USA – Page 73

Marc Cohn | Walk Through This World

Asked in an interview with Goldmine about the origins of his music career, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Marc Cohn answered: “I didn’t have any other choice. I just didn’t have a choice. This is what connected with me from the time I was 7 or 8 years old, when I first heard The Beatles and The Stones, and Van Morrison and The Band. It wasn’t just that I liked it. I was obsessed with it. And I had an older brother who played piano and had a band that practiced in our basement, so I got to hear what Motown sounded like, and what Burt Bacharach sounded like, three feet away. My brother had a great ear, and he got most of the chords right, and it was just an obsession from the very beginning. And it was also an escape. And I had some ability. I could always sing, and I found I could write some words, too. It was just to be, I guess. I wouldn’t know what the hell else I’d do. It’s the thing that I was obsessed with for as long as I can remember — making records and writing songs.”

Best known for his top-40 hit “Walking in Memphis” (1991) from his platinum-selling eponymous debut album, Cohn won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1992. Utica, NY’s Observer-Dispatch describes Cohn’s material: “emotionally stirring compositions, deeply personal yet universal, and his easy, husky voice [have] earned him a devoted following and a reputation as a musician’s musician.”

Built in C major overall, “Walk Through This World” (1993) features an instrumental break (2:35 -2:56) which modulates to Bb major before reverting to the original key.

I See The Light (from “Tangled”)

“I See The Light,” written by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater for the 2010 animated Disney film Tangled, was nominated for Best Original Song at the Golden Globe and Academy Awards, and won the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media.

The film is based on the Brothers Grimm Rapunzel fairy tale, which served as inspiration for Menken to venture into a folk rock idiom for the score. “I wanted folk rock on this,” he said in an interview with Collider. “I thought about her long hair and the freedom she wanted. I immediately thought about Joni Mitchell’s ‘Chelsea Morning’ and all that folk music that I love. Cat Stevens and that energy. I just felt like that would be, on a gut level, a fresh palette to bring to this. So, that was really our way into the score.”

The track, performed by Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi, begins in C and modulates up to Eb for Levi’s verse at 1:39.

Gabriel Kahane | Sit Shiva

Composer/songwriter/pianist/vocalist Gabriel Kahane occupies a very specific part of the musical firmament. His work has ranged from pop-inflected solo voice and piano to orchestral and chamber works. “I’m sort of trying to reconcile the very direct songwriter in me with the guy who’s interested in architecture and formal rigor and harmonic and rhythmic expansiveness or complexity,” (WBUR).

Kahane’s label, Nonesuch, describes his upcoming 2022 release Magnificent Bird: “The album … chronicles the final month of a year spent off the internet … (It) revels in the tension between quiet, domestic concerns, and the roiling chaos of a nation and planet in crisis. ‘Sit Shiva,’ the album’s first single … finds Kahane skirting the rules of his digital hiatus in order to mourn, online, the death of his maternal grandmother; in typical fashion, he mines not just pathos, but humor and grace amidst his family’s grief.

In October 2020, the final month of his tech sabbatical, Kahane set out to write a song every day. ‘I wanted to create an aural brain scan at the end of this experiment,’ he explains, ‘and to give myself permission to write about small things, rather than trying to distill the enormity of the moment into grand statements. … My internet hiatus grew out of a belief that at root, our digital devices reinforce the fiction that convenience and efficiency have intrinsic value. That has implications with respect to climate crisis, to inequality, to our (in)ability to see ourselves in each other, to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to make a more just world. I wanted to leave it all behind not as a further expression of techno-pessimism, but rather in search of a positive alternative.'”

“Sit Shiva” is named after the Jewish tradition of the early part of mourning after a death of a loved one. In the case of the passing of Kahane’s grandmother, the video suggests an acutely modern version of the ritual. The tune, in C# major overall, is punctuated by a bridge in E major (2:25 – 2:43).

Billy Joel | Tell Her About It

“When Joel made 1983’s An Innocent Man, he was rich, famous, and single for the first time ever,” (Stereogum). He was dating supermodels like future second wife Christie Brinkley. He’d been asked to write a song for Easy Money, a Rodney Dangerfield movie, and he’d come up with a peppy, stagey facsimile of early-’60s soul. Joel was into it, so he just went ahead and made a whole album like that. With that album’s first single, Joel made it to #1 for the second time.

When he wrote ‘Tell Her About It,’ Joel was trying to pay tribute to the feeling of early Motown — an even more difficult sound to recapture than the doo-wop of ‘The Longest Time.’ As a songwriting exercise, ‘Tell Her About It’ hits its marks. Joel and his band effectively tap into the classic Holland-Dozier-Holland four-four big-beat stomp. Joel comes up with a memorable hook, and he keeps the structure sharp and uncluttered. There’s nothing revolutionary about it, but that fits the conceit. It’s pastiche. There’s not supposed to be anything revolutionary about it … In a period of great pop-music futurism, Billy Joel looked backwards. If The Nylon Curtain was Joel’s attempt to evoke the frustrations of working-class Reagan-era America, then ‘Tell Her About It,’ and An Innocent Man in general, are Joel capitalizing on the rose-tinted simpler-times nostalgia that helped Reagan get elected in the first place.”

