Tag: pop

Various Artists | Doctor’s Orders

In the late 1960s, UK producer and songwriter Tony Hiller created the vocal group Brotherhood of Man to showcase his songs. In 1970, the group scored an international hit with “United We Stand” (UK #10, Billboard #13). The original lineup consisted of Tony Burrows, an established session singer, Roger Greenaway, a songwriter in his own right, and sisters Sue Glover and Sunny Leslie. That incarnation of the group lasted until 1971. The following year, Hiller put together a new version of the group, which is performing to this day.

The sisters had recorded a number of singles as Sue and Sunny, without a lot of success. But they kept busy as background singers on many recordings by prominent artists, including Elton John, David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Joe Cocker, and Tom Jones. Sunny’s solo recording of “Doctor’s Orders” became a hit in the UK (#7 in 1974). The tune was written by her former bandmate Greenaway, with Roger Cook and Geoff Stephens.

In the US, a disco-flavored version by Carol Douglas became a 1974 hit (Billboard #11, Canada #1). “An ad (was run) in Showbiz magazine specifically to recruit a singer to cover Sunny’s UK hit for the US market: the successful applicant, Carol Douglas, was a veteran performer who had remained an unknown recording artist.

Douglas, who reports that she is a cousin of Sam Cooke’s, recalled when she first auditioned she was told ‘I sounded great, but too black. [The track’s] producers wanted to capture my more melodic pop/commercial tones which undeniably made me sound white on the radio,’ (EurWeb). Although Douglas admitted to reservations about the song itself – ‘I really [would have] wanted a more soulful song’ – she’d also recall ‘I felt the minute I heard the music that it was going to be something, and after hearing my voice on the track it was even more amazing…[It] did throw me off when they played me the [Sunny] version. So I had to approach [singing the song] in my own way.'” The Douglas version shifts up a whole step at 3:48.

Josh Groban | Oceano

“Oceano” is the lead track on Josh Groban’s 2003 album Closer, the top-selling album of the 2000s in the US.

Produced by David Foster, the song begins by fluidly passing between F major and F minor. In the instrumental interlude between verses, the harmony turns very chromatic, passing through Eb major and E minor before winding back to the tonal center of F at 2:06. There is a definitive modulation to Db at 3:05, which then segues into a subdued outro in D minor.

Vicki Lawrence | The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

This multi-verse tune tells quite the complex story, like any good murder ballad. But this one managed to also become a chart-topping pop hit in 1973. It was “a lot of story to cram into less than four minutes, still making room for a chorus and for some instrumental flourishes,” (Stereogum). “It’s probably too much story for a two-hour movie. It’s too convoluted, too full of arbitrary plot twists … And yet the country songwriter Bobby Russell — the same guy who wrote Bobby Goldsboro’s execrable ‘Honey’ — still jammed all that into ‘The Night The Lights Went Down In Georgia,’ and the song still made it to #1.”

Russell offered the tune to Cher, but “Cher’s husband Sonny Bono thought the song was too dark, too potentially offensive. So Russell’s wife recorded it, instead. Vicki Lawrence, who was married to Russell at the time, wasn’t a singer — or, in any case, that wasn’t how she was known. Instead, she was a funny lady on TV. And other than that brief flirtation with pop stardom, that’s what she remained … Vicki Lawrence was 18 when she joined the cast of The Carol Burnett Show.

As storytelling, ‘The Night The Lights Went Down In Georgia’ is cluttered but evocative. As a piece of music, it’s pretty much the same way. It’s one of those songs where the verses work better than the chorus. The verses are all tingly suspense: prickly electric piano line, spare acoustic guitar, drums and shakers that pulse like heartbeats. On the chorus, everything explodes into hammy melodrama. Taken all together, the song’s combination of studio craftsmanship and thirsty attention-grabbing dynamics are basically early-’70s pop writ small, good ideas and bad ideas in a constant push-pull. It’s easy to hear how the song caught America’s collective ear, and it’s just as easy to figure out why Lawrence basically abandoned her music career afterward.”

