“B+B Project” is a Ukrainian ensemble named for its instrumentation (button accordion and bandura, an instrument which combines qualities of the zither and the lute). “The bandura is a traditional Ukrainian instrument … the B+B Project is bringing back the popularity of this fine instrument!” (EthnoCloud). “The group was created (in) 2015. They play a diverse repertoire: original songs, cover versions, rock, classical music, dubstep, Ukrainian music, and many others … The collective has toured extensively in Ukraine and around the world.” The B&B Project is now one of the most famous instrumental groups in Ukraine.
The group released “Cheremshyna” in 2022. After beginning in A minor, there’s a shift up a full step to B minor at 1:53. At 2:27, the tune returns to the original key.
Composer/singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane’s “To Be American” is a track from his from his 2022 album, Magnificent Bird. “Kahane both mines and interrogates nostalgia in the song, which he wrote during the roiling, national tumult of October 2020,” (Nonesuch.com). “‘It’s fitting,’ he says, ‘that a song preoccupied with the past would feature musicians who are some of my oldest friends. This song, as much as any on the album, is a showcase of my musical community.’ The elegiac anthem features an all-star band of Andrew Bird, Caroline Shaw, Punch Brothers’ Chris Thile and Paul Kowert, and percussionist Ted Poor.
Magnificent Bird, Kahane’s fifth solo LP … chronicles the final month of a year spent off the internet … Kahane revels in the tension between quiet, domestic concerns, and the roiling chaos of a nation and planet in crisis … In October 2020, the final month of his tech sabbatical, Kahane set out to write a song every day. ‘I wanted to create an aural brain scan at the end of this experiment,’ he explains, ‘and to give myself permission to write about small things, rather than trying to distill the enormity of the moment into grand statements … My internet hiatus grew out of a belief that at root, our digital devices reinforce the fiction that convenience and efficiency have intrinsic value. That has implications with respect to climate crisis, to inequality, to our (in)ability to see ourselves in each other, to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to make a more just world. I wanted to leave it all behind not as a further expression of techno-pessimism, but rather in search of a positive alternative.’
… Hailed as ‘a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America’ by Rolling Stone, the album chronicled an 8,980-mile, off-the-grid railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. ‘I wanted unmediated interaction with strangers, so I took that trip without my phone. Somewhere in New Mexico, I remember thinking, Wow, this is really transformative. I should do this for more than thirteen days.’”
“To Be American” begins with an intro and verse in Bb major, but shifts up to C major at 0:26; at 0:39, there’s a return to the original key. More key changes follow throughout. For all of Kahane’s skill in creating inventive textures as a classical composer, as well as his second career walking a complex line between classical and pop-adjacent contemporary music, this video sheds light further downstage — on his melody lines and lyrics.
for Steven
A video overview of Kahane’s cross-country 2016 rail journey:
“Tom Pettywrote dozens of hit songs over the course of his four-decade career as frontman of the Heartbreakers, but not all of them impressed his bandmates. At least not right away,” (Ultimate Classic Rock). “Such was the case with ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance,’ a song that Petty started one day and didn’t finish. ‘I wrote all but the chorus,’ he recalled for 2005’s Conversations With Tom Petty. ‘I just had the loop going around and around and really had most of the words and everything. And I played the tape for Rick [Rubin] and he liked it a lot and suggested I write a chorus. So I tried to finish it up while I was making [1994’s] Wildflowers, and there were maybe five years between the writing of the verses and the chorus.’
… For those who hastily assumed ‘Mary Jane’ was a reference to marijuana, Petty cleared that up later on. ‘I don’t think I was writing about pot,’ he said in 2005. ‘I think it was just a girl’s name. I can’t imagine that I’d write a song about pot. I don’t think there’s enough there to write about [laughs].’ Though it took years for ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ to take its final form, it clearly paid off. By the time Pettydied in 2017, the band had played the song live in concert over 500 times, and it’s remained an important touchstone of their catalog.”
Starting with an intro and verse in an uptuned A minor, the chorus (first heard from 1:09 – 1:31) shifts to A major — somewhat obscured by a prominent minor v chord (E minor).
“Written by Dexter Wansel, Cynthia Biggs, and Kenneth Gamble, ‘If Only You Knew’ became the Patti Labelle’s first #1 R&B hit as a solo artist,” (Songfacts). “Wansel – who also collaborated with Biggs on the track ‘Shoot Him On Sight’ from LaBelle’s previous album, The Spirit’s In It – didn’t think the mid-tempo ballad was that great, but LaBelle disagreed. ‘She loved it from the very beginning and saw the potential, that there were a lot of lonely people out there who loved other people and didn’t really know how to say it,’ he recalled in The Billboard Book Of Number One R&B Hits. ‘She felt like she could say it for them.’
