JB – Page 20

Nickel Creek | Love of Mine

Acoustic trio Nickel Creek‘s first self-released recordings appeared in the 1990s; its platinum-selling eponymous major label debut was in 2000. 2014’s A Dotted Line appeared after a break of nearly a decade. “There’s a fluid confidence that takes (Nickel Creek’s) precocious virtuosity into a musicianship that is as supple as it is kinetic,” (Paste). “…the progressive bluegrass they embraced as teenagers is a mere starting point—integrating the places the trio explored during the seven years since they released a studio project.

(Mandolinist/vocalist) Chris Thile emerges as perhaps the unrepentant romantic. ‘Love of Mine,’ with his voice tenderly tentative, weightlessly caresses what might be (then later might not). The see-saw of emotions is so well-reflected in how the instruments tangle, merge and fall out—paralleling what’s being sung … Not merely a product of maturity, Nickel Creek has grown without losing its palpable joy or wondrous ability to make musicianship as accessible as the engaging way their voices draw listeners to them.”

After a start in F# minor, a brief foray into F minor appears at 0:44 before reverting to the original key at 0:51. The two keys then proceed to quarrel it out to a draw, the intensity of the upward key changes only magnified by the common melody note on either side of the modulation.

Tower of Power | Maybe It’ll Rub Off

“In the realm of power funk and jazz-rock, Tower of Power was an original voice, one carved from a unique place within an exceptionally heady moment,” (AllAboutJazz). “And this convergence of forces, clearly, has yet to cool some 53 years hence. Horns? They’ve carried up to six at a time, to hell with diminished door splits. A big band of scorching funk, Tower of Power traces its roots to 1968 Oakland, where it flourished in a thicket of sound tearing at industry barriers. The band, initially dubbed the Motowns, was founded at the juncture which begat Blood Sweat and Tears, Chicago Transit Authority, and Earth Wind and Fire. Even then, the soul—if you will—of Tower of Power was born in the muscular arrangements and searing leads of the former as much as the latter’s R&B core.”

Tower of Power released Urban Renewal in 1974 — one of three releases by the band that year, just four years into its history. Although the album lacked an uptempo hit like “What is Hip?” or a stand-out lush ballad like “So Very Hard to Go” or “You’re Still a Young Man,” the release was a snapshot of the band hitting its stride.

“Maybe It’ll Rub Off,” built in F major overall, features an instrumental mid-section that meanders through several other keys between 1:45 and 2:31, when it returns to the initial key.

Michael Biggins | Ding Dong Merrily on High

This week we will be featuring guest submissions, kicking off with our newest masthead contributor JB, who provided the write-up below:

Even though it sounds like a modern commercial jingle, the melody of Ding Dong Merrily on High is at least 500 years old, and the current lyrics are nearly 100 years old.

While there have been many recordings of this tune over the years — including the iconic Wiggles version from A Wiggly Wiggly Christmas — it’s a safe bet that none of them has had more modulations than Michael Biggins’ version. There are key changes at 1:04 and 1:27, a full mode change from 1:50-2:14, and multiple keys-of-the-moment and other harmonic tensions sprinkled throughout.

Biggins was named the 2021 Young Traditional Musician of the Year by BBC Radio Scotland, the first pianist ever to win this prestigious award. One of the reasons that the award had, in the past, always recognized pipers, fiddlers, and other players of melody instruments is that the piano is generally relagated to the role of a rhythm instrument in Scottish trad, playing simple boom-chuck accompaniment to support the melody players. This role delineation is still honored in the video, where Biggins plays all the virtuosic tracks on the accordion (generally a melody instrument in Scottish trad), while keeping the piano track well below his pay grade.

Kansas | Carry On Wayward Son

Many thanks to uber-regular contributor JB for this submission! For anyone who was alive — and less than retirement age — in mid-1970s America, “Carry On Wayward Son” was nothing less than inescapable.

“I’ve always thought Kansas was an interesting hybrid of two different genres: Prog vs. ‘trad’ rock … I remember hearing a surprising amount of Kansas at frat parties during college, mixed in with the Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd — you’d never hear Genesis or Gentle Giant in a frat basement, but there was Kansas, WAY more rhythmically and harmonically complex than the other hard rock songs … a sheep in wolf’s clothing, as it were.”

