Category: Elise

Carole King and James Taylor | Up on the Roof

“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.

for Shayna

For reference, here’s the 1962 original:

Guys ‘n’ Dolls | There’s a Whole Lot of Loving

“Yes, we have reached the stage where a song from a McVitie’s fruit shortcake TV ad can be recorded and released as a hit single.” (Music Sounds Better With Two). “The song itself has nothing to do with cookies and a lot to do with the natural hugeness of the United States (the songwriters were American).  It’s a proper song, not a jingle fleshed out.  The loving going on is abstract; the love could be for anyone, but it’s heartfelt and the wholesome goodness of the song’s sing-a-long style matches the Hoover Dam mention.  It could be straight out of a musical, though usually there’s a bit more plot in a stage song.

I don’t know if this was expected to be a hit – but it was.  So, what to do?  On very short notice, a group of male and female singers were put together so they could appear as Guys ‘n’ Dolls for promotional purposes – miming the song and dancing on variety shows … There was no time to re-record the song with the new group, however. It worked, at least at first … This scam, if you like, did have one unintended consequence. A few years after their being relieved from Guys ‘n’ Dolls, Theresa Bazar – the female of the pair – approached the studio bass player, one Trevor Horn, to see if he would be interested in working with her and David Van Day, the male of the pair. He was and so they did – as the duo Dollar. And so from late 1974, the tiny seeds of something different were being sown.”

The intro features a few psychedelic-adjacent instrumental touches before it kicks into its full “Up With People”/The Bicentennial is Approaching — Look Busy! vibe in earnest at 0:33. At 1:45 and 2:30, the string-saturated key changes are unsubtle enough to drive your Great Aunt Mildred’s V8 Buick Electra through — with room to spare.

Glasys | Back to Reality

“GLASYS (Gil Assayas) is a pianist, synthesist, producer and vocalist who melds many genres and influences including Electronic Music, Alternative Rock, Jazz, Classical and Video Game Music,” (from Glasys’ site). “This album (Tugging on My Heartchips) is mainly inspired by the Gameboy games from my childhood. As a kid, the only gaming console I had was the original gray Gameboy, which I spent countless hours playing.

Some of those games had incredible soundtracks (Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge are two examples) and I’d often turn on my Gameboy just to listen to the music! No joke, some of those themes would make me tear up. I tried to capture those magical, nostalgic feelings in this 7-track album.”

After starting with a theme in an A dorian scale, the same passage is repeated in C# dorian at 0:59 on “Back to Reality” (2023). At 1:39, a bridge falls gradually downward, leading us back to A dorian at 1:54; the pattern repeats from there. Throughout the video, the virtual and the real world fight for prominence, until the timbre shifts from electronic keyboards to acoustic piano at 3:19, visiting the same territory with more expression and rubato. However, the digital world seems to get the last word as the end fade brings a subtly deflating tonality (4:20).

Jane Siberry | Mimi on the Beach

“Canadian art-pop chanteuse Jane Siberry stands outside the traditional boundaries of folk and pop music, creating ethereal, unconventional songs that draw from a deep wellspring of creativity,” (AllMusic). “Emerging in the early ’80s, Siberry courted mainstream success with left-of-center hits like “Mimi on the Beach,” “I Muse Aloud,” “One More Colour,” and “Calling All Angels.” As the decades progressed, she began weaving elements of jazz and Celtic music into her cosmopolitan sound — which evokes names like Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, Toyah Willcox, Suzanne Vega, and Laurie Anderson — while remaining fiercely independent and releasing her material via her own label, Sheeba Records.

… “No Borders Here (is an) assured, cinematic collection highlighted by ‘Mimi on the Beach,’ an underground Canadian hit,” which the 1984 album’s liner notes describe as a ‘7.5 minute art-rock single.'”

Built in G major overall, the tune takes a turn after the second verse, when the pre-chorus arrives at 2:35. The previously relentless 8th-note accompaniment is suspended as the melody shifts to short upgoing segments. At 2:42, the melody starts (but doesn’t complete) an E whole-tone scale, further unmooring the listener. At 2:51, the chorus lands in B minor.

The Maisonettes | Heartache Avenue

“The Maisonettes’ oddness lay not so much in their hit as their combination of maverick indie record label beginnings with a semi-manufactured image that some indie purists might find crass,” (LastFM). “Their hit, ‘Heartache Avenue,’ entered the UK chart in late 1982 and rose all the way up to number seven. Like most of the music they would record over the next year or two, it was fairly mainstream pop / rock with early 1980s synthesizer-abetted production and a notable (but not overwhelming) 1960s soul-pop influence, with a particularly audible debt to Motown.” The manufactured nature of the UK band’s lineup was driven completely by the nascent music video era: the backup vocalists didn’t sing on the studio version of the tune (or anything else), but rather were strictly dancers who could also lip-sync. Many saw this limitation on the band’s flexibility as a cause of its demise.

