“In this song, Wilson sings about a woman who finds a worn-down snake on the streets. She takes him in and cares for him, but instead of showing gratitude, he bites her. She is understandably upset, but he reminds her that she knew he was a snake when she took him in,” (Songfacts).
“Wilson was a popular soul singer who had his biggest hit in 1973 with ‘Show And Tell,’ produced by Johnny Rivers, who signed Wilson to his Soul City record label (and) is known for his 1966 hit ‘Secret Agent Man.’ In 2008, ‘The Snake’ was used in British TV commercials for Lambrini Perry,” a pear cider!
The horn-drenched r+b track, released on Wilson’s 1968 album Searching for the Dolphins, shifts up a half step at 1:37 and again at 2:21.
“SuperStar” is featured on the platinum edition of American singer/songwriter Taylor Swift’s 2008 album Fearless, which won Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Album of the Year and helped Swift become a household name. The version below is included on the re-recorded version of the album, released in 2021, the first of six planned re-recordings that Swift plans to release. Swift began her first tour since before the pandemic last week, highlighting music from her four most recent albums.
The track begins in D, modulates briefly up to E for the bridge at 3:04, and returns to D at 3:29.
“On first listen, the beautifully syrupy pop ballad that is John Lennon song ‘#9 Dream’ seems as though it couldn’t be further from its numerical cousin, The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ (FarOut). With its lush string sections, glittering acoustic guitar arpeggios, and exuberant melodies, this 1974 track, taken from Walls And Bridges, sees John Lennon at his most uninhibited.
Like many of John Lennon’s best works, ‘#9 Dream’ emerged fully formed in that brief intersection between sleep and wakefulness. ‘That was a bit of a throwaway. It was based on some dream I had,’ Lennon would recall in 1980. … The writing process was effortless, a welcome contrast to the usual grind that he ritually submitted himself to. ‘That’s what I call craftsmanship writing, meaning, you know, I just churned that out,’ he said. ‘I’m not putting it down, it’s just what it is, but I just sat down and wrote it, you know, with no real inspiration, based on a dream I’d had.’ … The dreamlike atmosphere Lennon wanted to capture motivated him to pay a lot of attention to the textural quality of ‘#9 Dream’. The vocals, for example, sound as though they have double-tracked at least five or six times, giving Lennon’s voice a choral quality.”
The verses are in C major, with a shift to E Dorian for the chorus (first heard between 1:14 and 1:56). The modulation doesn’t announce itself in advance — in fact, the downward chromatic motion of the melody at the very start of the chorus suggests a feeling of unexpectedly falling, but somehow enjoying the journey nonetheless. The post-chorus section never quite settles into one single tonality or tempo, its speed spiraling downward as it goes. At 2:10, the cycle begins a second time.
“All the Wasted Time” is from composer Jason Robert Brown’s 1998 Broadway musical Parade. The show tells the real-life story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man from Atlanta who was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of his 13- year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in 1913. Brown’s Tony Award-winning score, the first he wrote for Broadway, is tinged with folk, blues, gospel and musical theater influences.
This song comes near the end of the show; Leo and his wife Lucille are sitting in his cell taking stock of all they have been through over the past two years, and expressing how their love for each other is as deep as it has ever been. Its rolling accompaniment is reminiscent another of Brown’s romantic duets, “I’d Give It All For You,” from the 1995 show Songs For a New World. The first revival of Parade, starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond, opened on Broadway last week.
There are three modulations in the tune: at the start of Lucille’s verse at 1:37, leading into the third chorus at 3:10, and at the coda at 3:48.
“In the summer of 1880, Brahms … composed two concert overtures. ‘One weeps, the other laughs,’ he commented to his biographer, Max Kalbeck,” (IndianapolisSymphony.org). “The laughing piece referred to his rollicking Academic Festival Overture, Opus 80, filled with light-hearted student songs, written to acknowledge his doctoral degree bestowed by the University of Breslau, introduced by soft trombone chords. The weeping piece was his Tragic Overture, Opus 81, and a heavy counterpoise to the first. Brahms explained his motivation saying, ‘I (simply) could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture for tragedy.’
Though it was not written for any specific tragedy, speculation has suggested Tragic Overture was possibly written in contemplation of a commission to write incidental music for Goethe’s Faust. (This did not materialize.) Another possibility is that the composer had read Nietzsche’s work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872. This Overture is dramatic commentary on the spirit of tragedy in human life.
