“Dream Lover” was written and recorded by singer/songwriter/actor Bobby Darin in 1959. Along with “Mack The Knife,” “Splish Splash,” and “Beyond The Sea,” it is one of Darin’s most successful hits. Darin, who died at age 37 after a heart operation, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999. Key change at 1:45.
Tag: rock
Utopia | Monument
“Perennially underrated” are the first words of the headline on AllMusic’s Utopia page. The band was a sustained 1970s/1980s side project for songwriter/producer/performer Todd Rundgren, rock’s consummate hyphenate. Starting as a prog rock outfit in the early 70s, Utopia “evolved into a shiny mainstream rock quartet … Rundgren retreated into the background as each of his bandmates contributed songs and lead vocals to the albums. By the early ’80s, Utopia had developed into a hit-making entity in their own right.” 1980’s “Set Me Free,” a tune written by Utopia bassist Kasim Sulton, led the band’s singles by reaching #27 on the US pop charts.
According to the Rundgren-centric TRConnection, Rundgren remembers that “… at a certain point in time, Utopia was performing live as well as any quartet in the world.” But the band’s fanbase was miles deep, without nearly enough breadth to match. Drummer Willie Wilcox added, “The fan/band relationship was still fine. But when you’re still playing the same halls after ten years, getting the same guarantees, and expenses are going up, there start to be repercussions.” In addition to the band’s fervent but oddly finite following, Utopia went through a series of record label woes resulting from corporate consolidations, internecine squabbling, and pure bad luck. By the mid-80s, Utopia finally decided to call it a day, though they never officially disbanded.
Given Utopia’s often cerebral focus, 1986’s “Monument” certainly might have been written in the abstract. But for plenty of the band’s fans, the tune measures the distance between the quartet’s democratic ideals and the cold realities of making ends meet. At their collective best, each member wrote songs, sang lead vocals, and covered notoriously complex backup vocal harmonies in addition to top-drawer instrumental playing. But as one of the band’s final releases, “Monument” strongly evokes the tone of elegiac anthem not for a person, but for a time and place: “you can’t go home again.”
I got the message in my mailbox / Nobody goes to church no more
They’re closing down your little altar / They’ve locked the sanctuary door
Don’t fight it / Who can say that you didn’t try
Don’t fight it / Old soldiers never die …
Starting in G minor, the intro then jumps to a verse in Ab minor (0:36) as Sulton’s expressive tenor outlines a stark endgame, despite all efforts. At 0:58, the pre-chorus shifts to F minor; 1:10 brings a return to another verse and pre-chorus. The F major chorus (1:44 – 2:06) seemingly provides a reflection on the band’s unique vision, meticulous craft, and overarching legacy:
And if we don’t meet again
I know somewhere a monument
Stands in the name of our love …
Postscript:
Once the aftermath of its effective dissolution subsided, the band eventually reunited in Japan in the early 90s and a presented a full North American tour in 2018. Rundgren and Sulton continue to collaborate regularly. Demonstrating that the band was anything but a studio creation despite Rundgren’s famed production abilities, here’s a live 2018 version: the only change in the lineup is keyboardist/vocalist GLASYS in original keys player Roger Powell’s stead.
Sabaton | To Hell and Back
Sabaton is a Swedish band comprised of “heavy metal military historians,” according to The Guardian, which describes a recent pre-COVID gig: “A vast crowd of people are singing raucously, raising large beer tankards skyward and grinning like they have just won the lottery. In this small and sweaty venue, a Swedish heavy metal band are opening their set with a song about the exploits of Field Marshall Rommel’s infamous 7th Panzer Division in the second world war. They follow it with a number about the horrors of Passchendaele in the first world war.
By the end of the night, we will have had exuberant hymns to Lawrence of Arabia, an all-female Soviet bomber squadron and the military genius King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Everyone in the room, the vast majority of whom are wearing Sabaton shirts, sings along with absolutely everything. Meanwhile, the venue gently rocks from side to side, because we are on a ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Welcome to the 10th annual Sabaton Cruise: The Battleship, where passions for military history and Olympic-standard drinking collide.”
“To Hell and Back,” released in 2014, focuses on the Battle of Anzio (referenced in the chorus), part of the Italian Campaign of World War II fought in January 1944. Starting in D minor, the guitar solo (2:30 – 2:47) rises up into E minor before a reprise of the hook. At 3:06, the outro climbs up to F minor. Many thanks to first-time contributor Erik Lofgren for this submission!
