“My Kind of Present” is featured on Meghan Trainor’s 2020 album A Very Trainor Christmas. The album was a family effort, with various members serving as songwriters, backup singers, producers and instrumentalists; this track was written by Trainor and her two brothers Justin and Ryan. “The record is firmly within the realm of spirited seasonal soundtrack,” wrote AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine. The track begins in Db major and modulates up a whole step at 2:09.
Thanks to our regular contributor Ziyad for this submission!
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.
“Christmas Time” is featured on Rob Thomas’s first holiday album, Something About Christmas Time, released earlier this year. “Every year, I want to do a Christmas album, and every year, it’s too late because I always think about it at Christmas,” said Thomas in an interview with ABC Audio.
“When everything started to shut down in the beginning of 2020, I was home and I had that summer to make a record. I wasn’t on the road and it wasn’t making a solo record. I wasn’t making a Matchbox [Twenty] record. And so it was the only summer that I’d ever had where there was that kind of a time.
“I knew that I didn’t want to do a lot of the traditional Christmas covers,” he adds, noting that he preferred “songs that I grew up with and the artists that I grew up listening to.”
The track, which features vocalist Ingrid Michaelson singing with Thomas, was originally written and recorded by Canadian singer Bryan Adams in 1985. It quickly became his most successful and popular Christmas tune, and is still played on Canadian radio during the holidays.
Beginning in B major, the tune modulates up a whole step to Db at 2:38.
“Early in the [2021] press cycle for her fourth LP, Adele referred to 30 as her most personal album yet,” (Pitchfork). “It’s hard to imagine something more personal than the empathy bombs that Adele typically drops, but she did not lie about 30 … Here, she’s telling a more unexpected story about love: What it means to inflict that pain on your family, to rebuild yourself from scratch, and—big exhale—to try to love again … she’s taking cues from newer visionaries like Jazmine Sullivan and Frank Ocean as much as her diva elders … her vocals are more playful: Motown-style background vox are modulated to a chirp on “Cry Your Heart Out” and “Love Is a Game,” in a kind of remix of her usual retro homage.”
“‘Cry your heart out, it’ll clean your face,’ Adele admonishes herself … It’s a record in which Adele ugly-cries, then wipes off her streaked makeup, sloughing off layers of dead skin in the process,” (The Guardian).
“Love is a Game,” drenched with strings and saturated with layers of background vocals, is a Motown/R&B pastiche of the highest order. After a start in Db major, the bridge wraps up at 4:15 — with a transition to Eb as the drum kit stunt-stumbles over an odd-metered measure before settling into a new chorus at 4:22.
On their album An Evening with Silk Sonic, released today: “Working together as Silk Sonic, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak revisit that bygone analog era (the 70s) in a hybrid of homage, parody, throwback and meticulous reverse engineering, tossing in some cheerfully knowing anachronisms,” (New York Times). “They flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time.”
Mars and .Paak inhabit different regions of the R&B/Soul/Pop/HipHop vortex, but the overlapping section of the resulting venn diagram is intriguing — and apparently synergystic. The NYTimes continues: “Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak. Mars is a multi-instrumentalist with a strong retro streak … Paak’s catalog has delved into more complicated matters. On his albums, named after places where he has lived, he switches between singing and rapping, and his lyrics take on contemporary conditions; he’s also a musician steeped in live-band soul and R&B, and a hard-hitting drummer … On An Evening With Silk Sonic, Paak’s specificity merges with Mars’s pop generalities, while both of them double down on craftsmanship and cleverness.” With Parliament Funkadelic’s bassist Bootsy Collins serving as something of an intermittent master of ceremonies, the album “revives the sound of 1970s groups like Earth, Wind & Fire, the Spinners, the Manhattans, the Chi-Lites and the Delfonics … a Fabergé egg of an album: a lavish, impeccable bauble, a purely ornamental not-quite-period piece. Mars and Paak don’t pretend to be making any grand statement, but there’s delight in every detail.”
After a short intro peppered with compound chords, the tune settles in somewhere in the E major/E Lydian neighborhood. That duality is spelled out multiple times in the chorus (the first time at 0:44):
F#/G# — A/B — Emaj7
The use of densely-packed chromatic bass motion combined with compound chords as connective tissue (1:44 and elsewhere) keeps us happily wondering where we might touch down next. At 3:16, an extended outro leaves earth’s atmosphere entirely as the groove falls away. We continue to ascend a ladder of brief modulations (3:54), further and further into an ecstatic stratosphere — but not without a knowing and neighborly wave from Bootsy.
“Well, I thought I was going to make this big acid record but I don’t think it was an acid album,” New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde said upon the release of her 2021 album Solar Power. “I had one bad acid experience in this album and was like meh, it’s a weed album. It’s one of my great weed albums.” The record, which represents a departure from Lorde’s typical synth-dominated style in favor of more acoustic, folk-oriented arrangements, reached #1 in Australia and New Zealand, and charted in the top 10 in thirteen other countries.
