrison knows where his personal vote would go. The guitarist and keyboard player may have certain biases and advantages when it comes to making his own selection, by the simple virtue of the fact that he was there when the songs were written and recorded, and that he’s had to live with them his entire life, but when it all comes down to making the choice, one track seemed too tough to ignore the brilliance of.
Perhaps the most famous track from Remain in Light, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ is the sort of song that has the power to live forever, due in part to how refreshing and novel it sounded at the time, and how it could easily slip into the contemporary world 45 years later. In an interview for Vulture celebrating the album’s anniversary, Harrison explained that it’s the song he’s proudest of, and expressed his feelings about it being the band’s greatest achievement.
“It’s hard to get away from ‘Once in a Lifetime’,” Harrison proclaimed. “It really captures the ambiguity of the recording process. There’s an unusualness to the beat. We had laid down all of these parts individually. It sounds like it can be a million different things before you realise what the mix is doing. And the lyrics, of course, have the same sense of wonderment and randomness of life all these years later. Tina’s bass, Chris’s drums, and my keyboard wash adds to it. The song is just sort of there. It’s a state of being as opposed to a march through life.”
To think that the song was almost scrapped in its earliest incarnation is perhaps the most staggering fact about ‘Once in a Lifetime’, but once it was rescued by persisting with it in order to get it feeling right, the band created what is arguably their masterpiece. While there are plenty of other songs that could have easily been chosen as the best Talking Heads track, and while this could be considered a safe option, there’s no denying that its timelessness and sheer inventiveness makes it the most deserving candidate.
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