Even a great band like the Beatles goes off on a detour and does a bit of cabaret for awhile. But you’ll find that the truly great ones always come back to playing real rock and roll, I thought [Abbey Road] got a bit glossed over at the time it was released. But those bluesy fills and huge riffs [in I Want You (She’s So Heavy)] showed they were still terrific rockers right to the end
That whole [Abbey Road] album takes you for a ride. And I Want You (She’s So Heavy) takes you for a ride within that ride. Those monster riffs seem to go on forever and then suddenly drop you off a cliff. Lennon’s vocals are just so passionate. He hated his voice, as Hendrix hated his. I think the fact that they weren’t typical singers made them even more expressive. A lot of trained singers have less impact than someone who’s just flying by the seat of his or her pants.
Henrique Fogli was kind enough to interview me for his Creative Insights blog on the subject of creativity and whaddyaknow - The Beatles came up! You can read it here.
I've never been convinced by some of the great 'Hard Day's Night mystery chord' conspiracy theories in the past, but this video has won me over.
There's nothing more guaranteed to generate loads of comments than a post called Five Songs Where The Beatles...Well...Sucked and Something Else went there. For the record I'd call it 1 great, 2 good, 1 OK and 1 lousy song, but that doesn't have the same ring. Can you guess which is which?
On the back of the news that Abbey Road was the best selling album of vinyl album of 2011, Ultimate Classic Rock conducted a poll of Best Beatle Album. The poll seems to be a weird mashup of UK and US releases but here's the results
Abbey Road 26.69%
The Beatles (The White Album) 17.17%
Revolver 16.22%
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 15.53%
Rubber Soul 13.88%
A Hard Day's Night 3.46%
Let It Be 3.03%
Magical Mystery Tour 2.42%
Meet The Beatles! 1.6%
What do you think?
Lastly, if you're into fab gear (there's a joke in there somewhere...) then you might like the site at The Canteen
My mom … bought Abbey Road, and I wore that sucker out on my little phonograph as a kid. I used to put it on before I went to bed and would fall asleep listening to it. [I Want You (She's So Heavy) is] the last song on the first side, and it's very moody, with amazing guitar tones and a nice little bass groove. One night, I'm drifting off and the song keeps going on and on at the end, making storm noises and things. It freaked me out! I was a little kid and I got scared. I actually had to jump up and turn it off because I thought the devil had possessed my turntable.
Primus' Les Claypool (compiling his ideal mixtape in the Oct 96 Guitar World)
Be regular and orderly in your life ... so that you may be violent and original in your work.
- Gustave Flaubert
As well as being singletasking, prolific, co-writers, with a fine crop of facial hair, the Beatles were such successful songwriters because they were creatures of habit.
Consider how consistent, even boring, they were in their careers as recording artists. They maintained not only the same line up, but had one manager, one record label and the same two roadies for the entire seven years.
The vast majority of their 211 songs were rehearsed, cut and mixed at EMI studios, Abbey Road under the watchful eye of one producer, George Martin.
And tools of the trade? It's only a slight generalisation* to say Lennon & McCartney recorded most of the songs with 2 basses, 3 electrics and 2 acoustics. Harrison, the biggest gearhead, seemed to average one new guitar per album which still adds up to less instruments than many pros take on tour today. The band shared, swopped and repainted guitars throughout their career. Ringo had five successive kits that were all essentially the same, until he went crazy and added an extra tom tom for Let It Be.
This frugality is mind boggling when compared with Slash's collection of 100 guitars (and rising) and Mike Portnoy's purple, siamese and albino monster kits.
Even the number of wives and houses was far less than the average rock star quota!
It's A Drag Man All this resulted in a minimum of creative drag when it came to making music. Every new band member takes time to settle in. New producers and studios need time to get comfortable with. Even a new instrument takes time to get used to. And all that time could be better spent writing and recording.
Consider Abbey Road studios. In many ways it was a inhospitable grey place, characterised by harsh lighting, locked fridges and rough toilet paper. But whether George Martin and the team needed a harpsichord or a recording of a blackbird they knew where to find it. They didn't need to stop to figure out how to patch the reverb through the desk. In fact because everyone knew exactly how it all worked they had the ability to devise ways to make things not work properly, inventing ADT, flanging, close miking and the like.
