Once in a Lifetime

Water — or something that sounds like water — and a synthesized pulse open the track before the rhythm locks in: a polyrhythmic bed of congas, drums, and keyboard figures that suggests many traditions at once without quite settling into any. The production is dense but spacious, somehow, full of elements that should clash and instead create a kind of controlled turbulence. Brian Eno's presence is felt everywhere in the construction of the sound, which is textured and atmospheric in a way that pop music simply wasn't in 1980. David Byrne's vocal enters like a man genuinely bewildered — and the great thing about this song is that the bewilderment feels authentic rather than performed. The lyric is a series of dissociations, a person standing outside their own life and cataloguing what they find: the house, the car, the spouse, the water flowing underground. The existential question at the center of it is delivered without melodrama, which makes it more affecting, not less. This was Talking Heads at peak confidence, having absorbed influences from Africa and the avant-garde and somehow made the result both intellectually serious and impossible not to move to. You reach for this song in moments of taking stock — when you've arrived somewhere and need to understand how, when the ordinary suddenly seems strange and worth examining. It's a song that opens a door in the middle of an otherwise normal afternoon.