Elise – Page 37

Joe Jackson | Real Men

“Joe Jackson is known for vibrant, emotional hits like ‘Is She Really Going Out with Him?,’ ‘Breaking Us in Two,’ and the new wave-ish ‘Steppin’ Out,’ the latter two songs from his 1982 hit album Night and Day,” (American Songwriter). “That seminal release also includes a piano-driven, violin-laced ballad that didn’t manage to get quite as much attention but was way ahead of its time.

… It has been said that the Night and Day album (1982) was a tribute to Cole Porter and his view of New York, and that ‘Real Men’ was referencing the city’s gay culture (which became more prominent in the wake of the six-day Stonewall Uprising in 1969) … Jackson’s debut single and video for Night and Day, ‘Real Men’ did not chart in America and barely charted in the UK, but it managed to go Top 10 in Australia and Top 20 in the Netherlands. The album fared well, becoming one of two Jackson releases to sell half a million copies.”

Built in E minor overall, the somber verses transition to soaring wordless choruses in B major (first heard from 1:04 – 1:26). The tune’s lyrics were edgy at the time — and remain so. But Jackson’s use of “the other F-word” is likely without malice, given his longtime status as an openly bisexual man. There’s plenty of broader commentary on gender overall: Now it’s all changed / It’s got to change more is a line which wouldn’t have been out of place in a Women’s Studies textbook of the era.

The Roches | I Love My Mom

“While just about every critic and fan has a favorite Roches album that was inexplicably ignored, most will probably agree that Speak (1989) was the one that really should have gone gold,” (AllMusic). “All of the ingredients for a huge album are here: emotional yet accessible songs, radio-friendly folk-pop arrangements, and the sisters’ usual mind-blowing vocal pyrotechnics … this album doesn’t have a dud track from end to end. Sure, fans of their early work will find ‘I Love My Mom’ a bit too conventional and poppy … The jazzy backups are well handled and subtle throughout the album, and it’s a classic. Alas, like all Roches albums, it was critically acclaimed but ignored by the public.”

At 0:40, the approach to the second verse gets a touch of The Roches’ trademark oddity factor with a time hiccup — the first of several extra 2/4 measures throughout. After a start in A major, the tune shifts up a whole step to B major at 2:39 in the middle of an instrumental bridge (2:19 – 2:43). Many thanks to regular contributor Rob P. for this great catch!

Chicago | Just You ‘n’ Me

The second single released from Chicago VI (1973), “Just You ‘n’ Me” climbed to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. The track “was written after a fight between Pankow and his future wife Karen: ‘We had had a huge fight, it was a nasty lovers’ quarrel, if you will. She locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out…Just You ‘n’ Me poured out of me in its entirety. Usually when I write songs, I come up with an idea for a chorus or a hook and fill in the blanks in stages. This was a moment of clarity I’ve never experienced before or after. It remains a special event in my songwriting experience,'” (Billboard).

“Just You ‘n’ Me” was the final song played by Chicago AM radio station WLS (known as “the Rock of Chicago”) before it changed to a talk radio format in 1989 (WLSHistory.com).

The track starts in Bb major, with the band’s famous brass section playing a strong role from the first measures. 1:04 brings a shift to Ab major before a swaggering brass break brings Bb major back at 1:33. A calmer instrumental break section starts at 2:00, this time in D minor, featuring solo soprano saxophone and keyboards. At 2:40, there’s a shift to the original Bb as the backup vocals return, leading back to a very overdue second verse and a surprising unresolved ending.

The Impressions | People Get Ready

“Seldom does a song go down in history as not only one of the best popular songs ever written, but as a song that is so universal in composition and message that it can be effectively covered by almost anyone,” (American Songwriter). “But that’s the case with ‘People Get Ready,’ recorded in 1965 by The Impressions and written by the group’s lead singer, Curtis Mayfield. Nearly half a century later the song continues to be recorded and performed by a variety of acts in several genres.

From the album of the same name, (it) was released during a time of civil unrest in America, when the country was in turmoil over race relations and the Vietnam War just as Mayfield was beginning to infuse his work with social commentary. Influenced by the music of the church and his preacher grandmother, Mayfield began singing professionally as a teenager, and his work would go on to define what was the Chicago soul sound as opposed to what was coming out of Berry Gordy’s shop in Detroit at the time. In a 1993 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross … Mayfield said. ‘This is a perfect example of what I believe has laid in my subconscious as to the preaching of my grandmother, and most ministers when they reflect from the Bible.'”