Starting in Bb minor, the chorus shifts to F major at 0:59 before reverting to the original key for the next verse at 1:21. The pattern continues from there. This live performance, 22 years after the original release, apparently features a live vocal from Lawrence.

Aretha Franklin | Freeway of Love

“Freeway of Love” (1988) “was written by Narada Michael Walden and Jeffrey Cohen,” (Songfacts). “Walden is the guy you call when you need to produce a diva: he has written and produced hits for Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Diana Ross. When we asked him about the one song that had the greatest impact on his career, he told us it was ‘Freeway of Love’ by Aretha Franklin … This is one of the most famous driving songs of all time,” but Franklin wasn’t a driver!

“Aretha Franklin has an astonishing 20 #1 R&B hits – more than any other artist – and this song was the last of them. It was also a huge pop hit and revitalized her career. When she recorded her Who’s Zoomin’ Who? album, she hadn’t been in a studio in two years, and hadn’t had a Top 10 on the Hot 100 since ‘Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)’ in 1973.” Bruce Springsteen’s saxophone player Clarence Clemons played on this track, which was also produced by Walden. The tune won Grammy Awards for Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, as well as reaching #3 on the US pop charts and topping the Hot Black Singles chart for five weeks.

Spin‘s Armond White put the track into context within Franklin’s long career: ” … a highway of life song, proclaiming Aretha’s longevity … confirms her as the mother/master of much that is current. She’s still the Queen of Soul.” A whole-step modulation holds off until 3:40 — nearly the end of the tune.

Commodores | Sweet Love

“R&B purists have often argued that the Commodores did their most essential work before 1977,” (AllMusic). “It was in 1977 that they crossed over to the pop/adult contemporary audience in a major way with ‘Easy,’ and subsequent hits like 1978’s ‘Three Times a Lady’ and 1979’s ‘Still’ (both of which reached number one on Billboard’s pop singles charts) certainly weren’t the work of R&B snobs.

… the song that 1975’s Movin’ On is best remembered for is the laid-back, gospel-drenched hit ‘Sweet Love.’ Written by Richie, ‘Sweet Love’ is one of those secular soul tunes that isn’t really gospel but borders on it; when Richie belts out the lyrics, ‘You got to keep on searching/harder/day by day,’ you feel like you’re in the front row during an AME church service. And even though Movin’ On is an LP that R&B purists rave about (rightly so), you can’t say that it was ignored by pop audiences — ‘Sweet Love’ was a number two R&B hit, but it also reached number five on Billboard’s pop singles chart.”

The mid-tempo track features soft, shimmeringly delicate sections — but also passages with the saturated sound of a full compliment of horns and strings joining the band’s regular instrumentation. A powerhouse whole-step key change hits at 3:49.

Tony Bennett | Steppin’ Out With My Baby

20-time Grammy winner Tony Bennett passed away last week at the age of 96. With his release of Love For Sale in 2021, a collaboration with Lady Gaga, he broke the Guinness World Record for oldest person to release an album of new material.

His 1993 album Steppin’ Out, a tribute to Fred Astaire, won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance. “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” is the lead track, and the music video featured here was aired on MTV.

After a long, winding intro that quotes “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” among other tunes, we ultimately land in D minor for the start of the song. It modulates subtly to D major for the 8 bar “B” section at 1:00, then returns to D minor at 1:12. The tune continues alternating between these two keys throughout, and also briefly detours to C major for 8 bars at 1:40.

“I’m a Barbie Girl” again, but in the Style of Six Classical Composers | Josep Castanyer Alonso

“If you were alive and anywhere near a radio or MTV in the late ’90s, you heard ‘Barbie Girl,'” (Slate). “Its mercilessly chirpy Europop lyrics (‘I’m a Barbie girl in the Barbie world / Life in plastic, it’s fantastic’) were set against a relentless post–Spice Girls beat. Norwegian lead singer Lene Nystrøm playacted as Barbie and Danish singer-rapper René Dif played Ken. Dif’s gruff ‘Come on, Barbie, let’s go party’ is one of the song’s most unkillable earworms.