Tragic Overture begins with two slashing chords, which preface the solemn main theme, orchestrated within low strings and low winds in D minor. Trombones and tuba build a bridge to a contrasting F major theme, but relief is short. A third main subject stemming earlier sketches is also introduced. Writing in sonata form, the composer moves directly into a convulsive development. Brahms scholar Walter Niemann wrote, ‘The fleeting touches of thrilling, individual emotion in this overture are not to be found in conflict and storm, but in the crushing loneliness of terrifying and unearthly silences in what have been called dead places.‘ Themes surge and spin in a tempest of emotion. A traditional recapitulation, introduced by two fortissimo chords, summarizes the main ideas with certain alterations. Opus 81 premiered on December 20, 1880 in Vienna …”
A half-step key change, partially camouflaged by extensive chromaticism, takes place at 8:07. At 10:59, the piece reverts to its original key of D minor.
“With its thumping power chords and shredding solo, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ – recorded in September 1964 – is often cited as the jump-off point for punk and hard rock,” (LouderSound) “But early Kinks were a band forged by American rock’n’blues. Their third single, “You Really Got Me,” which borrowed heavily from The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie, made No.1 in the UK in 1964. The distorted guitar riff by Ray’s brother Dave was a revelation. But it was the follow-up that really created the metal/punk blueprint. ‘The one that started it was All Day And All Of The Night,’ Ray Davies explains.
The secret to The Kinks’ early guitar sound was Dave Davies’s brainwave of slashing the speaker cones of his amp with a razor. ‘As it vibrated, it produced a distorted and jagged roar,’ he commented later … Record label Pye, however, weren’t too enamoured with The Kinks’ latest sound, and initially rejected the song for being ‘too working class.’ … Whatever its social standing, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ was a ferocious blast of rock’n’roll. It gave The Kinks their second major hit and cemented them in the US as one of the key bands of the British Invasion. “
Contributor JB adds: “Listening to The Kinks with fresh ears, nearly 60 years after they first hit the charts, it’s amazing how far ahead of their time they were. If they had come along in the ’80s, they would absolutely have been in the vanguard of the grunge movement. But because they came up during the British Invasion and their sound wasn’t as melodic as the Beatles (or even the Stones, on albums like Flowers), they were relegated to the second tier.”
After starting in an uptuned G minor, there’s a shift to D minor for the first chorus at 0:28, reverting to the original key at 0:42 for the next verse and the pattern continues from there.
For its fourth album, 4, late 70s/early 80s pop/rock stalwarts Foreigner brought in producer Mutt Lange, later to become much more famous for his work with UK pop/rock band Def Leppard and country chanteuse Shania Twain (who became Mrs. Lange for a time). “Feeling the need for an outside influence on keyboards, Jones and Lange brought in the then-unknown Thomas Dolby, who described the experience as ‘very productive.'” (UltimateClassicRock). “He noted in his 2018 memoir The Speed of Sound that ‘I gained the utmost respect for (Foreigner guitarist) Mick Jones, a thoroughly decent bloke, as well as for Mutt Lange’s amazing production skills. I’ve never worked with a more fastidious producer. He would make me go over and over my parts, adjusting the inflections on every single note until it was exactly perfect. Some simple strings of notes took hours and hours to record.’
‘When he brought in sax legend Junior Walker for a solo on ‘Urgent’ and recorded at least a dozen versions, Mutt had the wisdom to recognize that the very first solo Junior blew, rough edges and all, was The Take,’ said Dolby.
In 2016, Dolby said ‘Urgent’ had at least some of its roots in a demo tape he’d sent to Lange earlier, in the hope of securing his own publishing deal. ‘He was a very big fan of some of the sounds I used in a song of mine called Urges … He asked me to put it one of (Foreigner’s) backing tracks. … A while later, they added the vocals, which were Urgent, urgent. … I raised my eyebrows slightly – but you know, I’m glad to have influenced them in a positive way.’ (It) was the first of five singles spawned from 4, four of which broke the Top 40.”
The studio version didn’t feature a modulation — but not so for a 2006 live version, performed in Germany. After a leisurely intro not found on the original, the song begins in earnest at 1:39. Mick Jones is still the center of the band’s sound, but the rest of the personnel has shifted over the years. However, the 2006 band did an admirable job of honoring the band’s central lead vocal and sax sounds. At 5:32, the band moves the key up a minor third, returning to the original key at 6:05.
The studio version, a staple of MTV’s debut era:
The Dolby tune, despite being thoroughly marinated in UK New Wave sensibilities, has some clear similarities in mood and texture:
The Ashes were a southern California pop group that formed in the mid-1960s. The group had two principal songwriters, guitarist John Merrill and bassist Alan Brackett (album liner notes). The star of the group was singer Barbara Robison, who had a clear and powerful voice, featured on “Is There Anything I Can Do?” The group’s drummer, Spencer Dryden, would later join the Jefferson Airplane.
