Windows 8 to Foxtale: Lenka’s ‘Everything at Once’ returns

If you heard the opening notes of Lenka’s Everything at Once in Foxtale’s new Shah Rukh Khan film and immediately thought of Windows 8, you are not alone. Released in 2012, Everything at Once became closely associated with Microsoft’s Windows 8 campaign, which used the track — a song about wanting to be “everything at once” — to soundtrack a colourful montage of the operating system’s new features. View this post on Instagram For many, the song is less a Lenka song than the Windows 8 song. When Foxtale puts it behind Shah Rukh Khan, it is not simply choosing a pleasant pop track. It is tapping into a memory that sits somewhere between music, advertising and early-2010s internet culture. And that memory does some of the work for the brand. The song is familiar before the viewer has even registered why. It creates a little recognition, a little nostalgia, and then makes way for the new message. Advertising has always understood the power of music. But in an era of shrinking attention spans and increasingly familiar visual codes, a recognisable song can do some heavy lifting. Sometimes, the quickest way into a consumer’s memory is not a new jingle. It is an old one. And Everything at Once seems to have found a rather unusual second career: not just as a pop song that appeared in advertisements, but as a song people remember through them.