… whatever rock snobs think of ‘Barbie Girl,’ the song is now so durable that, earlier this week, no less a rock star than (Coldplay’s) Chris Martin was asked by two fans to sing it live onstage. Though it’s been 26 years since Aqua’s infamous anthem was first unleashed, Martin still remembered the melody.”

Against this backdrop of pop ubiquity and this summer’s cinematic extension of the Barbie franchise, cellist Josep Castanyer Alonso has produced his take on how six different classical composers might have approached the “Barbie” theme. Belying his top-drawer resumé, Alonso’s YouTube bio simply reads, “I am a cellist in the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. I also play the piano a bit …” There are key changes between the various variations, but also a few modulations within a given variation (each carefully labeled); 1:16 is just one example.

Staying within just one era/style, here’s a shorter fugue by Alonso as well:

Fee Waybill | Tall, Dark and Harmless

“Wild, wacky, weird and wonderful are just a few words that would appropriately fit but still fall short of fully describing the unclassifiable theatrical rock enigma and fabulous freak show known as The Tubes,” (ChicagoConcertReviews.com). “The San Francisco-based band started in the 1970s by turning underground upside down with cult favorites ‘Don’t Touch Me There’ and ‘White Punks On Dope,’ accompanied by technologically-advanced productions, outrageous characters, over the top costumes and comedy that all seemed to jump straight out of a scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show crossed with a Saturday Night Live sketch.”

After many years with the band, Waybill decided to go solo. “It was the good, bad and the ugly of David Foster. He was a brilliant producer and a brilliant arranger, but he wanted to make hits. When we did the first album with him, he put me together with [Toto’s] Steve Lukather and we all wrote ‘Talk To Ya Later,’ which was a big hit. Then we wrote ‘She’s a Beauty’ on the second album and that was an even bigger hit. He wanted big hits on the radio and that’s what the record company wanted, but it kind of flew in the face of a band that had been together 15 years and he’s telling us, ‘no, I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to do a whole side of just hits with Lukather and Fee.’ The band couldn’t handle it and I understand it.”

Waybill released several solo albums, including 1996’s Don’t Be Scared of These Hands. “Tall Dark and Harmless” features all of the harmonic complexity and layered textures of later Tubes material. The uptempo rocker features a buzzing, ascending chromatic guitar line on the chorus — as complex as the repeated one-note title line is simple. Overall, the architecture of the tune is ever-changing: after an intro in E major, 0:17 features multiple two-chord pairs (suggesting several keys, none of which is E major). At 0:49, a pre-chorus leads back into the static E major of the chorus.

Livingston Taylor | I Will Be In Love With You

“Livingston Taylor picked up his first guitar at the age of 13, which began a more than 50-year career that has encompassed performance, songwriting, and teaching,” (Taylor’s website). “Born in Boston and raised in North Carolina, Livingston is the fourth child in a very musical family that includes Alex, James, Kate, and Hugh. Livingston recorded his first record at the age of 19 and has continued to create beautifully crafted, introspective, original songs as well as sparkling interpretations of the classic songbook that have earned him enthusiastic listeners worldwide.”

Taylor has released several Top 40 hits, including “I Will Be in Love with You” (1978). He’s collaborated and toured with a wide range of artists, including Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Fleetwood Mac, Jimmy Buffett, and Jethro Tull. “For over three decades, Livingston taught at the Berklee College of Music, where he created a course on Stage Performance.” Taylor’s former students at Berklee include Charlie Puth, John Mayer, Gavin McGraw, Susan Tedesci, and many others.

“I Will Be In Love With You,” which reached #30 on the Pop chart and #15 on the Adult Contemporary chart, clearly presents Taylor’s phrasing and musical vocabulary as parallels to those of his big brother James. At a distance, his vocal timbre is also much like his brother’s — but upon more careful listening, it’s easier to differentiate. The tune alternates throughout between C major and D major; the first unadorned modulation hits during the intro (0:19) and others follow at 1:58 and 2:11. All of the sections with vocals are in D major.