The public’s taste for music based on a nod to the past proved limited: ” … interest in the revival of the sounds and fashions of the Mod and Beat Generation era of the 60s was starting to cool off (the break-up of The Jam proving the final nail in the coffin). The Maisonettes never did get into the chart again …”

After beginning in a slightly detuned F# major, 0:33 – 0:40 brings a short pre-chorus. After a second verse and pre-chorus, a more ambitious G# major chorus hits from 1:19 – 1:42, making the verse seem rather connect-the-dots by comparison. The key reverts to the original F# for another verse, then lifts again to G# at 2:13 for another chorus.

Weather Report | A Remark You Made

“Weather Report were one of the earliest jazz fusion groups to emerge at the beginning of the ’70s,” (AllAboutJazz). “They were rare in that, like Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, they didn’t have a guitarist to light the fire and excite the audience as was the case with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever; instead, they relied, in addition to pure instrumental virtuosity, upon intelligent compositions. The band’s founding members were none other than Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, two exceptional musicians who had already contributed considerably to Miles Davis’ continuing evolution throughout the ’60s and into the early ’70s; some of the great trumpeter’s most pioneering achievements might not, in fact, have been possible without them.

Now, forty years after the event, Heavy Weather (1977) was the Weather Report’s major commercial breakthrough; arguably their finest album ever, it succeeded in breathing new life into a genre that was challenged to compete against the latest pop/rock fads of the time. Part of the LP’s success, it must be said, was due to the group’s enlisting of John Francis ‘Jaco’ Pastorius, fretless electric bassist extraordinaire; a man who forever altered the perception of his instrument and whose self-titled 1976 Epic Records debut caused such a sensation that, at the time, many considered it to be one the greatest bass albums ever recorded.”

Heavy Weather‘s “A Remark You Made” isn’t full of the fireworks of the album’s uptempo tracks, such as “Birdland” or “Teen Town.” But it nonetheless clearly showcases the expert interaction among the band’s master musicians. After a start in Eb major, the plaintive main theme comes from the Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass as the tonality flips to the relative minor, C minor, at 0:31, then continues for a gently atmospheric solo from bandleader Joe Zawinul’s keyboards until 1:11. Continuing in Eb major, Wayne Shorter’s fluid tenor takes the spotlight, joined here and there on the melody by Jaco (3:49) until the bass returns to holding down the roots (4:06) under a protracted solo from Zawinul that borders on hypnotic, cycling through only two chords. At 5:39, Jaco re-states the opening theme, then repeats it over and over; the upgoing lyrical melody is underlined all the more by the downward chromatic motion of the bass line itself, which ranges from C down to G before jumping back up to C during each cycle (starting at 5:39-5:50). At 6:21, A Db major chord wakes us from our sustained idyll; serving as a bVII of Eb, it delivers us back into the original Eb major.

for Scobie

Annie Lennox | Cold

“From the very beginning of her rise to international stardom, Annie Lennox desperately wanted to transcend her own fame,” (Pitchfork). “Her breakout single as one half of Eurythmics, 1983’s ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),’ encapsulated her anxieties as a frontwoman in the increasingly panoptic public eye: ‘Everybody’s looking for something,’ she warned … Like an international spy, Lennox used clothing and makeup as tools of professional disguise, continuously shapeshifting … many of Lennox’s characters served as commentary on societal perceptions of fame, wealth, and gender … But even if her facades had successfully warded off the media’s leering eye—even if she hadn’t been dubbed ‘Britain’s most tortured rock star’ … Lennox might still have justifiably burnt out by the end of the decade. Eurythmics were incredibly prolific, releasing almost an album a year starting with their 1981 debut In the Garden. Almost every album begot an international tour, with little downtime to recuperate. ‘I had this vision constantly towards the end of the Eurythmics period,’ Lennox later told Q, ‘my life was a bus, but I was running behind it. I just could not catch up with that fucking bus.'”

After she stepped away from Eurythmics and her longtime artistic partner Dave Stewart, “Diva (1992) broke dramatically with Eurythmics in style and substance: Where her work with Stewart trafficked in restless anxieties, her solo work was a step towards the wistful, patient resolve of womanhood … Despite the velveteen, varied instrumentation on Diva, Lennox’s voice is the album’s most essential and expansive element … a veritable one-woman orchestra.

In a decade marked by the meteoric rise of prefab boy bands, the explosion and subsequent implosion of Britpop, and the tragic, paparazzi-fueled death of Princess Diana, Diva is a prophetic warning about the acceleration of fame … In her eerily predictive manner, Lennox identified Ivana Trump as a bellwether for the growing influence wielded by, as she put it in 1992, ‘people famous for being famous.'”

On “Cold,” one of Diva‘s ballads, the verses never settle into one key (the music starts at 0:44, after a cinematic intro). The first progression, I – bIII – IV – I in G major (0:56 – 1:19), alternates with a second progression (1:20 – 1:43), which features the ii-V (and eventually the I) of the closely related key of D major. This tonality shift continues throughout all of the verses. Amid the rangy yet fluid melody and intensely emotive lyrics, somehow not a hair seems out of place.

