Celine Dion’s signature song, the theme of the 1997 film Titanic, is covered here by Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, known for their inventive interpretations of well-known classics. The track, the style of Jackie Wilson and Frank Valli, features singer/songwriter Mykal Kilgore, and modulates at 2:22.
Tag: pop
Taylor Swift | SuperStar
“SuperStar” is featured on the platinum edition of American singer/songwriter Taylor Swift’s 2008 album Fearless, which won Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Album of the Year and helped Swift become a household name. The version below is included on the re-recorded version of the album, released in 2021, the first of six planned re-recordings that Swift plans to release. Swift began her first tour since before the pandemic last week, highlighting music from her four most recent albums.
The track begins in D, modulates briefly up to E for the bridge at 3:04, and returns to D at 3:29.
Foreigner | Urgent
For its fourth album, 4, late 70s/early 80s pop/rock stalwarts Foreigner brought in producer Mutt Lange, later to become much more famous for his work with UK pop/rock band Def Leppard and country chanteuse Shania Twain (who became Mrs. Lange for a time). “Feeling the need for an outside influence on keyboards, Jones and Lange brought in the then-unknown Thomas Dolby, who described the experience as ‘very productive.'” (UltimateClassicRock). “He noted in his 2018 memoir The Speed of Sound that ‘I gained the utmost respect for (Foreigner guitarist) Mick Jones, a thoroughly decent bloke, as well as for Mutt Lange’s amazing production skills. I’ve never worked with a more fastidious producer. He would make me go over and over my parts, adjusting the inflections on every single note until it was exactly perfect. Some simple strings of notes took hours and hours to record.’
‘When he brought in sax legend Junior Walker for a solo on ‘Urgent’ and recorded at least a dozen versions, Mutt had the wisdom to recognize that the very first solo Junior blew, rough edges and all, was The Take,’ said Dolby.
In 2016, Dolby said ‘Urgent’ had at least some of its roots in a demo tape he’d sent to Lange earlier, in the hope of securing his own publishing deal. ‘He was a very big fan of some of the sounds I used in a song of mine called Urges … He asked me to put it one of (Foreigner’s) backing tracks. … A while later, they added the vocals, which were Urgent, urgent. … I raised my eyebrows slightly – but you know, I’m glad to have influenced them in a positive way.’ (It) was the first of five singles spawned from 4, four of which broke the Top 40.”
The studio version didn’t feature a modulation — but not so for a 2006 live version, performed in Germany. After a leisurely intro not found on the original, the song begins in earnest at 1:39. Mick Jones is still the center of the band’s sound, but the rest of the personnel has shifted over the years. However, the 2006 band did an admirable job of honoring the band’s central lead vocal and sax sounds. At 5:32, the band moves the key up a minor third, returning to the original key at 6:05.
The studio version, a staple of MTV’s debut era:
The Dolby tune, despite being thoroughly marinated in UK New Wave sensibilities, has some clear similarities in mood and texture:
Ashes | Is There Anything I Can Do
The Ashes were a southern California pop group that formed in the mid-1960s. The group had two principal songwriters, guitarist John Merrill and bassist Alan Brackett (album liner notes). The star of the group was singer Barbara Robison, who had a clear and powerful voice, featured on “Is There Anything I Can Do?” The group’s drummer, Spencer Dryden, would later join the Jefferson Airplane.
The Ashes released only two singles before breaking up. But the core of the group, Merrill, Bracket, and Robison, would go on to form The Peanut Butter Conspiracy (which is either the worst or the best band name ever); they recorded two albums for Columbia and a final album for the independent Challenge label.
Barbara Robison continued her singing career after PBC broke up. Sadly, she didn’t recover from a collapse she suffered during a performance in 1988.
“Is There Anything I Can Do” (1966) was written by singer Jackie DeShannon and Nick DeCaro. The version in this video is from an unreleased demo acetate. The final released version features additional instrumentation by those studio stalwarts, The Wrecking Crew.