The Beatles were products of their time and that means they had less choices available to them than we do today (as I've written about before). But that just means we need to pay more attention to this.
Don't Let It Be
Let's look at Let It Be as a case study. It's universally believed to be The Beatles lowest ebb. What was going on? Lennon was going through a divorce. The band were deadlocked over whether Lee Eastman or Allen Klein should represent them. So how did they approach recording a new album?
They decide to film a 'making of' documentary. This involved them rehearsing on a film studio soundstage. Union rules meant they had work normal 'office hours' rather than the night shift they'd become used to, surrounded by a strange film crew rather than the normal handful of insiders. Glyn Johns was giving the job of capturing the album on tape at Apple's 'state of the art' 72 track studio which hadn't even been finished (and proved unusable when it was).
The result was a disaster. The follow up, Abbey Road was a return to form, because in part, it was a return to the usual people, place and methods too.
Balance It's so tempting to start moving the furniture when you want to create something fresh and it feels like the more change the better. But the Beatles were able to evolve musically at such a phenomenal rate because they left so many other things untouched.
Think about it like this. Your kitchen is a workspace. You like to know where everything is and have everything you use regularly to hand. That's why it drives you (and me) nuts when they keep rearranging the shelves at the supermarket. There are times when we need to rearrange or decorate the kitchen. But they are the days when you order take out Pizza. Is the point 'never sack the drummer, buy a new guitar or move house?'. No. It's that every change is a withdrawal from the 'bank of creative headspace' and it makes sense to maintain a healthy balance. So if you just fired half the band maybe you shouldn't record your next album in another country on that brand new digital format this time around.
In general aim for as little excitement as possible in your working methods. Your creative process should appear utterly boring to anyone else (unless they are interested in 'creative processes'). If you're doing anything sexier than drinking lots of coffee while you play the same 3 notes over and over again, I'd say you're doing it wrong. Blessed are they who can change what they do, because they rarely change how they do it. *If you'd like my research to be a little more accurate you could always buy me a copy of Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk or (thanks Roberta!) any other book on my Amazon wish list!
Time to wrap up Abbey Road with some concluding thoughts.
First of all I still stand by all the observations I made in the introductory post Let It Be vs Abbey Road namely,
Though Abbey Road is far better than Let It Be both albums reflect a songwriting partnership that could no longer work together and a dysfunctional band running out of ideas.
The reason Abbey Road is such a good album is that in a sense it is George Martin's concept album where the 'concept' was simply to work in a businesslike fashion and make a well recorded, well constructed album.
Having analysed every song in detail, here's what I've learned
Here Comes The Sun, Something, Come Together are classic songs. Others like You Never Give Me Your Money and I Want You have elements of greatness that they don't quite fulfil.
Abbey Road represents Ringo and George's greatest moments as Beatles composers. John Lennon has one classic on here. Surprisingly McCartney is the only one not on top form. What sapped his creative energy? Let It Be, the lawsuits or the Long One? I think the positive critical response to the Medley (and to a lesser extent A Day In The Life ) harmed Paul's songwriting in that it encouraged McCartney to release many more 'patchwork songs' from Jet to much of the Memory Almost Full album. But apart from Live And Let Die I'm struggling to name any that have really worked. (Can YOU think of any?).
Two songs start with lines blatantly ripped off other artists. Come Together nicks lyrics (and the vocal rhythm) from Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me and Something from James Taylor's Something In The Way She Moves. (Berry's publisher sued and won).
In The Ballad Of John And Yoko/Old Brown Shoe I think we have the only example in the Beatles career of a single being far worse than anything on the album.
There are moments on Abbey Road where you can hear the seeds of where the music scene would head in the next decade. There are hints of Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, The Who, Fleetwood Mac and Santana here. I'm sure that, had they continued, The Beatles would have survived and thrived in the stadium rock era.
But that was not to be. Lennon was fading away. He was completely absent on Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Here Comes The Sun and Her Majesty and contributed only backing vocals to Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and Old Brown Shoe.
Next time I'll put up an index of all the Abbey Road posts. Then we're movin' on people, movin' on.
At this time of year the mullioned halls of Beatles Songwriting Academy become deserted as the students all go home for the summer, the professors head off to the nearest pub for research and the rest of the support staff put on the Stones and kick back. Even the school nurse is doing a European tour with Rammstein. So as soon as I heard that songwriting blogger Nicholas Tozier was in town I grabbed my Rickenbacker frying pan and invited him over for a traditional English meal and a chat about I Want You (She's So Heavy).