“People Get Ready” was awarded a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 1998, its first year of eligibility. The song has been covered by literally dozens of other artists, including Bob Dylan, Alicia Keys, Exile and Matisyahu, and guitarist Jeff Beck obviously is a fan of the song, having recorded or performed it with Rod Stewart, Joss Stone, Sting and Queen’s Roger Taylor.

A half-step modulation drops during a short, understated guitar feature at the track’s midpoint (1:21).

Frankie Valli + The Four Seasons | Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You

“Once the Four Seasons became a consistent success, Frankie Valli established a side career doing solo recordings whose style hearkened back to pre-rock pop,” (AllMusic). “The best and most successful example of his solo work is ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ (1967), (which) would be perfectly at home on one of Frank Sinatra’s mid-1950s albums … The music skillfully blends ballad and pre-rock pop feels by wedding gentle, yearning verses that ebb and flow in a cocktail jazz style to a swinging chorus that bounds along on a series of surging, soaring melodic motifs.

(The track) starts in a ballad style with stately horns drifting a smooth, jazzy beat, undergoes a change midway through where the horns and the beat both start to swing in an uptempo, lounge music style and then shifts back and forth between these two feels for the rest of the song. Valli navigates this tricky set of tempo shifts with graceful style, using a silky tenor croon for the lighter moments and a swaggering baritone in the uptempo moments … (it) became a #2 smash hit and an instant standard that was extensively covered by … Andy Williams, Paul Anka and Englebert Humperdinck … (and has) become an oldies radio favorite and popped up in films as diverse as The Deer Hunter and Conspiracy Theory.“

After starting in E major, the verse features with plenty of harmonic motion over a tonic pedal-point bass. At 2:08, there’s a shift upward to G major for verse 2 — impressive enough that you won’t even mind when you hear verse 1’s lyrics are re-used wholesale. At 2:38, the boisterous instrumental hook returns, but drops back into the original key E major for the chorus, which repeats as the track fades.

Boyz II Men | On Bended Knee

“When ‘On Bended Knee’ reached #1, Boyz II Men became only the second act in Hot 100 history to replace themselves (‘I’ll Make Love to You’) at the top of the Hot 100,” (Stereogum). “The Beatles had done it in 1964, going back-to-back-to-back and holding the #1 spot for 14 uninterrupted weeks. (Elvis Presley had once replaced himself at #1, too, but he did that in the pre-Hot 100 era.) When Boyz II Men pulled it off, they held that top spot even longer.

… And Boyz II Men really sing that. When singers get all showy with their melismatic runs, they can sometimes lose a song’s melody or its emotional center … Boyz II Men have these rich interweaving harmonies and these big solo moments, but they always convey the gravity of this heartbreak that they’re describing … ‘On Bended Knee’ (1994) does nothing new, but the execution is immaculate.”

The nuanced Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis production never lets anything get in the way of the quartet’s beautifully balanced vocals. The fact that the track is also a Jam/Lewis composition makes all of the careful handling even less of a surprise. The single was a worldwide hit, but nowhere more than the US, where it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, #8 (Adult Contemporary), #2 (Hot R+B/Hip-Hop), and #1 (Pop Airplay).

After an intro in Ab major, the tune settles into Eb major for the first verse. At 3:26, a bridge starts with emotion already turned up to 9.8 and ends somewhere around 14 on a scale of 10, delivering us into another verse in a new key of E major. Somehow, another ecstatic key change to F major hits at 4:32. The fever finally breaks around 5:20, dropping the tune into its final resting place of Bb major.

Tony Orlando + Dawn | Knock Three Times

“L. Russell Brown, one of the two songwriters behind ‘Knock Three Times,’ grew up in a Newark housing project,” (Stereogum). “There was one phone in his building, so when someone in his family got a call, his downstairs neighbors would bang on a radiator … Brown and his songwriting partner Irwin Levine made that into a song. Tony Orlando was another New Jersey guy. He’d started out singing doo-wop as a teenager in the late ’50s, and he scored a couple of minor hits in the early ’60s. From there, he became a Brill Building songwriter and, eventually, a record executive. He signed Barry Manilow and co-wrote a few songs with him.”

Orlando was unexpectedly pressed into service as a vocalist, saw success, began working with “Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson, two backup singers who’d worked for Motown and Stax and whom Orlando had gotten to know from working with Manilow,” using the collective stage name Dawn. “Dawn eventually became Dawn featuring Tony Orlando, and then Tony Orlando and Dawn, and that’s the version that eventually got a mid-’70s variety show on CBS.”

“Knock Three Times” modulates up a half-step at 1:59 with a partial instrumental verse; the strings and brass battle it out for the title of highest state of cheesiness. The single was a worldwide smash, hitting top 5 in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, much of Europe, and Canada. It also reached #1 on both the US pop and easy listening charts — but during this era it wasn’t entirely unheard of for octogenarians to hit the dance floor for tunes that also climbed to the highest reaches of the pop charts.

