Home Free + Straight No Chaser | Somewhere In My Memory

Home Free, an American country a cappella group, released Any Kind of Christmas, their third holiday album, earlier this year. The group rose to prominence after winning the fourth season of the NBC reality-singing competition The Sing-Off in 2013.

“Somewhere In My Memory,” originally written by John Williams for the 1990 film Home Alone, was nominated for a Grammy and an Oscar. Home Free’s cover features the Indiana-based a cappella group Straight No Chaser, and is the final track on the album. It begins in Bb and modulates up to C at 4:12.

Mike Curb Congregation | Burning Bridges (from “Kelly’s Heroes”)

Kelly’s Heroes (1970) featured Clint Eastwood “and a rowdy gang of G.I. goofballs including roughneck Telly Savalas, new agey Donald Sutherland, bitter wiseass Don Rickles and young, harmonica-playing, exactly-the-same-looking Harry Dean Stanton (credited as Dean Stanton). It kinda feels like one of those fun ensemble war pictures like The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape, except the idea behind it is much more cynical,” (OutlawVern.com). “Clint plays Kelly, a once great soldier, demoted and disillusioned after an incorrect order caused him to blow up some of his own men. When he finds out about a stash of gold bars in a German bank, he finally has a mission he can believe in again.

… The theme song ‘Burning Bridges’ (is) performed by The Mike Curb Congregation. Curb … scored The Wild Angels and The Born Losers … and was also the president of MGM Records. ‘Burning Bridges’ was the Congregation’s biggest hit (#1 in Australia!), though they also had some success with a version of ‘It’s a Small World’ from an album of Disney covers, (and) were featured on Sammy Davis Jr.’s version of ‘The Candy Man.’ … I thought the cornball vocals of ‘Burning Bridges’ added kind of a flower children-y touch to the movie, but I’m not sure Curb would like that characterization. In the same year Kelly’s Heroes came out, he made a splash by dumping The Velvet Underground and other groups from MGM because he thought they promoted drugs. In 1978, Curb was elected lieutenant governor of California, a Republican working under Jerry Brown. Still, the Congregation found time to record ‘Together, a New Beginning,’ the theme song for Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign. So, not really the hippie I took him for.”

In Curb’s version, half-step key changes hit at 0:58 and 1:40. Keep scrolling for a mellower version (performed by Clint himself) which features an artier V/IV upward half-step shift at 1:55 and skips the second modulation of the original. Clint’s version wasn’t in the movie itself, but was also released as a single. Many thanks to our regular poster Rob P. for this submission!

Yo-Yo Ma & Alison Krauss | Simple Gifts

The 1848 Shaker song “Simple Gifts” rose to prominence after American composer Aaron Copland borrowed its melody for his composition Appalachian Spring, which he wrote to accompany a ballet choreographed by Martha Graham. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma covered the tune on his 2001 album Classic Yo-Yo with vocalist Alison Krauss.

The track begins with a cello introduction in Bb and shifts down a fifth to Eb when Krauss enters at 0:46.

Wilson Pickett | 634-5789

Prattville, Alabama native Wilson Pickett ” … did something which always thrills the telephone company to no end: he recorded a song which featured a phone number as its title,” (Rhino). “Written by Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd, “the song came about when Pickett took a trip to Memphis in order to make another visit to Stax, where he met up with Cropper and Floyd at the Lorraine Motel. They had two songs for Pickett: ‘Ninety-Nine and a Half (Just Won’t Do)’ and ‘634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.),’ the latter being a driving shuffle which was an homage of sorts to a 1962 single called ‘Beechwood 4-5789’ by Motown’s Marvelettes.

Clearly, Pickett had his fans’ number: the song proved to be an even bigger hit than ‘In the Midnight Hour,’ spending seven weeks at the top of the Billboard R&B Singles chart and hitting #13 on the Hot 100 in 1966.”

A late key change (hitting at 2:31 on a tune with a run length of just under three minutes) shifts the tonality up a half step as a transition into a fading outro.

Orange Guava Passion | Eagletown

“Eight Brown University students united by an undying love for all things groovy” is how Orange Guava Passion is described on Spotify. “Named after a juice offered in the Sharpe Refectory, Orange Guava Passion oozes Brown influence: youthfulness, idiosyncrasy and an aversion to the cardinal sin of taking oneself too seriously,” says a write-up in the Brown Daily Herald. “Their lyrics fill the bingo card of things stereotypical liberal arts college students enjoy, from Subarus to Trader Joe’s.”