Matt: You want that last onion bhaji, Tozier?
Tozier: No, thanks man. I'm full!
One of the first times I talked to you, you said I Want You (She's So Heavy) was one of your favourite Beatles tunes. But what does a poetic, literary guy like you see in a song with just 13 words and hardly any description?
I’d call it more dramatic than literary. Just a few words sung like they’re meant. And to be honest, I think I enjoy the oppressive, ominous atmosphere more than anything else about this song.
That ominous atmosphere is really coming from the bridge section right?
Yeahhh. ROOOOOAARRRRRRR. Sounds like some kind of vortex opened up in the studio and started sucking all the Beatles and their instruments into it. It’s fantastic.
Did you know the album sides were originally reversed? Meaning this song (and that ending) would have been their final statement as a band.
I had no idea. That’s spooky.
It leaves you with a whole different parting message than
And in the end The love you take Is equal to the love you make
Mm, tell me about it. Ending with “I Want You” would make it more of a “Don’t get sucked into Cthulhu’s gaping maw” kind of moral I guess.
So beginning with the ending - I can see where you’re coming from, but for me that section is too long for anyone who isn’t stoned -
Ha! I have no idea why (I’m not stoned, I swear) but I like that portion a lot, actually. Maybe it’s the metalhead in me coming out after all these years. I’d argue that the song’s structure does drag, but for me I’d say the drag’s more in the middle.
Yeah. We have the verse section repeated in two keys (Am and Dm) and they do the whole thing four times. They could have cut the Dm section in a verse or two (definitely in the instrumental verse). After all the Am and Dm verse sections both end on the same chord progression [G to Am].
Totally agreed there. At that point the repetition isn’t really necessary. The statement’s already been made. Kind of like when somebody makes a really wonderful point orally, but then drags the speech out for five more minutes just rehashing that in less interesting ways.
Have you seen the Across The Universe film - it’s like Mamma Mia but with Beatles songs?
No I haven’t! Is this song in it?
Yeah it’s the best video I've seen where the visuals mean something completely different to the original meaning of the song. Let me show you.
[We head for the matron's room and find her PS3 console next to the statue of the Virgin Mary, underneath the framed Ringo Starr 8x10. Matt cues up the video on Youtube while Tozier admires the religious iconography].
Tozier: I think this Ringo signature is fake...
Matt: Here we go...
Tozier: Hmm, that was interesting.
Matt: Interesting in a bad way?
No, not at all. The social context of the song is interesting and I can see why they choose this very moody, grinding song to accompany that scene. Out of the whole film’s context it’s hard for me to pass any judgment on, but the visuals were very interesting and surreal and terrifying, which is entirely appropriate given that they’re talking about a sucking wound that the U.S. tried to stop by shovelling bodies into it.
The film is worth checking out. I wondered how they did such a good job of making a logical sensible piece out of such disparate songs when other shows (We Will Rock You) are embarrassing and tacky. I think it’s 'cos A, there are a lot of characters in the Beatles songs and B, the lyrical meanings are deliberately vague.
Yeah, I can see why you’d say that. An ambiguous refrain is useful for more than just verse development, I guess.
[We head to the drawing room for brandy, cigars and a game of billiards. Tozier pots the final ball off two cushions in spectacular fashion]
Matt: Darn you and all your fancy Down Easter ways!! Anyway, getting back to I Want You. I can hear the seeds of where the music scene was heading in this song. There are hints of Alice Cooper, early Led Zeppelin - the rock dinosaurs were coming!
Tozier: Totally agree with you there. This is blues, getting more and more nasty, more distorted.
I think Jimmy Page, would have done a better job as a producer/arranger on this song than the Beatles did. As you said, once the Beatles have stated their themes they just repeat - he would have built and added more parts...
I would hope so. Is it true that the Beatles mixed this as a group?! That seems insane.
Well by this time Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were involved in mixing, but not all at once. Have you seen those old consoles? There weren't enough controls to have one each!
[Chokes back his brandy] Oh to be a fly on the wall... No, I hadn’t seen those. I think your comment on being stoned earlier hit the nail. This song sounds stoned.
If you want to get a feel for what equipment the Beatles had at their disposal just watch any old Frankenstein film.