LaBelle found fame as the leader of the progressive soul trio Labelle, who had a big hit with ‘Lady Marmalade’ in 1974. Following their split a couple years later, she worked hard to build a solo career that earned her critical acclaim, but she struggled to make the charts. After releasing her first four albums with Epic, LaBelle signed with Philadelphia International Records, pinning her hopes for a hit on the label’s founders, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. The songwriting and production duo was behind many of the hottest soul singles of the ’70s, including ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now,’ ‘Love Train,’ and ‘Me and Mrs. Jones.’ Her first album with PIR didn’t yield any hits, but she finally scored on I’m In Love Again (1983). Aside from being her first R&B chart-topper, “If Only You Knew” was her first solo crossover hit, peaking at #46 on the Hot 100.” The track also climbed all the way to #1 on the Cash Box US Black Contemporary Singles chart.
The intro is in E major, but there’s an early shift to C# major when the verse starts at 0:29. The chorus (0:58) returns to E major; the alternating pattern continues throughout.
“Alongside house orchestra Art of Noise and … Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the German confection (Propaganda) added a pitch-black seductiveness to Trevor Horn and Paul Morley’s label ZTT,” (BBC). “Their debut album, A Secret Wish … (1985) remains a fascinating addition to the clumsy, clattering canon of 80s electronica. Powered by the vocal mystery of Claudia Brücken, the sweetness of Susanne Freytag and the engine room of Michael Mertens and Ralf Dörper, the group was able to sate the European fantasies of the label. Here, it had its Kraftwerk, its Boney M. and its ABBA.
Employing about every Weimar Republic and Wagnerian reference in the book, ZTT created something as grand and illusory as anything they had put together. The concept was so high, the music they assembled could have been almost incidental were it not so inventive, and at times brilliant.”
“The Murder of Love,” a track from the German band’s album A Secret Wish, begins with an F minor verse (1:24) after an initially percussion-only intro. From 1:58 – 2:14, a chorus alternates between Bb minor and Bb major, the tonality obscured at times by angular tensions in the vocal melody. At 2:15, a brief interlude falls back into F minor with a huge crash, featuring the sole lyric “plead for mercy.” None is forthcoming just yet: the entire cycle starts again with another verse at 2:23. But surprisingly, 3:23 brings a jazz-infused guitar solo, followed by some new keyboard patterns leading into the chorus-based outro — all of them lighter in feel than anything up to that point.
“Dancing in a beautiful synchronicity has long been part of OK Go singer Damian Kulash’s life,” (The Guardian). ” … he recalls his formative years in Kulash Alarm System, with big sister (and current choreographer and video director) Trish Sie. ‘I was seven and Trish must have been 11,’ he says, ‘and every morning when we’d wait for the school bus, we’d do this heavily thought-out dance routine outside our house, shouting, KULASH! ALARM! SYSTEM! like Kraftwerky robots.’
2006’s ‘Here It Goes Again’ has been viewed a staggering (68 million) times. ‘We saw that by dropping our instruments in the middle of the show and breaking into dance, it completely broke that fourth wall of expectations in a rock show … I love cultural products where you can see the effort people have put in to make something weird and unlikely.’ … Kulash points out that the ‘one take’ operates in a unique position in the current climate. ‘In the hypermediated world that we live in, we immediately go into ‘suspension of disbelief mode’. Like we see so much impossible shit in commercials, on films, in music. We assume artifice in everything we consume.'”
“Here It Goes Again,” a tune whose popularity is driven by a video that is arguably the band’s best known, was the fifth single from the 2005 album Oh No. The tune is built primarily in C major and C mixolydian, but during the nearly wordless bridge (1:40 – 1:59), there’s a shift to Eb major before a return to the original key. Eb also makes another appearance for the closing chord.
“Ross Ainslie is one of Scotland’s finest traditional musicians and composers, playing pipes, whistles and cittern,” (artist website). “He is renowned for his highly acclaimed solo material, and as a skilled performer and prolific collaborator who performs regularly with bands Treacherous Orchestra, Salsa Celtica, Dougie Maclean, Ali Hutton, Jarlath Henderson, Charlie Mckerron, Tim Edey, Hamish Napier, Brighde Chaimbeul, Duncan Chisholm, India Alba and has performed with Kate Rusby, Blue Rose Code, Zakir Hussain, Trilok Gurtu, Capercaillie, Shooglenifty, Carl Barat, Papon, Karsh Kale, Flook, Breabach, Soumik Datta and Patsy Reid.
