Elise – Page 5

21 Guns (from “American Idiot”)

“When young dirtbag punk trio Green Day signed to a major label in 1994, their first album, Dookie, captured the small pleasures of a disconnected working-class youth that was fast running out of options,” (The Guardian). “Their songs about getting high, jerking off and defiantly refusing to participate in the system were relatable and catchy – pleasingly melodic with 1950s doo-wop influences, coupled with California punk-style bass and drums. Pop-punk would later explode as a genre, in part to emulate Green Day’s singable raucousness.

Their ideas back then were scattershot, more informed by feeling than sociopolitical thought. But 10 years later, the band found their political voice and released their manifesto: American Idiot. Billed as a “rock opera”, the album was a sophisticated, horrified portrait of America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the conservative Bush presidency, and rapidly disappearing opportunities for those living close to America’s poverty line. American Idiot was a smash, selling 15 million records – and in 2010, a stage adaptation landed on Broadway. The album’s driving rock structure was coupled with songs from Green Day’s next album, 21st Century Breakdown, and caressed into soaring, edgy vocal arrangements and new orchestrations by the band and composer Tom Kitt, whose musical Next to Normal picked up a Pulitzer prize that same year.”

The original “21 Guns,” released on 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown, was written in one key throughout. But the Broadway version, while built around the same repeating melodic phrases and lyrics-forward delivery, features several changes in tonality. Starting in G minor, the tune shifts (after two verses and a chorus in the relative Bb major performed by female vocalists) to D minor as Green Day’s lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong takes the reins. For the second chorus, the key flips over to the relative F major at 2:34. More key changes follow throghout.

The original video by the band is included after the cast version from the 2010 stage producion, below.

Dexys Midnight Runners | Come On Eileen

“Context is a funny thing. In the UK, Dexys Midnight Runners were a troubled institution — a chaotic young band who couldn’t stop breaking apart and reforming and who still managed to tap into some dizzy zeitgeist more than once,” (Stereogum). “In the US, Dexys are classic one-hit wonders: Scraggly and goofy-looking British weirdos in overalls who were all over MTV for a couple of months and who then disappeared forever. On two sides of the Atlantic, this one band has two vastly different legacies.

But where ‘Come On Eileen’ is concerned, the greater context of Dexys Midnight Runners almost doesn’t matter. The effect was the same. ‘Come On Eileen’ was a #1 hit in both countries, and it remains a fondly remembered piece of pop-music history. You could revere “Come On Eileen” as a classic, or you could see it as an embarrassing little short-lived gimmick. Either way, when you’re three drinks deep and ‘Come On Eileen’ comes on at the bar, you’re singing along.

A big part of the charm of ‘Come On Eileen’ (1983) is Rowland’s voice. He’s clearly not the soul singer that he wants to be, but he doesn’t let that stop him. He yelps and wails as hard as he can, and his Northern English honk bulldozes through all the strings and horns around him. When “Come On Eileen” turns into a big mass singalong, it finds a certain drinking-song grandeur … it’s an elegantly written song about real, intense feelings, and it’s got a monster hook. Besides that, a mass singalong remains a joyous thing. I’ve had nights that were greatly improved by the existence of ‘Come On Eileen.’ You probably have, too.”

After beginning in C major for the intro and first verse, the chorus shifts up to D major at 1:07. At 1:28, the original key returns for an interlude mirroring the intro, then another verse. The two keys continue to alternate from there.

D’Angelo | Another Life

“D’Angelo established himself as an unwitting founder and leading light of the late-’90s neo-soul movement, which aimed to bring the organic flavor of classic R&B back to the hip-hop age,” (Qobuz). “Modeling himself on the likes of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, and Prince, D’Angelo exhibited his inspirations not only with his vocal style — albeit with a stoned yet emotive twist all his own — but also wrote his own material, and frequently produced it, helping to revive the concept of the all-purpose R&B auteur. His first album, Brown Sugar (1995), gradually earned him an audience so devoted that the looser and rhythmically richer follow-up, Voodoo (2000), debuted at number one despite a gap of almost five years, and won that year’s Grammy for Best R&B Album. A wait of nearly three times that length preceded the release of the bristlier Black Messiah (2014), a Top Five hit that made D’Angelo a two-time Best R&B Album winner. The musician worked on material for a prospective fourth album before he died of pancreatic cancer (in October 2025).