The creature walks!!!
Yeah but just REAAAAAAALLLLLLLYYY SLLLLOOOOWWWWLY!
[Laughs] Indeed! More of a shuffle.
Speaking of which - did you notice Ringo goes into swingtime on the final bridge fade out. The man was a genius. Sorry. Is.
I hadn’t noticed that! But now that I think back, you’re right. I was just thinking before we started talking that rhythms are really responsible for what momentum this song has.
It does sound a bit patchwork, but I hadn’t ascribed it to the tempo. Some of the transitions are certainly awkward, but I think the tempo’s only an accomplice in that. Not so sure about the heavily swinging bridge section that always makes me think of elevator music.
Are you calling the Dm ascending thing the bridge or the stop start E7b9 thing? Oh! The solo!
The solo.
Yeah, right. It’s Santana or Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac at their snooziest.
That’s a good way of putting it. It’s like Santana’s still a little sedated from his flight in or something.
[Laughs]. Put me in George Martin's seat and the solo (or at least half of it) would be my first edit for sure. Can I not persuade you to trim the ‘fade out' a little though? I mean the song is 7:47 - guess how much of that is the final section.
Probably about half an hour of that is the end, yeah.
Close. 3:10. On one riff! I mean the famous Hey Jude fade is only slightly longer [3:59]. The only fills are Ringo (very good) and Paul (very bad). I’d use the word dribbly to describe his fills.
That’s probably what the lead sheet said: “Slowly; with dribbles” The more I examine the song, the more its holes are apparent, for sure. Don’t ask me why, but I stand by the outro riff. There’s something about a sinister groove that I like.
I can get on board with that – it IS a brilliant riff. And if you were going to play one riff over and over again I’d want it to be that. Why is it so great?
For one thing, as you said, Ringo is doing his best to keep it all rhythmically exciting. And really if this wasn’t done at high volume with distortion, it’d lose a lot of its power. And if they’d played that riff in a higher register, it’d be a disaster.
For me the power comes from having a chord progression [Dm, Dm/F, E7b9, Bb7, A aug] that's basically minor, but nearly every chord has an F at the top - giving you a b9 on the E7 and a #5 on A which turns it into A aug.
Yeah, there are a lot of different dissonant relationships to that note keeping everything tense. It all “resolves,” but uneasily. Which makes us want to hear another repetition. Or in my case, 4,000 repetitions please.
[Laughs] Listen, I'm gonna have to feed the guard dogs in the theology department in a minute. Thanks so much for dropping by. I'm gonna turn our chat into a blog post. What's one thing (a concept, progression or arrangement idea) you'd say songwriters could take away from this song for themselves?
I think a good general concept is to just go ahead and be downright freakish rather than be boring. This song has weak moments, but something still comes across for me. Sometimes when you go into relatively uncharted territory like this song did, you’ll have a certain risk of failure--but if they’d tried to reign this in and keep it safe, it wouldn’t be the fascinating flawed lumbering monster that it is, and nobody would remember it.
What about you?
I think the big lesson is to keep pushing yourself to try new things. Lennon kept attempting mantra type songs with few words or one chord songs and they usually failed. You Know My Name Look Up The Number degenerated into a comedy number. But this was a success (up to a point) and I think when they went back to more familiar territory they were better writers for having done it. No experiment is a failure if it makes you a better writer.
That’s a great way of putting it.
[A series of blood chilling howls pierce the stillness] That's Luther and Calvin. Gotta go!
OK. I'll pull the gate shut on my way out!
Yeah, but walk, don't run!
Nicholas Tozier is an independent singer/songwriter from Maine, US. He's the author of the highly recommended eBook 31 Days To Better Songwriting and blogs about songwriting (The Halted Clock), supplies creative writing prompts (Bottled Ink), and appreciates good music (Good Aural).
Matt Blick is a songwriter/singer from Nottingham, UK. He's the Ringo Starr professor of applied chronology at Beatles Songwriting Academyand blogs about his own songwriting journey at www.MattBlick.com.
As I mentioned when I was trashing the Ballad of John and Yoko last time Lennon uses a variation on the 12 bar blues form (though he doesn't do anything interesting songwriting-wise with it)
a normal 12 bar would go
E E E E7
A A E E
B7 B7 E E
whereas Lennon's 16 bar pattern stretches the first four bars
A traditional blues has three lines of lyrics, the first line, which is repeated, then followed by an answering line. The Ballad of... has four lines followed by another answering four line refrain.
