This is Galen C.’s second MotD submission. Thanks, Galen!
“Bartender’s Blues” was originally written and performed by James Taylor in an attempt to imitate George Jones’ sound; it was released on Taylor’s 1977 abum JT. George Jones covered “Bartender’s Blues” a year later on his 1978 album of the same name, with Taylor on backup vocals.
In an interview with Billboardfollowing Jones’ death, James Taylor said that he wrote this song as a tribute to George Jones, trying to create a song that was “…100 percent George Jones…” Jones’ version is unique from Taylor’s original in that Jones added a key change at the start of the final verse (2:32).
On a personal note: Since learning about Modulation of the Day, I’ve been listening specifically for key changes. I heard this song on Willy Nelson’s radio show while visiting my parents in Florida — and rushed to write it down while the song was still playing!
Pistol Annies, an American country group made up of singers Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, released their first Christmas album, Hell of a Holiday, earlier this year. “Make You Blue,” a song about being lonely during the holidays, is the sixth track on the record. It modulates from E up a half step to F at 2:06.
*This is the third installment of our weeklong series on “Do You Hear What I Hear”
Country singer Jennifer Nettles released her first Christmas album, To Celebrate Christmas, in 2016. Her arrangement of “Do You Hear What I Hear” is the sixth track on the record, and modulates from C to D at 2:31.
“Shania Twain has been in our lives seemingly forever,” (WideOpenCountry). “So long that it’s hard to even imagine that she has a beginning. Shania just… is. Well, we all start somewhere and country music’s favorite Canadian is no different. Her first major hit, “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under,” from her second studio album The Woman in Me, reached No. 11 on the Billboard country music charts in 1995 and vaulted Shania into stardom. Twain’s first single to get recognition was actually so popular it won Song of the Year at the Canadian Country Music Awards.”
Shania co-wrote the song with then-husband, songwriter/producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange. Lange, who has produced AC/DC, Def Leppard, The Boomtown Rats, Foreigner, Michael Bolton, The Cars, Bryan Adams, Huey Lewis and the News, Billy Ocean, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, The Corrs, Maroon 5, Lady Gaga, Nickelback, and Muse, later produced Twain’s subsequent album Come On Over. According to the RIAA, the album became the best-selling country music album ever released and the best-selling studio album ever released by a female artist in any genre
After an instrumental break, a now-familiar chorus starts at 3:05 — but doesn’t get a chance to complete itself before 3:15 brings a second start for the chorus, this time a full step higher. Many thanks to Ziyad for another great contribution!
Canadian performer Anne Murray’s “A Little Good News” was written nearly four decades ago (1982), but its sentiment still resonates clearly today. “Written by Tommy Rocco, Charlie Black, and Rory Bourke, the heartfelt country ode finds Murray singing about one’s despair over the inhumanity, cruelty, and distress she often reads about in newspapers and hears on the news,” (CountryThangDaily). “Charlie Black remembered the day they wrote the song. The three songwriters were sitting around with their cup of coffee while watching [coverage about] the 1982 Lebanon War … and every news story was worse than the one past it, making them shake their heads of how bad things were. It was at that moment when Black said, ‘Wow, we sure could use a little good news today.’”
Anne Murray released the song in 1983 as the lead single from the album of the same name. A true crossover track, it reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, sustaining that rank for 20 weeks — but also reached #11 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart and #74 on Billboard Hot 100. The tune was awarded a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year.
There’s an early unprepared half-step modulation at 1:39. Many thanks to Ziyad for another great submission!
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!
Written and originally recorded by songwriter Peter McCann, “Right Time of the Night” was made a top ten hit by Jennifer Warnes on her eponymous 1977 album. Warnes wrote new lyrics for the second verse that she believed were more appropriate for a female performer, but McCann rejected her revision and wrote his own, which eventually made it onto the record. The track is Warnes’ most successful solo hit. Starting in Bb, the tune modulates up a whole step to C at 2:11.
“For well over four decades, Jimmy Webb’s songs have helped shape the American musical landscape,” Rolling Stone‘s Anthony Decurtis writes. “And ‘landscape’ is the operative term. A native of Oklahoma, Webb imbues his songs with a cinematic expansiveness and a musical sophistication that smooths the edges of his rootsy sources. They sometimes evoke specific places – ‘Wichita Lineman,’ ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ – but more often Webb’s songs summon an internal realm of the imagination. Yearning and regret loom large in Webb’s songbook, as does a particular kind of American loneliness, the emotional flip side of the country’s obsession with individualism.”
The Webb tune “Still Within the Sound of My Voice” is clearly related to the title of the 2019 documentary which recounts American singer Linda Ronstadt’s sweeping career. “She didn’t write her own songs, but she owned the ones she performed with rare authority,” (New York Times) ” … someone uses the word ‘auteur’ to describe Ronstadt’s relationship to her material, and it doesn’t seem exaggerated. Starting out in the ’60s at the crossroads of folk and rock,” over time, she performed styles from New Wave, Great American Songbook standards, Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (on stage and in film), and Canciones de mi Padre, “an album of traditional Mexican songs that explored a family heritage many of her earliest fans and collaborators never knew she had.” Ronstadt retired in 2011 due to Parkinson’s disease, which has profoundly affected her voice. But the documentary seems to speak most to her groundbreaking influence on many facets of contemporary music.
The 1989 release, a long overdue MotD debut for Ronstadt, is on the gentle side of the artist’s releases, but still features moments of her famously effortless belt. It begins in C major for verse 1, shifts to Eb major chorus at 1:07, touches briefly back down on C major at 1:22, then travels on to Ab major at 1:25. At 1:43, we’re back to C for verse 2, and the cycle repeats. At 2:43, there’s an interlude Ab major; at 3:15, chorus 3 steps up to F major. 3:43 brings an outro in Bb major as the tune fades toward the horizon.
“Night Flyer,” written by Johnny Mullins, was included on the 2004 re-issue of Emmylou Harris’s 1976 album Luxury Liner and features guest singer Delia Bell. The track demonstrates Harris’s trademark country/bluegrass style, and modulates from C to D at 2:18.
“B.J. Thomas (born Billy Joe Thomas) straddled the line between pop/rock and country, achieving success in both genres in the late ’60s and ’70s,” according to AllMusic’s bio. “At the beginning of his career, he leaned more heavily on rock & roll, but by the mid-’70s, he had turned to country music, becoming one of the most successful country-pop stars of the decade.”
In 1968, his career blossomed with “Hooked on a Feeling” and then Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from the film Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. NewsOpener.com adds: ” … no cover versions of ‘Raindrops’ have ever appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 — probably because Thomas’ version was so definitive … the 1998 box set The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection noted that Raindrops ‘was never really of its time. Mainly everything else was Flower Power, the protest songs, people were taking acid … but that song was a monster.’”
After his signature hit, Thomas then had a string of other soft rock hits in the next two years, including Bacharach’s “Everybody’s Out of Town” (1970). In 2013, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences inducted ‘Raindrops’ into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Thomas died last week at the age of 78.
“What’s Forever For,” written by Rafe Van Hoy, was a late-career cover by Thomas (2000); the tune received its debut in 1980 by Ann Murray and other covers by Johnny Mathis, John Conlee, and several others. Pushed gently into country/pop category by a few expert touches of pedal steel, the understated track modulates up a whole step at 3:03.
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