Between proper LPs, D’Angelo took some time off and split acrimoniously with his management. Meanwhile, neo-soul, a marketing term coined by industry executive Kedar Massenburg, caught on as a legitimate subgenre with the success of like-minded artists such as Maxwell and Erykah Badu. D’Angelo surfaced on a handful of soundtracks, primarily via cover versions, contemporizing Eddie Kendricks’ ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind’ (Get on the Bus), Prince’s ‘She’s Always in My Hair’ (Scream 2), Ohio Players’ ‘Heaven Must Be Like This’ (Down in the Delta), and Ashford & Simpson’s ‘Your Precious Love’ (a duet with Badu, for High School High) … He joined Lauryn Hill on ‘Nothing Even Matters,’ a cut off the Grammy-winning The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” … and worked extensively with QuestLove, drummer from The Roots. “Raphael Saadiq stated in an interview roughly a year earlier that D’Angelo had been writing songs for the follow-up to Black Messiah.”

Starting in Bb minor, “Another Life,” the closing track from 2014’s Black Messiah, shifts into multi-layered territory at 1:11, sidling up to D major at 1:38 via some slinky compound chords. At 1:52, there’s a rather rash return to Bb minor, but the groove is so profound that you’ll just keep nodding your head. More key changes follow throughout.

Joni Mitchell | My Old Man

“Joni Mitchell’s ‘My Old Man’ is quintessentially Joni: whimsically metaphorical, groundedly realistic, and fiercely independent with its laissez-faire approach to long-term, committed relationships,” (American Songwriter). “She wrote the iconic track, which she included on the 1971 album Blue while living on Lookout Mountain in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. At the time, Mitchell was in a whirlwind relationship with Graham Nash—a relationship that, although doomed from the start, produced other enduring tracks like ‘Our House’ and ‘A Case of You,’ the latter of which is also on ‘Blue.’

A definitive musical power couple, Mitchell and Nash’s relationship was bigger than either party and, as the song clearly states, antiquated ideas of legal domesticity through marriage. Within the context of Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s relationship, the opening lines of ‘My Old Man’ paint a clear picture of the creative duo: My old man is a singer in the park; he’s a walker in the rain; he’s a dancer in the dark. Almost immediately, Mitchell asserts the fact that neither party feels the need to validate their bond through traditional means of marriage. We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true, she sings in the chorus. “

The intro and choruses are built in A major; the melody soars to Mitchell’s legendary high range as she details times spent together with her partner. From 1:17 -1 1:42, a verse (bridge?) cycles through several keys, all providing vivid contrast to A major! After another chorus, the verse/bridge (which returns at 2:17 – 2:42), which recounts the couple’s time apart, features a lower melody and more complex, darker harmonies.

Robert Glasper Experiment | No One Like You

“For almost a decade, Robert Glasper has been the standard-bearer for jazz music’s fusion with hip-hop, soul, and rock, turning songs like Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and Radiohead’s ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’ into kinetic electro-funk mashups,” (Pitchfork). “With his Experiment band, Glasper (tends) to leapfrog different genres, making music that’s rooted in jazz and R&B and impossible to peg. ‘My people have given the world so many styles of music,’ Glasper declares at the top of ArtScience (2016), the Experiment’s new album. ‘So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.’

