“No More Wasted Time” is from the 2014 musical If/Then, featuring a Tony-nominated score by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey. The music incorporates folk elements with a contemporary edge. Performed here by original cast members Idina Menzel, LaChanze, Jenn Colella, and Tamika Lawrence, the song begins in Db and builds into a dramatic modulation up to Eb coming out of the bridge at 2:44.
Tag: 2010s
Show Yourself (from “Frozen II”)
Featured in the 2019 Disney film Frozen II, “Show Yourself” recounts Elsa examining her past and the source of powers. The song has compared to the anthem “Let It Go” from the hugely successful 2013 movie Frozen, and hits on many of the same themes of self-acceptance and discovery. Composer Kristen Anderson-Lopez said that her 14-year old daughter was sobbing after the first time she heard the song. “It feels like you’re telling me I can follow my gut and find my own path,’” Anderson-Lopez remembered her saying. “That’s the success of this movie for me. If she can’t hear it from her mom in daily life, she can hear it from her mom through a Disney movie she wrote.”
The music combines cinematic depth and musical theatre sophistication, incorporating other motifs from the score and reflecting Elsa’s evolution over the course of the number. Beginning in F# major, a modulation to G major leads into the second verse at 1:51, followed by a shift to Eb minor at the bridge at 3:27. A modulation up to Ab sets up the final chorus at 3:51.
John Powers | Test Drive (from “How To Train Your Dragon”)
“Test Drive” is a cue from John Powers’ Academy Award-nominated score for the 2010 Dreamworks film How To Train Your Dragon, accompanying the moment that Hiccup first rides his dragon, Toothless. “I was certainly trying to get a bit more epic,” Powers said in an interview discussing his score. “I just felt the animation and the visuals were giving me a broader palette to play with. As a kid I remember watching The Vikings with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and I always liked that score.
“[The directors] were really very specific a lot of the time. They did want size and depth and emotion. They wanted a feeling of the Nordic musical past. You could say the symphonic musical past was Nielson, the Danish symphonist. Sibelius. Grieg to a certain extent, although I think he was a little bit more Germanic than he was Nordic.
“We looked at all the folk music from the Nordic areas. And I’m part Scottish and grew up with a lot of Scottish folk music, so that came into it a lot.”
Multiple critics named it as the best score of the year, though Powell ultimately lost the Oscar to The Social Network. The cue begins in D major, and at 1:21 becomes somewhat tonally ambiguous before the sky clears into E major at 1:53.
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!
Kacey Musgraves | Space Cowboy
Kacey Musgraves, in all her pop-country glory, presents a slickly executed key change in her 2018 track “Space Cowboy.” The song’s intriguing wordplay and atmospheric textures will easily put listeners in a trance. The second verse ends with a refrain which transitions into a laid-back electric guitar interlude.
In the midst of calm ambience, the track is suddenly uplifted as Kacey’s vocals sneakily enter a half-step higher than expected at 2:27! The modulated vocals enter over the reverb tail of the preceding guitar strum and add a tint of brightness to a rather casual tune. It is most definitely one of the most graceful and well-considered moments in Musgraves’s repertoire!
Key + Peele | The Power of Wings
When it comes to comedy duo Key and Peele, “the title comedians are surprisingly good singers,” (Screenrant). The sketches on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele series “ran the gamut from touching on politics or race to skits on famous movies or TV shows. The pair also had some spot-on parodies of music artists, from the hilarious ‘Ray Parker Theme Songs’ – where the Ghostbusters singer reveals a catalog of horrible, unused themes for other movies – to ‘Outkast Reunion,’ where Andre 3000 and Big Boi awkwardly cross paths. Key & Peele remains a treasure trove of great sketches, with the show coming to an end back in 2015. While Keegan-Michael Key has continued to act, Jordan Peele has mostly retired from performing to step behind the camera, reinventing himself as a horror auteur with movies like Get Out.”
Wendell, a nerd and comic book fan of the highest order, is a recurring K+P character. But “Wings” took him to the next level of fantasy: If a Lord of the Rings Fandom Con had a baby with a power metal band, this video might be the result.
Unfortunately, the video’s modest budget is drained very visibly to zero dollars just before the bridge. Thereafter, even the half-step modulation at 1:53 and an “E for Effort” aren’t enough to save Wendell.