This is Ticket 34 – write a blues but avoid the AAB lyric structure.
Check out how they messed around with the blues more effectively on Can't Buy Me Love
Phew! Eight posts on one song! That's gotta be some kind of Beatles Songwriting Academy record. But this is the last post that I'm going to do on Something in it's own right. I promise. I mentioned way back when that the bridge might have originally been in the same key as the verse.
Wonder what that sounded like?
Roll the film!
Next up: A guest post - I know how you love those!
Pop quiz – what the first instrument* you hear on Something? OK. Carry on ...
We're on the home straight with this motherlode of Beatles songwriting – two more posts to go. We'll also take a closer look at a chord progression which crop up in at least four other Beatles songs, but for now lets clear up all the other cool little songwriting odds and ends.
The End
We've already come across a ticket called the picardy third. That's where you have a song in the minor key but you finish on the major instead. This was widely used in Baroque music. But here we keep resolving to A major instead of the expected C major. That's major 6 (VI). It's worth filing away for future reference, because though Something doesn't end on the VI, And I Love Her does, and so does Lately by Stevie Wonder (Ticket 46).
Speaking of the ending – there's another cool idea here - using a false ending (Ticket 47). At the end of the 3rd verse it looks like Harrison is coming in to land, but tricks us by going to A instead of C (2:46), before he immediately loops around and comes in to land.
We have a minor example of an intro made out of another part of the song (see Ticket 4), in this case the end of the verse. I call this the school hymn intro as this is generally cranked out by elderly pianists during dreary school assemblies. The outro is cut from the same cloth.
Micro Recycling
As we said in the last post the fact that Harrison used (at least initially) the same two chords at the beginning of the verse and the bridge constitutes a micro recycling of themes (Ticket 9)
The wide vibrato used at 2:03 – 2:06 of the song mimics the crazy vibrato on George's voice on the line She woos me, aka She woo-ooo-ooo-ooos me (0:22). (BTW that solo was cut live with the string section. No pressure. Well done George).
Ringo's opening sextuplet tom fill* (did you get the right answer?) alludes to the hi hat part in the bridge (starting 1:17). These are the only places sextuplets are used. They really shouldn't fit. And yet they do.
Busy but beautiful
Does McCartney overplay on the track? Probably. But the fills in verse 3 (2:18, 2:37) are beautiful. And his BVs, though plain old ordinary 3rds, contribute to the wonderful lush sound.
Remember the 3 over 4 hemiola from Here Comes The Sun, The End etc? (Ticket 29) here it is again – in the bridge's descending bass line at 1:24 and 1:38.
Lastly, why are we so strongly drawn to the final verse C chord that we never really get? Not only do we have the descending line that leads down to a C but the last three notes of the lead guitar are an ascending line A A# B, It's a beautiful example of contrary motion (Ticket 12) - all roads lead to C major.
Next time I'm hoping to dust off the video camera...
One effective songwriting tool is to have the different sections of a song contrasting with each other (Ticket 5). We've already seen the Beatles use this in She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and Here Comes The Sun but in Something Harrison takes things to extremes and manages to pull it off yet again.
VERSE
Key of C
Tempo - Slow
Melody - mostly around root and lower
long, languorous melody with no real repeats
Lyrics - odd rhyme structure (only internal rhymes) no repeats
Descending motif in melody and harmony
BRIDGE
Key of A
Tempo - Double time feel
Melody - all around 3rd (and 5th) and higher
short, strong melody with a exact repeat
Lyrics - obvious ABAB rhyme structure
Descending motif in bass line
A different key, tempo and structure. With such extreme contrast between the two sections how does Harrison achieve any cohesiveness? Both sections start with the same chord change. root chord going to the root major 7th chord.
Verse - C Cmaj7
Bridge - A Amaj7
This is obscured by the bass line on the Abbey Road version which makes the Amaj7 sound like a C#m/G#. But listen to Harrison's demo on Anthology 3. Whether it made it into the final version or not he clearly envisaged both sections starting with the same chord sequence.
Something is one of the most unusual classic songs around. We've already documented some of the musical curiosities, but lyrically the song tells you nothing about the beloved other than she moves him, woos him and shows him things. Oh, and she smiles.