ArtScience follows Black Radio 2, the band’s guest-heavy 2013 LP featuring rappers Common, Snoop Dogg and Lupe Fiasco, and singers Jill Scott and Norah Jones, among many others. On it and the band’s first Black Radio album, the Glasper Experiment mostly stayed in the background, giving room to their guests to shine atop the group’s instrumentals. The formula worked: Black Radio won the 2012 Grammy for Best R&B Album, and ‘Jesus Children’—a Stevie Wonder remake from Black Radio 2, featuring vocalist Lalah Hathaway and actor/poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner—won the 2014 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

For ArtScience, the Experiment keeps things in-house, handling all the vocal work themselves … ArtScience doesn’t play like an R&B or jazz record; it pulls in ’80s funk and ’90s soul without landing any place in particular. For the first time, we get to hear the Experiment let go for a full project, not just on a few songs here and there … ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.”

“No One Like You,” a track from ArtScience, begins in C minor. For its chorus, first heard from 0:36 – 0:53, the tonality shifts to Eb minor before returning to the original key. The two sections continue to alternate throughout the tune.

Jeff Beck + Rod Stewart | People Get Ready

“Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart played together in a band for roughly two years in the late ’60s, enjoying two Top 20 albums and several tours as part of the Jeff Beck Group,” (UltimateClassicRock). “But like a great many high-profile bands, success on the outside didn’t always translate to the inside. Riddled with disagreement among band members … the Jeff Beck Group split up in 1969. Stewart, for his part, found Beck to be an astounding musician but an incapable leader … ‘I never felt he was going to put an arm around someone and check that they were all right,’ Stewart wrote in his 2013 book, Rod: The Autobiography … Stewart continued with his solo career, as well as with a new band, Faces (which also included Wood), while Beck re-formed the Jeff Beck Group with new players and released solo music.” It was apparently a a musical break-up that was short on acrimony — just a mutual decision to go separate ways.

Years later, the two reunited and recorded a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s 1965 track “People Get Ready.” The cover “stalled at No. 48 in the U.S. and didn’t make the chart at all in the U.K. The album the song appeared on, Beck’s Flash (1985), reached No. 39 on the Billboard 200. Still, “People Get Ready” was “a moment of resolution for Stewart and Beck. ‘I was glad about doing [it],’ Beck later recalled. ‘Because people could see we didn’t hate each other. That it was all good, so to speak.’ … When Beck died in January 2023, Stewart shared his condolences online. ‘Jeff Beck was on another planet. He was one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond. Jeff, you were the greatest, my man. Thank you for everything.'”

Leading into a protracted guitar solo late in the tune, the track shifts up a half-step at 3:29 as Beck states the simple but compelling four-note hook. The amusing opening to the video shows Stewart writing a quick note to Beck: “Jeff, why not come to L.A. and take up the guitar professionally?”

Earth, Wind + Fire | Mighty Mighty

“It wasn’t until their fifth album, 1974’s Open Our Eyes, that EW+F started to have hits. (Lead singer Maurice) White had brought in Charles Stepney, a friend and colleague from Chicago (and also in-house arranger and producer at Chess Records, where White had cut his teeth as a session drummer in the late 60s), to co-produce, and sessions took place in Colorado in 1973,” (The Guardian).

“Philip Bailey had joined, and he and Maurice became a potent force with their striking dual vocals – an idea the band patterned in part on Sérgio Mendes’s Brasil 66. The first single from the album, ‘Mighty Mighty,’ echoes key EW+F influences (Sly + the Family Stone formally; Curtis Mayfield in the title and lyrical tone), but is definably the work of a band in charge of their own sound and style.”

The 1974 tune hit #29 on Billboard‘s pop chart and #4 on its Hot Soul Singles chart. Its heavy funk groove drives the track to its first upward half-step key change (0:52). After the first chorus, the tonality falls back to the original key at 1:25. The cycle repeats from there.

