Written by Allen Story, Anna Gordy Gaye and George Gordy, and first recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1967, “What Christmas Means To Me” has been covered by dozens of artists over the years. Green included the song on his 2012 Christmas album Cee Lo Green’s Magic Moment, and it reached the #23 spot on the R&B charts in the United States. The tune modulates from Bb up to B at 1:41.
Tag: r&b
Roy Ayers | Searchin’
According to the website of R&B/jazz vibraphonist/vocalist Roy Ayers, he’s known as “the Godfather of Neo-Soul. He continues to bridge the gap between generations of music lovers. In the 60s he was an award-winning jazz vibraphonist and transformed into a popular R&B band leader in the 70s/80s.”
Although he started performing in the late 1940s and was a part of the acid jazz sound of the 1970s with his band Ubiquity, he’s been prominently sampled by Dr. Dre, J. Cole, Tyler the Creator, Jill Scott and more, “earning him a vaunted place among music producers and DJs,” (LA Times). Again from his own website: “Today, (Ayers) is an iconic figure still in great demand with music industry heavyweights, including Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, 50 Cent, A Tribe Called Quest, Tupac and Ice Cube. Many of Ayers’ songs have been frequently sampled and remixed by DJs worldwide.”
“Searchin'” (1976) starts in E minor but shifts to G minor for its choruses (for the first time from 0:46 – 1:25) before reverting to the original key.
The Supremes | Here Comes the Sunrise
Clifton Davis, known for writing “Never Can Say Goodbye” for the Jackson 5, wrote “Here Comes The Sunrise” for the newly Diana Ross-less (-free?) Supremes, released on their 1971 album Touch (The Diana Ross Project). ” … a nice song, a mid-tempo pop number with just the right amount of bounce; the Billboard review of Touch called this song a ‘chart possibility,’ and it’s easy to imagine it getting some radio play …
“Touch received strong reviews from critics; Billboard raved, ‘The trio really has its act together, and are sounding more exciting than ever,’ and Rolling Stone called the album ‘an unqualified success and the final proof that the Supremes will continue without Diana Ross.’ Indeed, the trio sounds extremely confident, tackling an eclectic group of songs with great skill; lead singer (Jean) Terrell, in particular, turns in some of the finest work of her Motown career, shaking off any bit of lingering hesitancy and attacking each song with impressive versatility and vocal elasticity. Touch falls just shy of being a perfect album, but it’s close … Touch certainly deserved more success than it eventually found, and stands up today as a smart, satisfying artistic statement.”
After a start in G major, an early bridge (1:01) leads to a short instrumental interlude (1:24 – 1:29) featuring unexpected brass syncopations over a patch of sumptuous harmonies, dropping us into G# major for the balance of the tune.
Adele | Love Is a Game
“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.
Little Mix | You Gotta Not
“You Gotta Not” is featured on the 2016 album Glory Days by the British girls group Little Mix. The album was their first to reach #1 in the UK; AllMusic claimed “the group deliver[s] a set of hooky, smartly crafted songs that balance swaggering, ’60s-style R&B with stylish, electronic-tinged dance-pop.” Co-written by Meghan Trainor, “You Gotta Not” highlights themes of female empowerment, and its groove recalls Jennifer Lopez’s “Ain’t Yo Mama,” also written by Trainor. The tune modulates from Db up to D at 1:12.
Silk Sonic | Blast Off
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.
Connie Laverne | Can’t Live Without You
“Can’t Live Without You” by Connie Laverne was originally released as white label DJ copy on the New York record label GSF shortly before the label folded in 1974,” reports Sam Beaubien of NPR affiliate WDET’s program CultureShift. “This record is rarely seen and is highly coveted … (it became) popular through modern DJs playing this song in their sets, specifically in the UK. Since then, the track has been remastered and released for the Club Classics album celebrating 50 years of UK’s Northern Soul scene.
Information on the vocalist Connie Laverne is extremely hard to find. GrooveCollector states that the single was produced by George Kerr. Phyllis Hyman later recorded (but didn’t release) a version of the tune. From The Guardian’s overview of the genre, which is said to have been the UK’s answer to Motown: “One of the many beauties of Northern Soul is its sheer unknowability. It’s a scene that has always thrived on the rare, the obscure, and the undiscovered. Since it first emerged in the dance halls of northern England in the late 60s, it has existed in direct opposition to the very concept of greatest hits … There is no carved-in-stone canon – everyone’s journey through it is unique. Northern Soul is a culture based on chance finds, crate-digging and word-of-mouth recommendations.”
1:12 brings a half-step upward modulation; at 1:43, we seem to be headed for another, but we fall back into the original key instead! Many thanks to our prolific contributor JB!
Bruno Mars | Versace on the Floor
Featured on the 2016 album 24K Magic, “Versace on the Floor” is an homage to the slow jams of the 1990s, and gives singer Bruno Mars a chance to show off his sentimental side.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mars claimed the song through several different iterations before arriving at the final version. “At a certain point, I needed to stop telling you we’re gonna get down, and just get down,” Mars said of his inspiration for the hook.
The track charted moderately well, peaking at #33 on the Billboard Top 100 in the US. A music video, starring American actress and singer Zendaya, and a popular remix produced by French DJ David Guetta, were both released in 2017.
The tune begins in D major and modulates up to Eb for the final chorus at 3:19.
Billy Ocean | Love Really Hurts Without You
British singer Billy Ocean’s first Top 40 hit in the US, “Love Really Hurts Without You” was featured on his eponymous first studio album, released in 1976.
Ocean claims he wrote the song while simultaneously learning how to play the new piano he had just bought. “The novelty of it was coming home every lunchtime and evening and tinkling my piano until eventually I did get something out of it which was the song ‘Love Really Hurts Without You’,” he said. “My left hand started playing the melody and my right hand just did some down beats and my voice just started coming out with [the opening lyric] ‘You run around town like a fool and you think that it’s groovy’ and the song just came together there and then.”
The song has since appeared in the 2013 film Filth, as well as in the Netflix series Sex Education. Beginning in F major, the tune modulates up to G at 2:07.
Gladys Knight + The Pips | Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
Vocalist Gladys Knight, according to IMDB, won the Ted Mack & the Original Amateur Hour talent show (1948) at age of seven. She later built a lasting career with her longtime backup singers/dancers, “The Pips,” comprised of her brother and two of her cousins. Perhaps best known for the tracks “Midnight Train to Georgia (1973) and 1985’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” Knight was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. She’s won seven Grammy Awards out of her total of 22 nominations.
All of the Pips have now retired. But The Guardian reviewed one of Knight’s 2019 concerts, remarking on her extraordinary energy and enduring appeal: “Uplifting anthems came laden with poignant nostalgia on a night where the vivacious veteran showed no sign of stopping … an astonishing 58 years after ‘Every Beat of My Heart’ hit the US charts … she is still clearly having fun, telling her euphoric audience: ‘We’ve been hanging out for, errrr … many, many years’ to ripples of laughter. Moments later, she quips, ‘I feel it coming on. Be careful not to hurt yourself.’”
“Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” written by Jim Weatherly, was released during the very heart of Knight’s prominence (1974); it became a huge hit in the US (#3, Pop; #10, Adult Contemporary; #1, R&B) and also went into the top ten in the UK and Canada. Knight sails a high tonic note from the new key over the transition into the modulation at 1:43 — along with her warm and slightly raspy tone, a true trademark.
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