The tune is in a noticeably up-tuned E major. At 1:35, there’s a half-step shift up to F that sounds like the start of a sustained modulation, but actually serves as a very prominent sub-V (a relatively rare feature in pop). The song soon drops back to the starting key. The same jarring rise/fall pattern is repeated later.
Carole King and James Taylor | Up on the Roof
“By the 1960s, decades after Tin Pan Alley had moved from its original location on Manhattan’s West 28th Street and become a catchphrase for the popular music industry as a whole, writers such as the stellar team of Carole King and Gerry Goffin were mining the same escapist concepts, but updating them with a hint of postwar anxiety… (American Songwriter). ‘Up on the Roof,’ a hit for the Drifters in 1962, remains one of the most enduring songs of the latter-day Tin Pan Alley period (when writers labored at the Brill Building and other sites along Broadway), if only for its lushness of melody and lyrical sophistication. ‘At night the stars put on a show for free’ … In a manner similar to that of the first Tin Pan Alley writers, Goffin and King honor the tradition of quick recognition through tunefulness: hit songs, during the Brill Building era, needed to be heard just once to be remembered.
But ‘Up on the Roof’ also evinces a quiet sense of sadness, an urban dissatisfaction that moves beyond anything conceived by the rose-spectacled Tin Pan Alley writers of the early 20th century. Inspired, perhaps, by the realism of works such as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, King and Goffin view modern Gotham as a place of chaos and potential strife: ‘people are just too much for me to face…I get away from the hustling crowd.’ For these city dwellers, escape is not just a goal but a necessity. The difference—from the perspective of songwriting technique—is that listeners are allowed to visualize the beauty of the flight ‘to the top of the stairs’ along with the reasons for making it … Hard, unsparing reality could be saved for Bob Dylan and the new generation of singer/songwriters who arrived in his wake.”
James Taylor’s 1979 album Flag featured his cover of the tune, which performed well as a top 40 single. Reflecting on his first years of work with King starting in 1970, Taylor remembered: ” … Carole and I found we spoke the same language” (The Guardian). “Not just that we were both musicians, but as if we shared a common ear, a parallel musical/emotional path. And we brought this out in one another, I believe.” It’s all the more powerful to hear Taylor and King collaborate on this live duo version of the tune (2010). The duet finds them shifting between her best key and his — while adding a surprising new dimension with the connective tissue. King begins in C major, followed by a shift to the F major (the same key as Taylor’s studio cover) at 1:15, then back to King’s C major at 2:22, then finally settling into F major at 2:45 for the balance of the tune.
for Shayna
For reference, here’s the 1962 original:
Guys ‘n’ Dolls | There’s a Whole Lot of Loving
“Yes, we have reached the stage where a song from a McVitie’s fruit shortcake TV ad can be recorded and released as a hit single.” (Music Sounds Better With Two). “The song itself has nothing to do with cookies and a lot to do with the natural hugeness of the United States (the songwriters were American). It’s a proper song, not a jingle fleshed out. The loving going on is abstract; the love could be for anyone, but it’s heartfelt and the wholesome goodness of the song’s sing-a-long style matches the Hoover Dam mention. It could be straight out of a musical, though usually there’s a bit more plot in a stage song.
I don’t know if this was expected to be a hit – but it was. So, what to do? On very short notice, a group of male and female singers were put together so they could appear as Guys ‘n’ Dolls for promotional purposes – miming the song and dancing on variety shows … There was no time to re-record the song with the new group, however. It worked, at least at first … This scam, if you like, did have one unintended consequence. A few years after their being relieved from Guys ‘n’ Dolls, Theresa Bazar – the female of the pair – approached the studio bass player, one Trevor Horn, to see if he would be interested in working with her and David Van Day, the male of the pair. He was and so they did – as the duo Dollar. And so from late 1974, the tiny seeds of something different were being sown.”