The Winstons | Color Him Father

“In 1969 an interracial R&B group from Washington, DC posted their one and only Top 40 hit,” (45RuminationsPerMegabyte). “The song, ‘Color Him Father,’ is written from the point of view of a young man explaining the role his father has in their house. He sings of coming home from school, and how his father stresses the importance of education, and how the man he calls father helps his mother, and all of that. At first, it seems like just another cute song with simple lyrics (‘My mother loves him and I can tell/By the way she looks at him when he holds my little sister Nell’ isn’t the greatest rhyme ever written, but it works). After a quick bridge, the tone abruptly changes:

My real old man he got killed in the war
And she knows she and seven kids couldn’t have got very far
She said she thought that she could never love again
And then there he stood with that big wide grin
He married my mother and he took us in
And now we belong to the man with that big wide grin

Yep – this is a song about step-parenting, and it just got really, really dusty in here. The song went on to become a huge hit, making it to #7 on the pop chart, #2 on the R&B chart, and claiming the Grammy award for Best R&B song in 1969.”

After running in Ab major through several verses and choruses, a brief instrumental interlude (1:59) shifts us up to A major for another verse and chorus.

Yes | I’ve Seen All Good People

“Yes’ ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ (1971) is an unlikely rock masterpiece. The song, an arrangement of two separate pieces (‘Your Move’ by Jon Anderson and ‘All Good People’ by Chris Squire), contains many elements not commonly contained in rock music,” (Something Else Reviews). “The combination works in this case, however, producing the most-played Yes song in the band’s cannon.

‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ starts with a compelling three-part harmony a capella opening by Anderson, Squire and Howe. The Yes choir has never sounded so resolved … Instead of an electric power-chord introduction, Steve Howe utilizes a Portuguese guitar in a fleet-fingered opening to accompany Jon Anderson. His vivid lyrics are in turn buoyed only by the bass drum of Bill Bruford. In another unusual move, Yes utilizes a non-band member in Colin Goldring, whose recorder adds additional colors to the song. By this time, Anderson’s lyrics shift from person to spiritual: ‘ … ’cause his time is time in time with your time’ … The harmonies build to a powerful wave of voices … Tony Kaye’s Hammond organ joins over a background chorus, which references John Lennon’s classic ‘Give Peace a Chance’ … Howe provides a now-classic electric guitar solo … while Bill Bruford and Chris Squire continue to amp up Yes’ energy. By the coda of ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ … you’ve experienced one the very best songs recorded by the world’s greatest progressive rock band.”

Beginning in E major, the track grows from the a cappella intro to a gentle first verse and onward from there, eventually expanding to an expansive pipe organ accompaniment. At 3:32, the second movement begins — at first apparently also in E major and built around a hard swing feel. The bass motion wanders all over the place, with passing hints that we’re continuing in E major, A major, or B major. But the most prominent feature is bass motion from E down to D natural and then down to C natural, ruling out any of those options. At 5:58, the grooveless outro features multiple downward modulations as the volume fades — along with any chance for a clear guidline on the tonality of the second movement!

Survivor | The Search is Over

“Where did Survivor’s soaring power ballad ‘The Search Is Over’ come from? It’s partly a mystery,” (The Tennessean). “The group’s Jim Peterik — who penned the tune with bandmate Frankie Sullivan — believes the title came from something he heard on a news broadcast. But as for that daring key change, which turns every chorus on its ear? Thirty-five years later, Peterik still doesn’t know how he came up with it, or why it works so well. But it did: ‘The Search Is Over’ became one of Survivor’s biggest hits, and a staple of its concerts.”

Peterik: “‘The Search is Over’ is still on the radio partly because it really has a message that sometimes you take for granted what’s right in front of your eyes, and you have to go full circle around the world to come back to where you started … one of my favorite royalties, and it’s not money — It’s the stories. ‘I got married to that song, and that’s our song.’ I get, ‘It was at my father’s funeral.’ Even Alcoholics Anonymous meetings use that song. ‘The search is over.’ You’ve got it right here.”

Built in a slightly de-tuned Eb major overall, the beginning of the chorus shifts to C major at 0:55. But partway through the chorus, the tonality returns to the original key (1:10). The pattern continues from there. Be forewarned: the video is 100% industrial-grade ’80s! Many thanks to regular contributor Rob P. for submitting this tune.