Though details are sparse one thing that holds together is the amount of repetition in the lyrics.
First there is some direct repetition –
I don't want to leave her now, you know I believe and how
ends every verse and
I don't know
appears four times in the bridge
There's also some clever internal rhymes
Somewhere in her smile she knows
Something in her style that shows me
with similar instances in the other two verse
But Harrison's use of ticket 24 (parallel lyrics) is the glue that holds the whole thing together, most notably in
I'm going to deviate from my normal M.O. and post on a couple of songs at the same time. I'll continue with Something soon but let's pause to examine George Harrison's curious footwear.
It's interesting that Old Brown Shoe was recorded directly before Something as they're kind of peas in a pod. Both songs break all kinds of rules but one pulls it off in breathtaking fashion. And the other one is Old Brown Shoe.
It's too much of a good thing. There are numerous tickets to write on display here but they combine to make a really bad song. All the right ingredients but instead of a cake you get an inedible frisbee of death.
It's not difficult to say why this song is so bad. It's just difficult to say why Harrison does a lot of the same things wrong in Something and gets such great results.
But here's a couple of examples.
Putting a foot wrong
Staying off the root (Ticket 6) is a great way to increase some freshness and movement into tired chord progressions. But here we only get the root chord (C) for the first 4 bars of a 16 bar verse. We end on the Am (The Aeolian cadence - Ticket 10). The chord he uses as a root is itself an unsettled 7th chord. The root doesn't appear at all in the bridge (the only other section of the song). We also (as always) have multiple out of key chords (Ticket 28) but hanging on them for several bars at a time increases the tonal uncertainty. The melody makes things even worse by being based largely on the minor pentatonic instead of following the chords (Ticket 22).
So instead of starting somewhere unfamiliar and then heading for home She Loves You (intro) or heading out the front door then taking a quick detour Here Comes The Sun (bridge) we just wander around lost with a sharp stone in our old brown shoe for the full 3 minutes.
The most glaring weirdness in this song is the loping off beat drum part. Ringo was a genius (yes I did call Ringo a genius – deal with it) at coming up with fresh and inventive parts, with or without Paul's input. But Ringo was away filming The Magic Christian. So Paul stepped up. But messing around with the beat as he does means we have lost not only the root, we've lost the 'one' too (no pun intended).
Contrast this track with weird metre/syncopated songs by Led Zeppelin. The weirder the riff, the more likely you are to find John Bonham playing a solid AC/DC approved 4 to the bar (e.g. The Ocean, Kashmir, Black Dog). Paul's not entirely to blame though. No drum beat could have saved this song.
Lastly the lyrics are really poor. Harrison sometimes displayed a really cynical shoddiness when it came to lyrics and that's what we have here.
There are some interesting lines - right is only half of what's wrong, but I'm stepping out this old brown shoe? What does that mean? 'Out OF'? Has he moved in with the old woman who lived in a shoe? Or 'out IN'? What happened to his other shoe? And don't get me started on being in the queue for her sweet top lip. What's wrong with her bottom lip? Does she even have one?
The song is crammed full of lines that are not only vague, stupid or nonsensical but also really clunky and awkward sounding. The former is a minor infraction in pop music. The latter is unforgivable.
won't be the same now, when I'm with you Not worry what they or you say pick me up from where some try to drag me down To miss that love is something I'd hate
Last time we began digging into the melody of Something to see what makes this very beautiful odd song work.
Even though the song is all over the map melodically and structurally there is one unifying theme I've found. Let me state it up front. There's a whole lot of going down...erm...going down.
Let Me Take You Down
First the main verse melody steadily descends in the first two bars (0:05 - 0:17)
C B Bb c d c A
The next two lines broadly descend (0:19 - 0:24)
D C d B A G
This brings us to bar 7 of the verse. There's no descending melody but there's a counter melody running through the chord progression (0:27 - 0:38) which goes
A G# G F# F Eb D C
Here's that line with the chords that contain it
A (Am) G# (AmM7) G (Am7) F# (D9) F (F) Eb (Eb) D (G) C (C)
Couldn't you construct any line, heading in any direction, from any set of chords? Possibly. But the fact that the A G# G is the only movement over a static Am chord really makes it stand out and draws your ear to the line. (By the way the top three note of the D9 chord are A C E = Am again!)