“Eagletown,” released in 2020, is one of the group’s three singles. The track begins in F and shifts up to G at 3:16. There is a final modulation up to A at 3:49.

Brad Mehldau | Don’t Let It Bring You Down

“Locked down in the Netherlands (during COVID), pianist Brad Mehldau decided to compose a 12-part cycle (Suite: April 2020) that reflects his response to our new normal (Downbeat) … Don’t come looking for Mehldau’s long, lustrous improvisations—or even short ones, though there might be some light embellishments here and there. This is a composer’s work. If its bite-size pieces are easily digestible, so are its penetrating melodies. Like the thinned-out harmonies, they emphasize the isolation at the heart of both the work and the context. Well, that and the pure strangeness …

Neil Young’s ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ is fraught with tension …” The track, originally released by Young in 1970 and covered by Annie Lennox in 1995, alternates quickly between A minor and A major throughout. It’s only as the lone chorus arrives (1:41) that the piece settles into A major in earnest for more than a measure, but even that respite from ambiguity is briefly interrupted by A minor just before the piece ends in A major.

Devo | Whip It

“The magnitude of Devo’s effect on music is one that is horrifically overlooked… something that completely baffles me,” (DrownedInSound). “Here is a band with everything required. Great catchy songs? Check. Insane live show? Check. Uber-intelligent members with a penchant for witty socio-political satire? Check. A sound completely different to everyone else? Check.

For many, Devo are just ‘that band’ who wrote ‘Whip It’ and wore red flower pots on their heads … This was when punk music was taking off; when ripped T-shirts and spikes were de rigeur. There were only three chords to a song, and certainly no keyboards or synths … What Devo did was decapitate the evolution of music. Their sound was not the next genesis of what had come before them. They envisioned a sound and distilled it, as opposed to (99 per cent of other) bands that merely mix various influences to create something ‘new’.

Devo’s Gerry Casale: ‘We had punk elements, but we were Punk Scientists. We weren’t nihilists or anti-intellectual. We had a degree of anger and intensity that definitely echoed punk, but we weren’t writing the same type of music. We were much more experimental … we met with so much resistance from radio and never got help from the powers that be, so we never really made any money. I made a little from the publishing of ‘Whip It’ … I wish Devo had made money, but it is nice to have respect from other creative people now … It is a great feeling and something a lot of people don’t get.'”

“Whip It” (1980) featured an intro verse written in an oddly colorless key of E, comprised of a non-standard quadratonic scale — only the first, fourth, fifth, and flatted seventh steps of the key (joined by the second/ninth in the guitar hook starting at 0:39). At 0:49, the chorus arrives for the first time; the highest keyboard notes finally throw us a bone with a major third, revealing that this section is in C major. The pattern continues from there.

Third Reprise | Defying Gravity (from “Wicked” feat. Amanda Barise)

The musical theater cover band Third Reprise released their arrangement of “Defying Gravity” from the musical blockbuster Wicked earlier this year. Featuring vocalist Amanda Barise, the tune is filled with reharmonizations and set to a funk groove that provides a sharp contrast to the original. A film adaption of Schwartz’s musical opens in theaters tomorrow.

The track begins in Db major and modulates down a half step to C near the end at 3:39.

Procol Harum | Salad Days (Are Here Again)

“Formed in 1967, the sophisticated and forward-looking British band Procol Harum … recorded and released 1967’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ a smash hit that today remains the band’s most well-known song,” (MusoScribe). “After opening for Jimi Hendrix in London in that same year, the band organized a tour.

… The band’s sound had always been a mixture of the members’ r&b influences (and) a progressive – but not overly fussy – musical bent (aided and abetted by the presence of not one but two keyboard players) … Those qualities had largely fallen out of favor with the record-buying public by 1977, so the members went their separate ways.” The band regrouped several times, including a new album, Novum, and touring in the late 2010s.

“Salad Days Are Here Again” (1967) begins in G major. At 0:31, there’s a brief shift to an F major chorus before a return to G at 0:44.