Phony Ppl | Why iii Love the Moon
Phony Ppl, a Brooklyn-based band with a neo-soul/hiphop focus, grew out of the school friendship of vocalist Elbie Thrie and keyboardist Aja Grant. “Thrie and Grant met in middle school,” Rolling Stone reports. “’We found out we lived two blocks from each other. It was the first time my parents would let me out of the house by myself, to go to Elbie’s: Oh, he’ll be okay. They’re playing music.‘ … A lot of our influences were us listening to new music that was actually super old music from the Sixties and Seventies.’”
Members of the band delved into music study at Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, the School of Rock, and learning on the fly in musical theatre pit bands. Rolling Stone continues: “’Why iii Love the Moon,’ a hypnotic ballad on Yesterday’s Tomorrow (2015) combining vintage Earth, Wind and Fire with Kaya-style Bob Marley, that began as a voice memo … ‘Aja had the chords; I had the concept. We actually put the first time we played it on the record. That’s what you hear, us testing everything.’ Thrie smiles. ‘We tried to make it sound more shitty. But that’s the original tape.’”
After a dreamy intro, the track starts in earnest in Eb minor at 0:26. From 3:34 – 3:55, a trippy bridge shifts gears and airdrops us into B minor. The casually improvised percussion hints at the the tune’s homegrown origins as a voice memo. At 4:36, we’re suddenly back in Eb for the duration.
Postmodern Jukebox | We Can’t Stop
Founded by arranger and pianist Scott Bradlee in 2011, Postmodern Jukebox is a music collective, featuring a rotating group of instrumentalists and vocalists, that is known for reworked and inventive takes on popular modern songs, focusing particularly on swing and jazz. The group originated with Bradlee jamming and shooting videos in his basement with his friends, and took off with the release of a cover of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop,” featuring Robyn Adele Anderson on vocals, which clocked a million views the first week after its release in 2012.
“We Can’t Stop,” originally released by Miley Cyrus, was given a doo-wop treatment by the group in 2013, again featuring Anderson on vocals as well as the NYC-based TeeTones. “I think everyone on some level loves doo-wop,” said Bradlee when discussing why he thought his cover was so successful. “It’s feel-good music. It’s easy to listen to. It has a strong melody. It’s simple…And sure, it’s funny that the lyrics are ridiculous by ’50s standards, too.”
The track modulates at 3:09.
Childish Gambino | Sober
“Donald Glover doesn’t need your approval. He has always had plenty of admirers, be it through his standup, TV work, or his music, which he makes as Childish Gambino,” Consequence declares in its review of his 2014 EP Kauai. “Fans of his comedy routines and 30 Rock and Community episodes followed him to the mixtape circuit, a world which rewards humor but not necessarily Gambino’s particular brand of pop culture-dissecting kind. In turn, depending on who you ask, he’s one of hip-hop’s smartest MCs or a short-shorts-wearing outsider who’s unable to see why he’s unwelcome.”
Glover’s come a long distance since 2014. As Childish Gambino, he’s been extremely prolific, releasing multiple albums, EPs, and “mixtapes,” growing in prominence as he goes. His track “This is America” (2018), which went to #1 in the US and many other countries, was released with a single-take music video which Time described as “laden with metaphors about race and gun violence in America.”
After starting in a F major, 2014’s “Sober” drops a break (2:50) comprised of only scant background vocals, the buzz of heavily distorted electronic bass, and percussion, which somewhat obscures the whole-step modulation to G major at 3:09. The break’s contorted landscape continues until 3:29, when there’s a return of Glover’s clear, seemingly effortless falsetto over pulsing eighth-note synths and major 7th voicings at just about every opportunity.
Many thanks to Mark L. for this submission — his first!
Sia | Free Me
Australian singer/songwriter Sia released “Free Me” as a single and music video in July 2017. The video, narrated by Julianne Moore, depicts an expecting mother (played by Zoe Saldana) who is told she is HIV-positive after going in for a routine check-up. The mother’s emotional journey is communicated through choreography, set by Ryan Heffington. “The HIV/AIDS epidemic is one that can affect anyone, particularly child-bearing women around the globe,” Sia said upon the song’s release.
“I’ve proudly joined forces with the Abzyme Research Foundation and the #endHIV Campaign for the release of my song, ‘Free Me,’ to help raise funds and awareness for a potential breakthrough cure of the epidemic.” All proceeds of the song support efforts to eliminate HIV/AIDS. A half-step modulation from Eb to E occurs at 4:02.
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