Burt Bacharach | The Look of Love (feat. Diana Krall)

We usually wrap up our week with an up-tempo rock or dance tune, but this week we’ll continue to look back at the singular career of legendary songwriter Burt Bacharach, whose work has been a frequent feature on MotD. Bacharach’s work not only featured a broad harmonic vocabulary — including plenty of modulations. It generally stepped lightly through complex harmonic and meter transitions which only fully came to light after several listening sessions, rarely “telegraphing” themselves in advance. Bacharach generally avoided cliché half-step or whole-step key changes; rather, he favored transitions between closely-related keys, which don’t hit the listener like a brick upside the head, but a bit more like the sun gradually peeking through the clouds. He hid all the seams and made the final result sound effortless.

Bacharach studied composition with composer Darius Milhaud, one of the members of the informal but influential guild of progressive French composers, “Les Six.” Key changes and meter changes were not special effects for Bacharach, but rather organic tools for expression. Composer/pianist Ethan Iverson reports that Milhaud “told Bacharach that he shouldn’t worry about dodecaphony and keep composing those nice melodies.”

Iverson continues: “In his 60s songs, Bacharach undoes conventional pop from deep underneath the surface. ‘Hooks’ are almost always a bit asymmetrical, but Burt’s are truly lopsided. In the background of his radio-friendly hits, there is an echo of bebop logic, an echo of Schoenbergian logic.” Lyricist Hal David, Iverson suggests, “searched a surreal and overcast meadow for unexpected rhyme and reason.” Iverson continues by saying that jazz musician Dave Frishberg, when learning to write memorable themes, studied “the ‘4 Bs’: The Beach Boys, the Beatles, Brazilian, and Bacharach. (‘Brazilian’ means Jobim, Gilberto, Mendes, etc.)”

“The Look of Love,” originally released by Dusty Springfield in 1967, was covered by jazz vocalist/pianist Diana Krall for a 2012 performance at the White House as part of the In Performance at the White House | Burt Bacharach + Hal David: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song PBS broadcast in May 2012. While Bacharach was present for the performance, Krall’s emotional mention of David hints at the ill health of the lyricist, who lived only a few more months. Krall’s version of the #22 US pop hit, which features plenty of “Burt-isms” in her piano work, is in Bb major overall, but shifts to Bb minor from 3:59 – 4:10. The modulation is situated in the heart of an outro that seems lit only by hushed twilight (3:59 onward), during which Krall communes with her bassist as the two negotiate the subtle ritardando that brings the tune in for a landing. The final Bb major tonic chord rings out at 4:10, complicated by the quintessentially Bachrachian #11 tension Krall repeats several times.

Samara Joy | Can’t Get Out of This Mood

“Samara Joy won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best New Artist,” (Vulture). “The 23-year-old singer took the stage in front of her idols. ‘Some of my biggest inspirations were in the room,’ she said at the Grammy press room. ‘Beyoncé, Lizzo, to name a few.’

Joy first started singing jazz while in high school in the Bronx. She hopes to return there and give a performance or start a foundation. She got a record deal after a video of her covering Ella Fitzgerald’s “Take Love Easy” went viral … One thing that sets Joy apart from her fellow New Artists is her reliance on jazz standards. Her Grammy-winning album, Linger Awhile (Best New Artist is an album-less category, but Linger Awhile also won for Best Jazz Vocal Album) is full of songs that have been done by Joy’s vocal predecessors. ‘I love the music I grew up on,’ Joy said in the Grammy press room. ‘What drew me to jazz was the authenticity of it.'” Born in the waning days of 1999, Joy won a Best New Artist award from Jazz Times in the wake of the release of her eponymous first album in 2021.

Joy indeed seems to channel Ella on the live version of “Can’t Get Out of This Mood” from this week’s 2023 Grammy ceremony broadcast. After a start in F major, the tune shifts up at 2:08 into Gb major.

Owsley | I’m Alright

“Audacious musicians are the best,” (Harvard Crimson). “They’ve been all over the map with their talents and tastes, they’ve been a part of power-pop band The Semantics, they’ve toured with Shania Twain, Pat McGee, Amy Grant and Janis Joplin to get a foothold in the music industry, they’ve jammed with Ben Folds for fun. And then they retire to their living rooms in Alabama to craft their solo pilot over four meticulous years, which they subsequently drop off at the major labels with a rakish take-it-or-leave-it attitude until Giant Records snaps it up. As a result, they make music that’s informed and intelligent, yet independent and fresh.

That’s Will Owsley, recommended by his history and spirit and supported by a very strong debut album of 11 rock gems … The songs here don’t address urgent issues or bleed hearts and even have a tendency to sound like one another, but they do serve blissful, slightly off-center rock with consistent crunch. They make you shut your eyes, nod emphatically and belch, ‘Yey-ahh. Thank god for audacious musicians.'”

The meticulously produced “I’m Alright” is a track from Owsley’s eponymous debut album (1999), recorded in his home studio, which went on to receive a Grammy nod for Best Engineered album. The track starts in E major, shifts to E minor for the first chorus (0:40); the pattern continues until 1:34, where an instrumental verse arrives in Eb major. At 1:51, we’re back to the original E major/minor pattern.