There's a nice contrast too because the first occurrence (in bars 1-4) is over a 'major' chord progression, whereas the second (bars 5-6) happens within a 'minor' chord. The second progression also moves twice as fast as the first.
So having seen this descending idea move from the melody to the harmony now we arrive at the bridge. And descending figure moves into the bass 1:16 - 1:22).
A G# F# E D appears underneath the following chords
A (A) G#(C#m) F# (F#m) E (A) D (D)
After a couple of bars rest we get the distinctive chromatic run (1:24 - 1:28),
A G# G F# F E
Descending of course. After a repeat of the descending chords we get another run (1:38 - 1:42). The notes are different but the direction is the same -
C B G E D C
There's one final downward chromatic line. Check out the cheeky little guitar fill Harrison adds at 2:48.
Next time we'll take a closer look at what ties the lyrics together so effectively. But first we might see if George has Something on his Old Brown Shoe.
Last time we began asking how Something managed to become a songwriting classic when it's so odd structurally.
Taking a look at the melody only seems to deepen the mystery. Out of 45 notes in the verse, 38 are chord tones*. Normally having a melody consisting largely of chord tones is a recipe for boredom. Where's the tension and resolution? It's like watching the 24 hour paint dry channel.
Harrison gets away with it because the chord progression is filled with interesting extended (7ths and 9ths) chords as well as the usual out of key chords that we've come to expect in a Beatles song.
The extended chords are Cmaj7, C7, D7, Am maj7, Am7 and D9 and C7, D, D7, Am maj7, D9 and Eb are out of key. When the key changes to A major for the bridge G major becomes 'out' and if that wasn't enough atonal action the first descending run in the bridge is a chromatic figure (A, Ab, G, Gb, F, E).
So George gives us is a very odd, almost atonal melody, wrapped up in lush close fitting chords, which take the edge off any dissonance.
To finish with one very small example the melody starts on the root (C) then goes down to the maj 7th (B) and leaves us hanging on this unstable note for a whole bar. Then it drops to the b7 (Bb) which is both dissonant and out of key before resolving to the A which is the third of the F chord is lands on.
It's hard to get away with this kind of death defying melodic high wire act but Harrison pulls it off with style.
Next time we'll look at one element of the melody that ties together practically the whole song.
*Here's where the seven non-chord tones crop up.
The 'uh' of other lover
One note in the middle of the long 'woos me'
'I' and 'leave' in 'I don't want to leave'
'I' and 'leave' in 'you know I believe'
And the B natural release bend passing note in the mini solo.
After setting the context last time, we're ready to start dismantling Something to see what makes it tick. But before we can understand why it works so well we need to grasp why it shouldn't work at all.
The verse (which makes up the bulk of the song) is bizarre. Structurally, lyrically, harmonically, melodically it seems to have no recognisable shape.
The lyrical structure is ABACCd.
A Something in the way she moves
B Attracts me like no other lover
A Something in the way she woos me
C I don't want to leave her now
C You know I believe and how
d - - - - - -
The two C's are a neat rhyming pair with the same syllable count. But the two A's only match because of the beginning, (Something in the...) not the end (she moves/ she woos me). The tune of the second A bears a slight resemblance to the first but moved up a tone. B and d don't seem to have any relation to each other or anything else. 'd' doesn't even have lyrics – it's played on electric and organ.
This final melody (d) seems to inhabit the middle ground between being an extremely short counter melody and an extension of the vocal line (much like Harrison's “do do do do” in Here Comes The Sun). It's too short to really be though of a part in it's own right like the guitar 'solo' in Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight.
Whichever way you slice it the phrase is not answered or concluded musically or lyrically. The first verse is nine bars long. After the ninth bar it immediately loops back to the beginning, so the resolution we're expecting from hearing a C major chord (the I) in the 10th bar happens in bar one instead so that we've started another verse almost before we realise it (this 'missing' 10th bar is another example of what I call the Lennon Edit). When we get to the end of verse 2 Harrison gives us a 10th bar but denies us the resolution altogether by jumping to a C# melody note on top of an A major chord.
The next 'verse' section is the guitar solo, where we loop back after 9 bars to a final 10 bar verse. Surely now we'll come into land on C?! No. We get the rug pulled out once more with the C# and A chord combination. But wait! It was a false ending and two bars later we finally get the single sustained C major chord pay off. In essence Harrison has made us wait the entire 3:03 for a proper resolution.