Sting | Fortress Around Your Heart
For his first solo album after his groundbreaking work with the Police, The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), Sting formed a new band. Rolling Stone reports that the group included “young jazz hotshots from Weather Report (drummer Omar Hakim) and the Miles Davis group (bassist Darryl Jones), plus saxophonist Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland. These aren’t the usual sleepy gang of veteran sidemen; they never bothered to learn pop-jazz clichés, but they know their Jimi Hendrix, Chic, Herbie Hancock and Led Zeppelin, along with their Duke Ellington … Sting still writes short, modal melody lines … if you listen to the way verses and phrases end, there are new twists, surprising extended chords by way of Steely Dan, Weather Report and Ellington … (with) delicate-to-martial dynamics.”
In Musician magazine, Sting explained: “‘Fortress’ is about appeasement, about trying to bridge the gaps between individuals. The central image is a minefield that you’ve laid around this other person to try and protect them. Then you realize that you have to walk back through it.”
The verses leave a light footprint in terms of feel, belying difficult subject matter and complex harmonies. Three keys are touched on during the verse (0:45 – 1:22) before the tune opens up into the relatively straightforward chorus. Calling it “one of the most complex pop songs ever,” Rick Beato dissects the tune’s physiology in detail here (1:57 – 8:13).
Donald Fagen | The Nightfly
“Donald Fagen‘s solo debut established him as a more grounded, autobiographical writer away from Steely Dan. It also launched a trilogy of albums that wouldn’t conclude for decades,” notes Ultimate Classic Rock. “The Nightfly, released on Oct. 1, 1982, uses an overnight stint by a DJ at the fictional WJAZ to transport listeners back to a moment in time from Fagen’s youth at the turn of the ’60s. ‘I used to live 50 miles outside New York City in one of those rows of prefab houses. It was a bland environment. One of my only escapes was late-night radio shows that were broadcast from Manhattan – jazz and rhythm and blues. To me, the DJs were romantic and colorful figures and the whole hipster culture of black lifestyles seemed much more vital to a kid living in the suburbs, as I was.’
Fagen was searching ‘for some alternatives to the style of life in the 50s – the political climate, the sexual repression, the fact that the technological advances of the period didn’t seem to have a guiding humanistic philosophy behind them. A lot of kids were looking for alternatives, and it’s amazing how many of us found them in jazz, in other kinds of black music, in science fiction and in the sort of hip ideas and attitudes we could pick up on the light-night radio talk shows from New York City. More and more of us started looking, until the whole thing sort of exploded and you had the 60’s.'”
The album’s jazz pedigree might have a more obvious presence on its other tracks, based solely on instrumentation or arranging (for instance, the close-harmony vocals on the ballad “Maxine,” where Fagen’s multi-tracked vocals behave like an exquisitely phrased big band saxophone section.) But the adventurous harmonies and storytelling on “The Nightfly” make it an appropriate fulcrum for this album, somehow constructing an updated niche for the treasured audio iconography of jazz. Among other impressive chart positions worldwide, the album was certified platinum in both the US and the UK.
After starting in G major, the track shifts into a high-strung bridge (beginning at 3:20 in B major, but featuring multiple short excursions just about everywhere else), then returns to G major at 4:10.
U2 | Gloria
Pitchfork reports: “In the early 1980s, U2 had earned critical respect and a swelling fanbase but, despite a UK #1 album, were far from superstardom … U2 weren’t yet an arena band but they carried themselves like one. What’s more, they actually sounded better the bigger and brasher and bolder their music got.”
Released just months after the game-changing debut of MTV, the video for 1981’s “Gloria” combines a vast outdoor location, sweeping cinematography, and the happy involvement of the band’s fans from the margins. AllMusic describes the tune as a clear point in the band’s development, “marry(ing) the message, melody, and sound together.”
Starting in Eb minor, there’s a big shift at the outro (3:06) to Bb major.
Hall + Oates | I Ain’t Gonna Take It This Time
Hall and Oates came into being during the height of the Philly Soul sound. “Daryl Hall had become friends with The Temptations as they rose to stardom from the streets of Philadelphia,” reports SoulCountry. “‘They were an outrageous influence on me,’ Hall said. He joined them on the road some, ‘trying to be their assistant,’ picking up their suits at the cleaners and grabbing their coffee.
‘After the show, they would just go and sing gospel songs and stuff,’ Hall said. ‘I felt that was something I belonged doing. It was really a lot of interracial interaction, and it’s why I sing the kind of music that I sing,’ he continued. ‘There’s been a lot of misunderstanding over the years by people who can’t even imagine that.'”
