![\"Talking](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Talking-Heads-1985-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Album Cover \/ Sire Records)<\/p>\n
Fri 15 August 2025 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
As much as you might like to think you\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n
If you were to assume this role for Talking Heads<\/a>, 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\u2019t pick every song from Fear of Music or Remain in Light is going to feel harsh.<\/p>\n With a catalogue so deserving of praise, and one that it\u2019s hard to find any fault in, you\u2019re 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\u2019re seen now. You might have nightmares about having to leave out \u2018Cities\u2019, but let\u2019s face it, nobody else is going to care if it means \u2018Psycho Killer\u2019 still makes the cut.<\/p>\n But, that\u2019s a case of narrowing things down to a selection of the band\u2019s best work. If push came to shove, would you really be able to pick the \u2018definitive\u2019 Talking Heads song, or would you crumble in a heap, crying as though you\u2019ve been asked to choose who your favourite child is?<\/p>\n It might seem impossible to you, but Jerry Harrison<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most famous track from Remain in Light, \u2018Once in a Lifetime\u2019 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\u2019s anniversary, Harrison explained that it\u2019s the song he\u2019s proudest of, and expressed his feelings about it being the band\u2019s greatest achievement.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get away from \u2018Once in a Lifetime\u2019,\u201d Harrison proclaimed. \u201cIt really captures the ambiguity of the recording process. There\u2019s 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\u2019s bass<\/a>, Chris\u2019s drums, and my keyboard wash adds to it. The song is just sort of there. It\u2019s a state of being as opposed to a march through life.\u201d<\/p>\n To think that the song was almost scrapped in its earliest incarnation is perhaps the most staggering fact about \u2018Once in a Lifetime\u2019, 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\u2019s no denying that its timelessness and sheer inventiveness makes it the most deserving candidate.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Album Cover \/ Sire Records) Fri 15 August 2025 22:00, UK As much as you might like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,56660,136,23209],"class_list":{"0":"post-72504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-jerry-harrison","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-talking-heads"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}