Born in Perthshire in 1983, Ross began his career as a member of the Perth and District Pipe Band before joining the Vale of Atholl Pipe Band, where he was mentored by piper Gordon Duncan. Hugely influenced by Gordon’s fearlessly innovative spirit and groundbreaking compositions, Ross began exploring his own abilities as a composer and writing his own tunes; in 2002 he was a finalist in the prestigious BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition. Ross has six solo albums to date: Wide Open (2013), Remembering (2015), Sanctuary (2017), Vana (2020), Live in the Gorbals (2022) and Pool (2024).“
“Threads,” from the 2022 album Live in the Gorbals, begins in D minor but shifts to C dorian by the 0:46 mark — followed by several other harmonic shifts, further enhanced with some metric shifts as well.
“The Indigo Girls … have been friends singing together since they were kids in 1970s Atlanta,” (New York Times). “They make a good living as working musicians, touring regularly to delight a loyal fan base … But their music — songwriterly, acoustic-forward, aggressively emotional — hardly seems a good fit for our strange and cynical times. They are, as the kids would say, cringe … Cringe: the ultimate insult of our era. It implies a kind of pathetic attachment to hope, to sincerity, to possibility.
I asked (film director Greta) Gerwig why the Indigo Girls were in Barbie. ‘The Indigo Girls were part of my growing up … ‘Closer to Fine’ is just one of those songs that meets you where you are, wherever you are. It has spoken to me throughout my life, like a novel you revisit,’ … This is what the Indigo Girls are all about. Sincerity coupled with wisdom, which is a recipe for something durable: solidarity. A sense that we are in this together. The Indigo Girls are great. Cringe but true. That’s because the kernel of who we are is cringe. That is what it means to be open to the world. To be open to the possibility of a future different from who you are now.”
“Reunion” is a track from the duo’s fifth studio album Swamp Ophelia (1994). Tim Paul, a first-time contributor to MotD, explains that “the song is in A major until the instrumental interlude around 2:21; they modulate to B major, then back to A major at 2:51.” Many thanks, TP, for this wonderful submission — doubly good because it marks the Indigo Girls’ (long overdue) MotD debut!
“The angst of American middle-age – when many of us question the paths we’ve taken and the ones we’re moving toward – has never been as tuneful as in the (1989) show Closer Than Ever,” (WHYY). “The smart, sophisticated musical revue opened Off-Broadway (35) years ago, when we had yet to know the real power of a pixel and only the birds sent a tweet. But Closer Than Ever is as current today as it was then … It consists of 24 songs – a dozen in each act – that reflect the cycles running through most (and maybe all) of our lives: staying in love or not, parenting, parenting your parents, figuring out what the right thing is and doing it, doing the wrong thing and paying for it.
… We have the power couple trying to figure out who can take the baby for an afternoon in the absence of a nanny, and the divorcees who now date and hate it. (“Churning out the small talk with someone who is all talk.”) One character later sings that “the visions seep in my head of the life I could have led.” Why, sings Deirdre Finnegan, “are patterns haunting every move I make?” … If this appears to come down on the side of dreariness, it doesn’t … these ultimately come across as songs about connection and new experiences. The music is by David Shire (Baby, the film Saturday Night Fever) and Richard Maltby Jr. (Baby, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Miss Saigon).”
Beginning in F# minor, “If I Sing” transitions to A major at 1:04, among other harmonic shifts. This tribute to familial love, shared tradition, and humbleness in the face of the passage of time is — ultimately — about connection.
Reviewing a 2022 Pet Shop Boys concert, The Guardian described the distinctive culture surrounding the band: “Judging from the demographic here, the audience stretches from 18-year-old girls to middle aged men in suits, hen parties to arty intellectuals. Their vast constituency reflects the electro-pop pair’s status as British pop’s biggest-selling duo, and a musical reach that stretches from Italian house to Tchaikovsky samples.
… Their songs are like miniature kitchen sink dramas – the couple struggling with fidelity in ‘It’s Hard,’ the painful reminders of a break-up in ‘Losing My Mind,’ or the power imbalances in ‘Rent.’ Tennant, unfeasibly now 67, brings delicate thespian touches – a shrug of the shoulder or wagging finger (in ‘It’s a Sin’) – and is one of our most unmistakable vocalists, his inimitable tones somehow capable of expressing excitement and yearning at the same time.”
Tennant viewed the 1986 track “In Suburbia” as a pivotal moment for the UK band (Classic Pop): “I thought Pet Shop Boys were very likely going to be one-hit wonders… We were on a classic trajectory. Our first single: No. 1 everywhere around the world. Next single: No. 19 in the UK. Now, the logical trajectory is that the next record goes to No. 29, the one after doesn’t make the Top 50, and then you’re dropped … “ The intro and choruses are in C major; the verses (first heard between 1:31 – 2:03) are in C minor.
Many thanks to one of our veterans, mod-spotter Rob P., for this wonderful submission!
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