The Ashes released only two singles before breaking up. But the core of the group, Merrill, Bracket, and Robison, would go on to form The Peanut Butter Conspiracy (which is either the worst or the best band name ever); they recorded two albums for Columbia and a final album for the independent Challenge label.
Barbara Robison continued her singing career after PBC broke up. Sadly, she didn’t recover from a collapse she suffered during a performance in 1988.
“Is There Anything I Can Do” (1966) was written by singer Jackie DeShannon and Nick DeCaro. The version in this video is from an unreleased demo acetate. The final released version features additional instrumentation by those studio stalwarts, The Wrecking Crew.
The tune is in a noticeably up-tuned E major. At 1:35, there’s a half-step shift up to F that sounds like the start of a sustained modulation, but actually serves as a very prominent sub-V (a relatively rare feature in pop). The song soon drops back to the starting key. The same jarring rise/fall pattern is repeated later.
“Aly Bain was born on May 15 1946 in Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland,” (WorldMusicCentral). “Lerwick is a small, enchanting town on the Shetland Islands. Aly began learning fiddle at the age of eleven. Tom Anderson, his teacher, is acknowledged as one of the true masters of Shetland music. Aly developed a highly dramatic style of playing, matching his great tone and technical ability with genuine emotion. Alert to the musical potential of the dynamic interaction between Irish and Scottish traditions, he helped establish the Boys of the Lough. The group is now recognized as one of the best in the tradition.”
Fiddler Jay Ungar was “a Bronx kid” while pianist Molly Mason “grew up in Washington State,” (JayAndMolly.com). “He was raised on pop music of the 1940s and ’50s. She had a fondness for traditional fiddle music and ’30s and ’40s popular tunes. He hung out in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and roamed North Carolina and Tennessee in search of traditional players. She played clubs and colleges on the West Coast and took a liking to the jazzy sound of the Swing Era. Since joining forces—both artistically and romantically (the two would marry in 1991)—Jay Ungar and Molly Mason have become one of the most celebrated duos on the American acoustic music scene.” Ungar is probably best known for co-writing “Ashokan Farewell” with Mason — a tune which was featured in the Ken Burns series The Civil War and certainly feels like it was written a century or more before its 1982 debut.
Ungar, Bain, and Mason collaborate here on “The Lovers’ Waltz,” also written by Ungar and Mason. Starting in G major, the tune alternates between solo and duo fiddle lines and a solo by an uncredited guitarist as the key shifts up to D major at 1:47.
“By the 1960s, decades after Tin Pan Alley had moved from its original location on Manhattan’s West 28th Street and become a catchphrase for the popular music industry as a whole, writers such as the stellar team of Carole King and Gerry Goffin were mining the same escapist concepts, but updating them with a hint of postwar anxiety… (American Songwriter). ‘Up on the Roof,’ a hit for the Drifters in 1962, remains one of the most enduring songs of the latter-day Tin Pan Alley period (when writers labored at the Brill Building and other sites along Broadway), if only for its lushness of melody and lyrical sophistication. ‘At night the stars put on a show for free’ … In a manner similar to that of the first Tin Pan Alley writers, Goffin and King honor the tradition of quick recognition through tunefulness: hit songs, during the Brill Building era, needed to be heard just once to be remembered.
But ‘Up on the Roof’ also evinces a quiet sense of sadness, an urban dissatisfaction that moves beyond anything conceived by the rose-spectacled Tin Pan Alley writers of the early 20th century. Inspired, perhaps, by the realism of works such as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, King and Goffin view modern Gotham as a place of chaos and potential strife: ‘people are just too much for me to face…I get away from the hustling crowd.’ For these city dwellers, escape is not just a goal but a necessity. The difference—from the perspective of songwriting technique—is that listeners are allowed to visualize the beauty of the flight ‘to the top of the stairs’ along with the reasons for making it … Hard, unsparing reality could be saved for Bob Dylan and the new generation of singer/songwriters who arrived in his wake.”
James Taylor’s 1979 album Flag featured his cover of the tune, which performed well as a top 40 single. Reflecting on his first years of work with King starting in 1970, Taylor remembered: ” … Carole and I found we spoke the same language” (The Guardian). “Not just that we were both musicians, but as if we shared a common ear, a parallel musical/emotional path. And we brought this out in one another, I believe.” It’s all the more powerful to hear Taylor and King collaborate on this live duo version of the tune (2010). The duet finds them shifting between her best key and his — while adding a surprising new dimension with the connective tissue. King begins in C major, followed by a shift to the F major (the same key as Taylor’s studio cover) at 1:15, then back to King’s C major at 2:22, then finally settling into F major at 2:45 for the balance of the tune.
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