The 1990 power ballad “I Ain’t Gonna Take It This Time,” like so much of the band’s output, straddles the lines among rock, pop, and soul. The tune starts in D minor; at 1:37, a multi-section bridge builds tension until 2:37, which brings a mammoth shift to F# major.
Neil Young | Winterlong
To quote novelist Anne Lamott: “If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”
Young, the longtime folk/rock sage and a resident of LA’s storied Laurel Canyon during its heyday as a music nexus, has penned a dozen or more well-known hits. But “Winterlong” was a concert-only rarity for the Canadian-born artist — until the track inexplicably showed up on a compilation album. Songfacts reports: “One of Neil Young’s rarities, ‘Winterlong’ finds him yearning and waiting, possibly for a woman, but that’s no sure thing. All we know is, he’s looking to find his way, and not sure how to get there. The song contains one of the more evocative lines in Young’s catalog: ‘It’s all illusion anyway.’ Fans recall hearing Young perform this song as early as 1970. It’s likely he recorded it in 1974 during the session for his album On The Beach, but ‘Winterlong’ wasn’t released until 1977, which it appeared on the Decade collection.”
Starting in C major, the chorus starts squarely in C but ends in D major at 1:18. At 1:38, C major returns. 2:21 – 2:40 brings another D major patch before the tune ends in C major.
The Police | Man In a Suitcase
After the success of its second album, UK/US-hybrid rock/pop/reggae trio The Police were under orders from their record label to write a hit album (Zenyatta Mondatta). This focus was quite a change from the band’s earlier goals as they were defining their sound — but also different from its later days of almost total artistic freedom as a supergroup.
In a 1982 interview with Creem excerpted on the band’s website, drummer Stewart Copeland recalls the challenges inherent in making the 1980 album: “‘We’ve got to do an album in four weeks we know we can do it, we’ve done it before. But this time it’s going to go straight to number one.’ Whilst we were in the studio, our sales figures were being discussed by people from the record company – and we hadn’t even got the thing on tape, let alone on vinyl. We were very acutely aware, that we were Creating A Product For The Market-place. The market-place was there in the studio with us. It made it a very commercial album, a very slick, clean album that showed we can do that … It’s very difficult to make an album that’s tailor-made to go straight to the top of the charts.”
The frenetic album track “Man in a Suitcase” starts in F major, but after the bridge (1:14 – 1:28) there’s a jump to G major. Many thanks to our frequent contributor JB for this submission!
for Mark
Tigran Hamasyan (feat. Berklee Middle Eastern Fusion Ensemble) | Drip
“With pianist/composer Tigran Hamasyan,” reports the artist’s own website, “potent jazz improvisation fuses with the rich folkloric music of his native Armenia … he’s one of the most remarkable and distinctive jazz-meets-rock pianists of his generation … Tigran’s career has included an impressive number of accolades, including top piano award at the 2013 Montreux Jazz Festival and the grand prize at the prestigious 2006 Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition … he was applauded by NPR Music: ‘With startling combinations of jazz, minimalist, electronic, folk and songwriterly elements … Hamasyan and his collaborators travel musical expanses marked with heavy grooves, ethereal voices, pristine piano playing and ancient melodies.'”
Our regular contributor Carlo Migliaccio has submitted Tigran’s tune “Drip,” performed here in 2018 with the Berklee College of Music Middle Eastern Fusion Ensemble. The tune combines elements of Middle Eastern music with metal — just for starters. Carlo hasn’t taken on the huge task of charting the tune out, but sends his initial findings: “The tune starts in B minor. The first modulation is at 5:03, which seems to ascend up a major third to D#, but it quickly drops down a half step in a modal shift. The tonal center definitely moves to D on a G harmonic minor scale … so is that D harmonic minor mixolydian(?) The second modulation is at 7:08 and travels briefly down a major third to Bb minor, a half step below the starting key. A few bars later, the final modulation takes it down another half step for an ending in A minor, a whole step below the starting key … I think. My ears are playing tricks on me with this one, but I’m now on a Tigran Hamasyan kick as a result of this tune.”
Maxime Cholley, a French drummer and Berklee alum now based in New York City, has long been a proponent of Tigran’s work. Maxime performed on this track and recounts the session: “Working with Tigran Hamasyan was an incredible experience. He was very humble, patient, and thrilled to play with us and try new ideas on his own songs. At the end of a rehearsal, Tigran was working on a part and I joined him while the rest of the band packed up. As we played together, I clearly felt something that could be described as his ‘musical aura.’ His playing enhanced mine and both our sounds merged in the most satisfying way — as if each of his notes had some kind of sonic glue on it. His presence was absolutely mind blowing!”
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