LouderSound reports that “the track peaked at #11 in the US (1976), helping to propel parent album Leftoverture to #5 in the Billboard Hot 100 … Four decades on, it’s become more even famous than the band that recorded it, its meaning almost lost to ubiquity. It was the second most played track on US classic rock radio in 1995, topping the same chart in 1997, and at the last count, having appeared in TV comedy shows and films that include South Park and Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, has logged up more than two million downloads during the digital era.”

After the tune begins in A minor, 4:14 brings a shift to E minor.

Connie Laverne | Can’t Live Without You

“Can’t Live Without You” by Connie Laverne was originally released as white label DJ copy on the New York record label GSF shortly before the label folded in 1974,” reports Sam Beaubien of NPR affiliate WDET’s program CultureShift. “This record is rarely seen and is highly coveted … (it became) popular through modern DJs playing this song in their sets, specifically in the UK. Since then, the track has been remastered and released for the Club Classics album celebrating 50 years of UK’s Northern Soul scene.

Information on the vocalist Connie Laverne is extremely hard to find. GrooveCollector states that the single was produced by George Kerr. Phyllis Hyman later recorded (but didn’t release) a version of the tune. From The Guardian’s overview of the genre, which is said to have been the UK’s answer to Motown: “One of the many beauties of Northern Soul is its sheer unknowability. It’s a scene that has always thrived on the rare, the obscure, and the undiscovered. Since it first emerged in the dance halls of northern England in the late 60s, it has existed in direct opposition to the very concept of greatest hits … There is no carved-in-stone canon – everyone’s journey through it is unique. Northern Soul is a culture based on chance finds, crate-digging and word-of-mouth recommendations.”

1:12 brings a half-step upward modulation; at 1:43, we seem to be headed for another, but we fall back into the original key instead! Many thanks to our prolific contributor JB!

Ben Folds Five | Alice Childress

The 1995 track “Alice Childress” by the “guitarless, and seemingly numerically-challenged, indie-pop trio Ben Folds Five,” (The Delete Bin) … “does without many indie-pop conventions of the time, yet is packed with ironic humour, punk energy, and in this tune in particular, a profound sense of pathos, too.” The band’s music, “centered around Ben Folds’ sardonic lyrics and jazz-influenced piano, is infused with a sense of irony that undercuts the way it might be perceived on the first go-round as straight-ahead pop music. As such, the trio wasn’t exactly the darling of North American radio at the time this record was released, even if they had a strong grass roots appeal on college radio.”

The song was co-written by Folds’ then-wife Anna Goodman. It “seemingly name-checks American author and playwright Alice Childress,” but is actually about a woman who was under Goodman’s care at a mental hospital where Goodman worked. “… the song was once centered around a specific experience, Folds took it to another plane, telling a tale of separation and alienation between two lovers who’ve come to grow in different directions, both geographically as well as emotionally. There is a certain irony here, given Folds’ relationship with Goodman, which ended a few years before this song appeared on the band’s debut record.”

Starting and ending in B major, the tune shifts to G major from 2:16 – 2:43, with plenty of compound chord sleight of hand throughout. Many thanks to our mod wrangler extraordinaire JB for this submission!

Electric Light Orchestra | Mr. Blue Sky

Jeff Lynne, who essentially is Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), wrote and produced “Mr. Blue Sky,” which was recorded for the UK band’s Out of the Blue album in 1977. “The song forms the fourth and final track of the ‘Concerto for a Rainy Day’ suite, on side three of the original double album, and was later released as a standalone single,” (SmoothRadio.com). ELO’s mix of modern production, tips of the hat to Beatle-esque songwriting, and unapologetic earnestness was popular with the public: RockFandom.com reports that “from 1972 to 1986, ELO accumulated 27 Top-40 hit singles in both the UK and the US. The group also scored 20 Top 20 UK hit singles, as well as 15 Top-20 hit singles in the US . The band also holds the record for having the most Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hits of any group in US chart history without ever having a number one single.”

“Lynne has said that he wrote ‘Mr Blue Sky’ after locking himself away in a Swiss chalet, and attempting to write ELO’s follow-up album to (the 1976 release) A New World Record (Smoothradio.com). ‘It was dark and misty for two weeks, and I didn’t come up with a thing,’ he told the BBC. ‘Suddenly the sun shone and it was, Wow, look at those beautiful Alps. I wrote it, and 13 other songs, in the next two weeks.'” The tune reached only #6 on the UK pop charts and only #35 in the US, but retroactively has become a classic: “it has since become ELO’s signature song, and has been one of the most downloaded and streamed songs of the 1970s” and has been featured in many TV and film productions, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Doctor Who.

