“Dark Lady” was a 1974 #1 hit for singer/actress Cher in the US, Canada, and Sweden; the track also reached the top 20 throughout much of the rest of Europe, New Zealand, and Africa, according to About.com. The title track from her eleventh studio album, it was her third US #1 hit; she didn’t top the pop chart again until her worldwide smash hit “Believe,” nearly a quarter century later (1998). The album was released just as her divorce from Sonny Bono became public.
The tune features quite a repetitive melody in the verses — but Cher’s storytelling flair, a varying phrase length (5/6/5/6 measures in each verse, with an extra instrumental measure thrown in just before the chorus), and a half-step modulation (2:01) win the day. Many thanks to our Twitter follower Yellow Walrus (@biggytupac) for this submission!
We’ve featured this 1965 Bacharach/David tune before, but this 2020 cover, performed and produced by students at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee, really speaks to our current moment. It’s certainly one of the most successful virtual choir/orchestra endeavors I have seen. Key change at 2:00.
Co-written by Kelly McNulty, guitarist/composer Lee Ritenour, and Eric Tagg, “Turn the Heat Up,” is an album track from Ritenour’s 1987 album, Portrait. The sound came from the most pop-centric corner of jazz fusion. One of the few tracks on the album to feature vocals, it caught the crest of the smooth jazz wave.
Starting with an intro in F minor, the emphasis shifts to the relative Ab major as the verse begins at 0:23. At 1:03, the pre-chorus leads us back to F minor as the chorus starts at 1:12. The pattern holds until 2:35, where there’s a whole-step modulation up to G minor/Bb major.
Grant Stott is a Scottish broadcaster who went viral at the 2011 Radio Forth Awards with “That’s Fife,” a parody of Frank Sinatra‘s “That’s Life” and a tribute to the county of Fife in Scotland. Here, he utilizes the same idea with a different message, and even throws in a key change at 2:21.
Tommy James + The Shondell’s “Crimson and Clover” had an unexpectedly quick release in 1968 after it was leaked by a radio station. The track went to #1 in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, and South Africa. Pitchfork named it the 57th best song of the 1960s.
According to Wikipedia, the tune has been covered by many artists, including Joan Jett and Prince. However, the tune’s cultural impact goes far beyond cover versions: it’s mentioned in the movie Less than Zero and dozens of other films and TV shows. Its distinctive title has been dropped into lyrics by artists and bands including The Dandy Warhols, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Eat World, Kings of Leon, Elliott Smith, Liz Phair, Green Day, and Lana Del Rey.
As the tune builds in intensity near its end, the modulation hits (4:19) and the extreme tremolo used by the guitars throughout the tune spreads to the vocals. Many thanks to expert mod stringer JB for this contribution.
Not a band normally known for modulations, the Stones produced a tune with a key change in “Dear Doctor” from 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet. The tune is a country/blues waltz — a classic story song about an ill-fated romantic pairing.
According to AllMusic, “Jagger may be poking fun a little, but he could not nail the parlance of the characters so precisely if he had not studied it closely as a fan of the music…in a sense, they have been musicologists, interpreting musical forms that were in danger of dying out.”
At 1:38, there’s a big key change (up a major fourth). Many thanks to mod scout Rob Penttinen for this contribution!
Stevie Wonder‘s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” was originally released in 1973 on his album Innervisions and exudes a positivity that we could all use a little bit of right now. The performance here features Tori Kelly in a cover included in the 2016 animated feature Sing Movie. Beginning in Eb minor, the tune kicks up one half step at 2:16, and then another at 2:32.
More often than not, electronica/funk/pop artist Louis Cole writes uptempo tunes about downer subjects. AllMusic calls him “a left-field pop musician whose energized material often puts an ebullient spin on everyday pitfalls.” Louis Cole is the co-founder of Knower, has written for Seal and co-written with Thundercat, has played with Snarky Puppy, opened (along with Genevieve Artadi, the other half of Knower) for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and collaborated with celebrated jazz pianist Brad Mehldau on a recent track “Real Life.”
“The mark of a great chord progression is a peculiar mixture of surprise and inevitability. On first listen, you find yourself confused by the way that one chord follows another, refusing to follow the well-trodden path: jumping when they should step and bounding when they should glide. Eventually, once the song has burned itself into your brain—once its course has remapped your own neural pathways—you’ll have trouble imagining a world where these curious patterns didn’t exist. But even then, even after no matter how many plays, that harmonic dodge-and-feint will still produce the tiniest frisson of wrongness. It’s among the sweetest dopamine hits that music is capable of producing.
Louis Cole’s instrument of choice is the drums, but he definitely knows his way around a killer set of changes. Time, his third album, is brimming with strange, counterintuitive progressions—chords that seem to slip sideways, tumbling into one another, jostling and pivoting just when you don’t expect. An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole’s is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.”
“Tunnels in the Air” (2018) starts in G minor; at 2:26, the track modulates up to Bb minor. The outro gives us a space-age church pipe organ at 2:57 — right down to a traditional plagal cadence into a closing Eb major.
Charlie Chaplin‘s classic 1936 song “Smile” is performed here by Voctave, whose members sang and sent in their individual parts from home. Key change at 0:47; also gotta love ending on the 9.
“Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, was a #1 hit, despite the fact that its singer, Janis Joplin, passed away from a drug overdose before its release. It was her only number one single and is ranked #148 Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The tune has been covered by a wide range of artists, including Kenny Rogers, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Grateful Dead, Blind Melon, Melissa Etheridge, and Pink.
According to Rolling Stone, “Joplin recorded the song for inclusion on her album, Pearl, only a few days before her death in October 1970…Kristofferson did not know she had recorded it until after her death. The first time he heard her recording of it was the day after she died.”
After starting in G major, there’s an unusually early whole-step modulation to A major at 1:15.
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