The intro features a few psychedelic-adjacent instrumental touches before it kicks into its full “Up With People”/The Bicentennial is Approaching — Look Busy! vibe in earnest at 0:33. At 1:45 and 2:30, the string-saturated key changes are unsubtle enough to drive your Great Aunt Mildred’s V8 Buick Electra through — with room to spare.
Cher | Love and Understanding
“Love and Understanding” was featured on American singer Cher’s 1991 album Love Hurts. Written by MotD regular Diane Warren, the track reached the number 3 spot on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.
The song’s intro begins in the key of A minor and 12/8 time before abruptly shifting to a 4/4 rock groove in the relative C major at 0:14. The verse stays in C before pivoting back to A minor through a V7 chord for the chorus at 1:00. A full modulation up a step to B minor occurs at 2:50, leading into the final chorus. Finally, a short outro at 3:54 recalls the opening 12/8 motive.
Jane Siberry | Mimi on the Beach
“Canadian art-pop chanteuse Jane Siberry stands outside the traditional boundaries of folk and pop music, creating ethereal, unconventional songs that draw from a deep wellspring of creativity,” (AllMusic). “Emerging in the early ’80s, Siberry courted mainstream success with left-of-center hits like “Mimi on the Beach,” “I Muse Aloud,” “One More Colour,” and “Calling All Angels.” As the decades progressed, she began weaving elements of jazz and Celtic music into her cosmopolitan sound — which evokes names like Laura Nyro, Kate Bush, Toyah Willcox, Suzanne Vega, and Laurie Anderson — while remaining fiercely independent and releasing her material via her own label, Sheeba Records.
… “No Borders Here (is an) assured, cinematic collection highlighted by ‘Mimi on the Beach,’ an underground Canadian hit,” which the 1984 album’s liner notes describe as a ‘7.5 minute art-rock single.'”
Built in G major overall, the tune takes a turn after the second verse, when the pre-chorus arrives at 2:35. The previously relentless 8th-note accompaniment is suspended as the melody shifts to short upgoing segments. At 2:42, the melody starts (but doesn’t complete) an E whole-tone scale, further unmooring the listener. At 2:51, the chorus lands in B minor.
The Maisonettes | Heartache Avenue
“The Maisonettes’ oddness lay not so much in their hit as their combination of maverick indie record label beginnings with a semi-manufactured image that some indie purists might find crass,” (LastFM). “Their hit, ‘Heartache Avenue,’ entered the UK chart in late 1982 and rose all the way up to number seven. Like most of the music they would record over the next year or two, it was fairly mainstream pop / rock with early 1980s synthesizer-abetted production and a notable (but not overwhelming) 1960s soul-pop influence, with a particularly audible debt to Motown.” The manufactured nature of the UK band’s lineup was driven completely by the nascent music video era: the backup vocalists didn’t sing on the studio version of the tune (or anything else), but rather were strictly dancers who could also lip-sync. Many saw this limitation on the band’s flexibility as a cause of its demise.
The public’s taste for music based on a nod to the past proved limited: ” … interest in the revival of the sounds and fashions of the Mod and Beat Generation era of the 60s was starting to cool off (the break-up of The Jam proving the final nail in the coffin). The Maisonettes never did get into the chart again …”
After beginning in a slightly detuned F# major, 0:33 – 0:40 brings a short pre-chorus. After a second verse and pre-chorus, a more ambitious G# major chorus hits from 1:19 – 1:42, making the verse seem rather connect-the-dots by comparison. The key reverts to the original F# for another verse, then lifts again to G# at 2:13 for another chorus.
Barry Manilow | I Write The Songs
“I Write The Songs” was written by Bruce Johnston, a member of the Beach Boys, and released on his 1977 solo album Going Public. Barry Manilow’s cover, recorded in 1976, won Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards and reached the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Cash Box, a now-defunct music trade industry magazine, wrote that “the melodic, ballad-like beginning grows into an operatic crescendo, all done in clear production that all age groups will appreciate.”
There is an unusual modulation up a major third from F to A for the penultimate strain of the chorus at 2:34, and then Manilow takes it up one more step to B for the last chorus at 3:00.
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