After the tune starts in Bb major, the chorus shifts to F major at 1:11, then back to Bb for the intro to the next verse (1:32). From 2:25 to 2:46, the bridge drops to Ab major. The video, complete with its oddly Nixonian take on Ed Sullivan, only adds to the retro feel!

Celine Dion | That’s The Way It Is

“That’s The Way It Is” is one of Dion’s biggest hits, and was heralded by Billboard as one of the greatest songs of 1999. “‘That’s The Way It Is’ doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be Britney Spears,” said the website Can’t Stop The Pop. “It sounds like the authentic evolution of a superstar – this is a Celine Dion song through and through – and it’s hard to imagine it being performed by anyone else.”

Dion has performed the song on the Rosie O’Donnell show, twice on the Today Show, as well as on multiple tours. Beginning in E major, the track dramatically modulates up a third to Ab coming out of the bridge at 2:50.

Thanks to MotD contributor Gus Connelly for this submission!

The Beach Boys | Disney Girls (1957)

“The way the story is sometimes erroneously told, The Beach Boys were nothing more than a convenient vehicle for Brian Wilson’s incendiary songwriting and brilliant producing,” (American Songwriter). “Of course, that misconception overlooks the crucial contributions of the talented men at Brian’s side bringing his artistic vision to thrilling life with their vocals. It also neglects to take into account the years when the troubled genius contributed only sporadically to the band’s output. Consider 1971’s album Surf’s Up, where the rest of the band picked up the songwriting slack for their leader and Bruce Johnson’s wistful waltz ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ stood out as one of the disc’s finest moments.

If you’re not listening closely enough, you might read the title, hear some of the references in Johnston’s opus, and think that it’s easy nostalgia, something in which The Beach Boys have been known to trade. But what you come to realize, either by perusing the lyrics or listening to the subtle ache in those ‘oohs and aahs,’ is that the ‘fantasy world’ on which the narrator fixates is just that, an idealized vision of happiness that he hasn’t yet attained. ‘Oh, reality, it’s not for me / And it makes me laugh.’ … The unspoken context is that this song comes from a touring musician leading what was likely a hectic life with one of the most famous bands on the planet …”

After starting in F# major, we reach a dreamy bridge at 2:07. At 2:28, the groove falls away as the layered vocals briefly take on the oblique, rubato harmonies of a Barbershop quartet, proclaiming that “… she likes church bingo chances and old-time dances.” At 2:37, a strong IV/V in the new key (G major) leads us to another verse (2:45) as the 3/4 time resumes. The track could be a more grown-up echo of the band’s 1966 hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

Lauren Kennedy | And I Will Follow

“And I Will Follow” is a stand-alone song by musical theater composer Jason Robert Brown. It is the lead track on singer Lauren Kennedy’s 2003 album The Songs of Jason Robert Brown (JRB subtly lends his voice as back-up as well.) The song, which fuses musical theatre, folk and country characteristics, begins in D and modulates up a whole step to E coming out of the bridge at 3:30.

Mike Stern | What I Meant to Say

Voted Jazz Guitarist of the Year in 1993 by Guitar Player and one of DownBeat Magazine’s “75 Great Guitarists,” Mike Stern has released 20+ albums of his own as well as collaborating with Miles Davis, Blood Sweat and Tears, Steps Ahead, Michael Brecker, The Brecker Brothers, Jim Hall, and many others.

A lot of work and preparation have set the stage for Stern’s versatility. “‘There are so many different things to get into and study,’ (RivetingRiffs). ‘I check out a lot of horn players, a lot of saxophone players and trumpet players, and Miles, I check his stuff out. I write it out, I transcribe stuff like that. Piano players, like McCoy Tyner and Herbie, I try to get some of those ideas on the guitar … You can arrange everything to a certain point and you can rehearse it to a certain point, but it doesn’t all have to be Pro Tooled to death and everything lined up perfectly. It’s got to have some rough edges … with Miles, there was an edge, but I’ve always liked a kind of a vocal sound, like a horn. I use a little chorus and two amps to try and make it sound a little more vocal, like Jimi Hendrix, because he sang, and the blues guys I grew up with, BB King, Albert King, they bent the strings and sounded very vocal and I’ve always been a fan of that style. I want the guitar to sound more legato and more singing like. I want air in the sound.’”

Although Stern is well known for tunes that fit into a more uptempo rock/blues/funk/fusion vein, “What I Meant to Say,” from his Grammy-nominated 1994 album Is What It Is, embodies the legato, lyrical style he detailed in the interview. Verse 1 starts in Ab major; after a surprisingly smooth side step into D major at 0:34, we return to Ab major for verse 2 (0:42). A shift to E major hits at 1:21, then C major at 1:38, and a sustained solo section in Ab at 2:12. Stern re-visits many of the sections until the verse is re-stated in the original key at 4:25.

George Jones | Bartender’s Blues

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 Billboard following 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!

JT’s version, for reference:

Linda Eder | Someone Like You

“Someone Like You” is from the 1990 musical Jekyll & Hyde, featuring a score by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse. Eder originated the role of Lucy in her Broadway debut and was nominated for a Drama Desk award for her performance. She is now an acclaimed solo concert artist and has released 18 studio albums.

The song, which comes at the end of Act 1 as Lucy is questioning her love for Jekyll, modulates at 2:43.