“The Man With The Axe” is autobiographical, a love song about a person who affects the singer in a way no one else can. “I wrote this track almost as a poem,” Lorde said. “I was very hungover and I think that fragile, vulnerable quality made it in here. It’s funny because it’s kind of melancholy, but I also think of it as very cozy.
“I’m expressing a huge amount of love and affection for someone. To me, it sounds very private — I sort of don’t even like thinking about people listening to it because it’s just for me…I really didn’t change the poem, apart from maybe taking one line out. That was one of the biggest accomplishments of the album.”
Aubrey Johnson “is a New York-based vocalist, composer, and educator who specializes in jazz, Brazilian, and creative contemporary music with and without words. She holds a Master of Music degree in jazz performance from the New England Conservatory and teaches at Berklee College of Music in the Voice Department and in the Jazz Masters Program at Queens College in New York City.” As a college student, Aubrey won two DownBeat Collegiate Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and Jazz Vocalist, Outstanding Performance and another during her master’s studies for Outstanding Performance in Jazz Voice.
Johnson has studied with Danilo Perez, Jerry Bergonzi, Dominique Eade, Allan Chase, George Garzone, and Frank Carlber; she contributed to Bobby McFerrin’s Grammy-nominated release VOCAbuLaries. She’s also shared the stage with Lyle Mays, Janis Siegel (Manhattan Transfer), Fred Hersch’s Pocket Orchestra, John Zorn’s Mycale Vocal Quartet, and many others, and as a leader with her own band.
The tune Johnson covered in 2020, “No More I Love Yous,” is best known for its performance by Annie Lennox (1995) — itself a cover of a tune by a band called The Lover Speaks and written by David Freeman and Joseph Hughes. “When the song was released it made a mild murmur in the charts,” Lennox recalls, “but I don’t think it ever really became a hit. There are quite a few songs floating around which should have touched the consciousness of the nation – they should have made their mark, and this is one of them. I thought, well, I might be sticking my neck out to do this, but I really wanted to give it another chance because it’s a magnificent song.” Her hunch paid off: Lennox’s version became a multi-continent smash hit and a Grammy winner.
Liberated from the measured feel of Lennox’s version, Johnson focuses on the lyrical melody lines instead. After a start in D major and a menagerie of short, darting instrumental lines accompanying the vocal on the verse, 1:42 brings a modulation up to F major. At 2:36, there’s a bridge featuring wordless vocals and then a piano solo, cycling through several keys. At 4:09, just before the last chorus section, we’ve pivoted back to D major.
ShareAmerica explains that “world Expos are global gatherings of nations that welcome tens of millions of visitors and include country pavilions that transform their host cities for years. The Dubai Expo will be the first held in the Middle East … The six-month event will open this month, following a one-year postponement because of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The USA Pavilion’s exhibits will include “moon rocks, a Mars rover and Thomas Jefferson’s Quran.”
Written by Joseph Dickinson and Lucy Torchia, the Expo’s expansive, anthemic theme “This Is Our Time” was recorded in on several continents: Las Vegas, Dubai, Macedonia, Egypt, and the UK. The primary performers were Emeratis Hussain Al Jassmi and Almas, as well as Mayssa Karaa, an American born in Beirut, Lebanon. The tune modulates up a whole step at 3:37.
Many thanks to our busy contributor Ziyad, who is from the UAE.
Last Sunday the 74th annual Tony Awards were presented at the Winter Garden Theatre, belatedly recognizing Broadway shows from the pandemic-shortened 2019-2020 season. Marc Shaiman penned the opening number for the ceremony celebrating the return of live theatre to the Big Apple. Key changes at 1:39 and 2:21.
The unique funk-pop covers spread like wildfire in the music community, garnered them millions of views, and got them the attention of many acclaimed artists, namely 16x Grammy Award winning producer David Foster … (he) has acquired a significant fan base of high-profile musicians, including music impresario Quincy Jones: ‘He’s different though, he’s got the perfect balance of right brain creativity and left brain music theory. It’s in his blood,’ says Jones. ‘He’s got soul, with one of the biggest ranges I’ve ever heard.’”
Nilsson’s “Diamond Ring” (2021), featuring the legendary Steve Vai playing “Stunt Guitar,” finds Nilsson out from behind the keyboards, thoroughly embracing the role of frontman. After starting in C# minor with a full funk groove, 2:19 brings a quiet interlude in D# major; at 2:43, we’ve climbed to E major. At 3:00, another transtion: the sole accompaniment is the band clapping en masse on beats 2 and 4, along with some beatboxing(?). The cherry on top is Vai’s appearing via green screen for a culminating solo in A Dorian minor as the tune’s volume — but never its intensity — fades.
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