Once in a Lifetime

Released in January 1981 as the first single from Remain in Light, it was built like the rest of the album, from jams in Nassau that the band and Eno edited down and learned to play repetitively. Robert Palmer joined one jam on guitar and percussion. Byrne described the band as human samplers and said the track came from trying and failing to play funk. It was not one of Eno's favorites at first and was nearly abandoned. Harrison found the lack of chord changes hard to divide into verse and chorus. Eno found the chorus melody by singing wordlessly and then heard the third beat of the bar as the first. Harrison added the bubbly synthesizer arpeggio and a Hammond organ climax inspired by the Velvet Underground's What Goes On. Steven Stanley replaced Rhett Davies as engineer for the basic tracks.

Weymouth said Frantz created the bassline by yelling in a jam, which she copied on bass. Eno removed the first bass note from the first beat and had the part rerecorded, and back in New York the engineer had Weymouth record it again. She called it a musical dispute rather than a big fight. Byrne's vocal is half-spoken and half-sung in the cadence of a preacher with a call and response chorus. He denied the lyric was about yuppie greed and said it was about the unconscious, about operating half-awake or on autopilot and ending up with a house and a family without asking how you got there.

Video and legacy

Byrne and Toni Basil directed the video, with Basil choreographing. Byrne dances in a white room in a suit and glasses over bluescreen footage of religious rituals, working from archive film that included the evangelist Ernest Angley. It was made cheaply, and Rolling Stone ranked it the 81st-best music video in 2021. The song reached 14 in the UK in March 1981 and 24 in the Netherlands, and went platinum in the UK in December 2023. A live version from Stop Making Sense, which runs 4:34 on the soundtrack, reached 91 on the Hot 100 in 1986. NPR named it among the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century, and Rolling Stone put it 28th on its 2021 list of the greatest songs. Weird Al Yankovic recreated the video in UHF in 1989. An early version, Right Start, is on the 2006 Remain in Light reissue.