Lyrically we fare no better. How does George sum up his attraction to this person? “You know I believe and how....na na na naaa naaa naaaaaaaa”.
Thanks for clarifying that then.
Knowing Harrison struggled to come up with the lyrics I'm intrigued to know if he tried to, or intended to, put any here? Frank Sinatra, for one, seems to think it needs some, as he 'sings' this part, but as George plays the lick within the rhythm guitar part on the Anthology demo, I suspect he always thought of it as distinct from the vocal melody.
So to sum up, There's very little structure or repetition in the melody, harmony or lyrics, all the phrases are odd lengths, the verses are 5 lines long (instead of the usual 4, 6 or 8) and 9 or 10 bars long (instead of 8, 12 or 16). And, of course, there are lots of chords that don't belong in this key.
It should be a terrible random mess of a song. But it's a classic. Why? Next time we'll dig a little deeper and find some answers.
What can you say about the best song that George Harrison ever wrote and arguably the best track on Abbey Road? The answer is a lot. But let's start by looking at the history and story behind Something.
Though very much a band piece it was written on the piano, Harrison carving it out during The White Album sessions. The song is in C but the demo (on Anthology 3) is in A (and possibly capoed). Joe Cocker was supposed to record it (but Abbey Road hit the stores first) and perhaps the demo (and lower key) were aimed at him or was that the key it was written in?
It's also said that Harrison struggled with the bridge until he hit on the idea of a key change. Does that mean he had the bridge already but was playing it in the same key as the verse? We may never know, but it's an interesting experiment to try.
A popular fact was that Harrison wrote it for/about his wife Patti. She certainly says so. But he says it was written with Ray Charles in mind (though presumably not in the same way as Patti!)
...she moves!...get it?...oh, never mind...
Harrison struggled with lyrics and blatantly stole the first line from Apple recording artist James Taylor's breakthrough song Something In The Way She Moves
Though using other peoples lyrics as a kick start to create is a totally legitimate songwriting tool taking such a recognisable bit and leaving it in is a bit naughty to say the least. Factor in that it was the biggest band in the world 'borrowing' from a little known singer/songwriter on their label and it seems a bit of a shoddy way to conduct yourself.
If Harrison struggled with the first line the next one was even more painful. He had “attracts me like...” and then nothing. John Lennon, who added the final brilliant piece in more than one McCartney jigsaw suggested
Something in the way she moves Attracts me like a cauliflower
Top marks for scanning Lennon, but if you wanted evidence that John was going downhill rapidly, there it is. Harrison rejected the very British working class vegetable for the more exotic pomegranate, but thankfully that soon went the way of Paul's scrambled eggs.
It's rumoured that Harrison hated McCartney's bass playing on the track, having gone on record as saying he'd rather have Willie Weeks play bass for him than Paul McCartney (Revolution In The Head p.349). Engineer Geoff Emerick says
Paul started playing a bass line that was a little elaborate, and George told him, 'No, I want it simple.' Paul complied. There wasn't any disagreement about it
Though there may not have been any Let It Be style hissy fits it's hard to believe that the bass line we have on Abbey Road was a satisfactory response to “I want it simple”. What was he doing before – playing 64th note polyrhythms above the 12th fret?
Lennon & McCartney always wanted to write a song for Frank Sinatra. Paul even submitted one called Suicide which Frank dismissed as some kind of sick joke. But George succeeded where they had failed (even though Sinatra initially credited Lennon & McCartney as composers) and Sinatra proclaimed Something “the greatest love song of past 50 years” (Revolution p.348) and proceeded to murder it in concerts for the next 30 years.
"Stick around Jack???" Harrison's favourite cover was by the equally understated James Brown.
Something was the last Beatles single and they were soon to shuffle off the world stage and make was for the new breed of stadium rock dinosaurs. There's definitely a passing of the torch to Led Zeppelin on this song – as well as the mellotron part recalling Abbey Road's lush strings like a lofi bootleg listen to the first 3 chords of Rain Song...
Something – C Cmaj7 C7
Rain Song – G Gmaj7 G7*
(*The first two chords have no third but it's implied by the overall major tonality of the song).
Next time we'll start chipping off little bits of songwriting awesomeness. Stay tuned!
