Musical Simples: Once In A Lifetime

“Once In A Lifetime” is a simple but remarkable tune based on a simple but remarkable scale: the major pentatonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98AJUj-qxHI

Like its cousin the minor pentatonic scale, major pentatonic is found in just about every world musical culture. It’s also incredibly ancient. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a paleontologist plays an unmistakeable major pentatonic scale on a replica of a 35,000 year old flute made from a vulture bone.

The pentatonic scale must have qualities appealing to us at a deeper level than cultural convention. One such quality is the scale’s symmetry. Its pitches can be arranged so they form a series of perfect fifths. The fifth emerges out of the natural overtone series and is the “simplest” musical interval aside from the octave. The scale has no dissonant intervals generally, so there are no “wrong” combinations or sequences of notes.

If you play the black keys on the piano, you get G-flat major pentatonic. You may recall from “Superstition” that the black keys also give you the E-flat minor pentatonic scale. G-flat major and E-flat minor pentatonic share the same five notes–in music-theoretic terms, they’re modes of each other.

Nearly every element of “Once In A Lifetime” is built on the D major pentatonic scale. To get D major pentatonic, you take the D major scale and remove the notes G and C-sharp.

“Once In A Lifetime” centers around a two-bar bassline that repeats the same two notes identically and hypnotically throughout the entire tune.

Basslines almost always use the root of the chord or scale. (Very often, they don’t use anything else.) “Once In A Lifetime” only has one chord, D. You’d think that this note would be at the heart of the bassline, but instead it avoids D completely. The first half is a pair of syncopated A’s. The second half jumps from A down to F-sharp. When you combine D, F-sharp, and A, you get a D major triad. Your ear is so well-trained to recognize triads that you can easily infer the root when it’s absent. Still, it’s a strange sound.

Just as the bassline is harmonically unstable, it’s also rhythmically unstable. The strongest and most obvious part of the two bar cell is bar one, beat one. The bassline avoids this beat, beginning instead on the exceedingly weak eighth note that follows. The second note is accented and lands on beat two, the backbeat. The second half of the bassline has its accent on beat two as well. The instability of the bassline is balanced out by the drums, percussion and many other layers of rhythm in the track, and its extreme repetitiveness gives the listener plenty of time to make sense of it.

The process behind the song’s writing and production is a fascinating one. Inspired by Fela Kuti, Talking Heads and producer Brian Eno were trying to create songs by improvising grooves in the studio without any previous discussion or planning. Bassist Tina Weymouth recalls that her husband, the drummer Chris Frantz, came up with bassline spontaneously during a jam and shouted it to her. Eno says that he heard the second bar of the pattern as the first bar, and that he deliberately tried to maintain that feeling of ambiguity in the finished track.

While the studio version of “Once In A Lifetime” was a minor European hit, a live version released a few years later really put the song into mass consciousness. That live version comes from a concert film called Stop Making Sense.

Talking Heads’ songs generally have a strong subconscious dream-logic feel to them, none more than “Once In A Lifetime.” Every aspect of the song is the result of improvisation. It’s a testament to how little “making sense” matters in music.

By the way: You can play the entire chorus melody and most of the keyboard and guitar parts on D major pentatonic. To play the organ riff at the end of the song, however, you’ll need to switch to D Mixolydian.