Hector Berlioz | Les Troyens

“Unappreciated and misunderstood in his lifetime (1803-1869), today the French composer’s music is instantly recognizable – and for a variety of reasons,” (CurtainGoingUp). “First for their coloristic elements (i.e., an exceptionally high quotient of woodwind, brass, choral and percussive effects), along with their originality, ingenuity and character. His output of operas and large-scale concert works – from the trailblazing The Damnation of Faust and Benvenuto Cellini, to his choral-symphonic Roméo et Juliette and comedic Beatrice and Benedict, as well as the reverent L’Enfance du Christ (“The Childhood of Christ”) and the massive Requiem – have all enjoyed a modern resurgence, with a handful or so belatedly joining the standard repertory, a most welcome inclusion.”

The Berlioz opera Les Troyens (The Trojans) is a five-hour epic in five acts. The performance here, “Chasse Royale et Orage,” is merely an orchestral excerpt. “Written between 1856 to 1858 and revised up to 1863, Les Troyens was Berlioz’s largest and most ambitious work, and the summation of his entire artistic career,” (HBerlioz.com). “Its origins go back to his childhood and his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid under his father’s instruction, as he recalls in his memoirs. Thereafter Virgil was never far from his thoughts – citations from the Roman poet abound throughout his writings …”

After a harmonically restless journey throughout, perhaps the clearest modulations in this section of the work shift from a brass feature in Bb major (5:29) to a more string-centric G minor (5:49) before a big fortissimo leap into Eb major at 6:26.

Lizzo | 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)

“(2019’s) Cuz I Love You (was) an album that drastically shifted Lizzo’s career,” (The Guardian). “It turned the lauded leftfield hip-hop artist into an inescapable part of the mainstream pop landscape, spawning one TikTok-boosted hit after another. The twin challenges of coping with sudden success and deciding what to do next evidently hung heavy. There’s a lot of stuff on Special (2022) about healing – for Lizzo this involves ‘twerking and making smoothies’ – while, by her account, she wrote 170 songs before whittling them down to these 12.

The results are impressively varied. The world hardly wants for 21st-century disco pastiches, but “About Damn Time” is a spectacularly good example – buoyed by a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar line, it sounds like the greatest Chic track Chic never recorded … What Lizzo has, and in abundance, is personality, a rarer commodity than it should be in pop. Indeed, she has so much of it that she’s capable of transforming flimsy material into something else. In anyone else’s hands, the synthy, new wave-ish pop of ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’ … might sound boilerplate. But more often than not, the music is built to match the woman behind it … “

After a start in C major, the track’s dense percussion suddenly shifts to the background for a vocal break at 2:02. The groove returns in full at 2:15 as a key change to D major kicks in.

Mike Batt | Better Than a Dream

“Yes … his has been something of an unconventional career. ‘The mystery man who jumps around from lily pad to lily pad without really explaining himself … My career has been like hitting a wall with a rubber hammer a thousand times, rather than just getting a bulldozer and knocking a way through in one go.’ (The Guardian). In the popular imagination, his name is linked with discovering Katie Melua, writing Art Garfunkel’s 1979 smash hit ‘Bright Eyes,'” and the Wombles, a British novelty pop group whose members dressed as fuzzy animal characters from the children’s TV show of the same name. “That barely does justice to his oeuvre, however: four decades of albums, film scores and projects … (that) have never been less than fascinating.”

Indeed, Batt’s career seems to have been nearly uncategorizable: “… One minute he’s knocking out a global soft-rock smash for Garfunkel, the next he’s taken off on a round-the-world yachting trip and is proffering a concept album about it … he protests that he’s not taken seriously as an orchestral conductor. ‘Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between my version of the Planets suite and Simon Rattle’s.'” Had the Wombles’ tunes “not been performed by himself and sundry cohorts in vast, furry costumes made by (Batt’s) mother, it’s hard not to feel they would be widely hailed as classic bubblegum pop – as indeed they were by the late Dee Dee Ramone, who unexpectedly outed himself as a fan of their keep-fit-themed 1974 album track ‘Exercise Is Good for You (Laziness Is Not)‘ in Legs McNeil’s oral history of US punk, Please Kill Me.”

1992’s “Better Than a Dream,” which starts as a piano ballad but evolves into a full orchestral accompaniment, begins in C major. But at 2:20, the dense texture of a brass fanfare shifts the tune to Eb major. Many thanks to our contributor Julianna A. for this submission!