Written mostly in an emphatic F major, 3:43 brings an extended instrumental outro. Starting in Db major, the outro heavily features two ELO signatures: choir and strings. At 4:24, a section in Eb major further demonstrates Lynne’s unique approach of adding classical music conventions to a rock/pop sound — the rock instrumentation falls away entirely. Many thanks to our our regular contributor JB for this submission!

Roy Lee Johnson and the Villagers | The Dryer

“Despite 40 years in the music business, details about Roy Lee’s life are rather scarce,” (Sir Shambling’s Deep Soul Heaven). Born in 1938, “reportedly in Heard County, Georgia” (current county-wide population: just over 11K), he worked with groups such as the Brassetts, the Ohio Untouchables, and Piano Red, “for whom he wrote and sang ‘Mr. Moonlight’ … Since the Beatles covered Johnson’s song, it’s an easy assumption that this number has brought him the biggest pay checks he’s ever received … Johnson has been an intriguing figure on the southern soul scene for decades, always on the road gigging, and this cult soulman’s records are never less than interesting.”

Of “The Dryer” (1973), contributor JB adds: “While the arrangement of this tune makes it sound like a bog-standard James Brown song, it has a far higher MPM (mods per measure) quotient than any James Brown song I’m aware of.”

After a start in G minor, 0:42 brings a shift to E minor; a jump back to G minor lands at 1:07, another step back to E (this time major) at 1:42. Thereafter, cascading half-step modulations follow in rapid succession: by the time we complete this tune of barely two minutes, we’ve cycled all the way up to A major.

Gogol Bordello | Trans-Continental Hustle

“Gogol Bordello is a spectacle,” (NPR). “The wildly exuberant, multi-ethnic group from New York City makes frenetic music that’s part punk rock, part Gypsy folk, part Cabaret. Led by Eugene Hütz, a Chernobyl survivor from Ukraine, the band is famous for its costumed live shows that often stretch for more than two explosive hours … ” The band, formed in 1999, has a focus of making “‘the contradictions of life sound harmonious,’ with a head-spinning mix of ska, punk, metal, rap, flamenco, roots reggae, dub and any other sounds they could think of.”

Pitchfork describes Gogol Bordello’s fifth studio album: “the aptly titled Trans-Continental Hustle is largely about the experience of being Gogol Bordello, about overcoming stigmas against immigrants and America’s tacit favoring of bland one-world homogenization in order to carve out a vibrant, warts-and-all space where life can be celebrated and differences cherished.”

The title track from the 2010 album starts with just an acoustic guitar, but soon more layers are added, building to the first chorus at 0:48, where the groove is fully in place. At 1:42, the key jumps up a major fourth; at 1:57, we skip up another full step, then returning to the original key at 2:27. Many thanks to our keen-eared mod scout JB for yet another wide-ranging submission!

Procol Harum | Repent Walpurgis

Best known for their hit “Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967), the UK-based prog rock band Procol Harum “developed a really new sound with two keyboards (piano and Hammond organ) and a guitarist extraordinaire called Robin Trower who was greatly influenced by Jimi Hendrix,” (ProgArchive). “They quickly became one of the precursors of progressive rock (along with the Moody Blues and the Nice), mixed in some classical influences, and sold millions of singles but also albums.” Anyone who’s heard “Whiter Shade,” which is likely a lot of people, would recognize the band’s sound immediately on “Repent Walpurgis,” the closing track on the band’s 1967 self-titled first album. The album also featured the track “Conquistador,” which became a hit single, albeit several years later).

JB, who contributed this tune, adds: “PH always managed to retain a rock sensibility, which kept them from crossing the line from melodrama into bombast, or even self-parody … one of the most under-rated bands of the 60s, in my opinion. It’s at least as progressive (at least along certain dimensions) as Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper. But even though nearly every self-respecting hippie that I was exposed to during that period seemed to have a copy of this album in their collection, PH never really broke through to the same level of success as Yes, ELP, or other bands mining the same musical vein. My guess is that PH was about 3-4 years too early to really hit the sweet spot of Art/Prog Rock, although arguably they were one of the principal progenitors of that movement.”

Built primarily around C minor, a big transition at 2:15 leads us through a peaceful patch — a melody-less accompaniment for the Bach/Gounod version of “Ave Maria” in C major. At 2:59, we return to C minor.