Here Comes The SWAT

Happy New Year Everyone.

Things are really busy as I prepare to release my EP Let's Build An Airport. I'm working my way through Martha My Dear for Beatles Songwriting Academy but it's proving to be the most complex contrapuntal Beatles song so far.

 Meanwhile here's something to cheer you up. This obviously wasn't shot in the UK. Walking into a job centre with a bassoon would probably trigger an armed response unit here!

Oh and by the way. If you type "Beatles Songwriting" into google this blog is the top site. (For today at least!) Thanks for all your support!

 

11:13 Part Two Of Us

Last time we had a quick overview of the lyrics arrangement but the main interest in Two Of Us is the odd things happening to the rhythm and meter.

Firstly the verse melody has an interesting shape. Melodies often have structure that repeats at the beginning - AAB (Can't Buy Me Love – verse) or ever other part ABAB (the verses of Help, We Can Work It Out) or ABAC (verse Here Comes The Sun). But Two Of Us melody repeats in the middle, and then adds an extra part on the end the second time around.

ABBC
ABBCD

A Two of us
B riding nowhere
B spending someone's
C hard earned pay

A You and me
B sunday driving
B not arriving
C on our way
D back home

This gives the song a catchy stuck record/hiccup feel.

We get more repetition in the chorus melody with an AAB structure

A We're on our way home
A We're on our way home
B We're going home

Chords

Interesting as that is, the chords are where it's all happening for me.

We have a verse in G and (mostly) 4/4 but the chorus is (mostly) 3 / 4 and the bridge returns to 4/4 but is (mostly) in Bb major. So that's a time change (Ticket 15) AND a key change (Ticket 45) between section.

More than just simple time changes though, the verse and chorus time signatures keep switching in a way I've come to call the 'Lennon edit' (Ticket 37) where you basically cut any extra beat or bar that has no vocals (the end of every line of verse on All You Need Is Love is the prime example). I'm not saying there was originally something there that was cut, simply that Lennon often was impatient to get to the next line and had no desire to wait for the next 'correct' moment.

So in the verse we have

(4/4) G, G, (2/4) G, (4/4) C C/B, Am7
(4/4) G, G, (2/4) G, (4/4) C C/B, Am7, G

and the chorus is

(3/4) G, D, G, D, G, (2/4) C (4/4) G 

After quite a boring transition where everything stops, leaving the drums to build up on their own, we slam into the new key. The bridge then goes from Bb major (Bb Dm Gm) to C major (Am) back to G major (via the D major chord that acts as a V chord). You could argue that the key of C major is really A minor, but as both the chord and melody at “farther than the” repeat almost exactly a tone higher for “road that stretches” it sounds like the key is rising.

Two minor but cool points of interest are the chords following the words

(C) on (C/B) our (Am7) way back (G) home

which is ticket 36 and the stop to emphasis the key word 'home' at the end of the chorus (Ticket 30).

Next time we'll untangle the mystery of the Get Back track.

    

Here Comes The Son (With A Lost Solo)

Here's a treat for you - Dhani, George and Giles finding a unused solo in the Here Comes The Sun master tapes

   

 Thanks to And Pop

12:34 Say Something Odd (Something pt.2)

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.

12:22 Here Comes The Sun (Again)

Here Comes The Sun is an uncharacteristically sweet and winsome track by George Harrison. It has an incredibly simple verse and chorus perfectly balanced by a odd time almost prog-rock bridge.

What else stops us breaking out the sunblock? The George Martin version of the 'wall of sound' arrangement for a start – a weird mix of orchestra (warm strings and bright piccolos – like the sun...geddit?), steam powered synths (playing a counter melody), rich vocal harmonies way back in the mix, in background and a distinctive high capoed acoustic guitar doubling vocal melody.

We've encounter Ticket 4 before, where the band fashion intros out of choruses, but here the outro is based on part of bridge which then finishes on a single chord (Ticket 18). Nice touch.

The song is ladened with hooks (Ticket 3). Not just the guitar doubling the vocals. The acoustic lick at the end of the chorus may be an obvious one but notice how the 3 over 4 hemiola (Ticket 29) prefigures the actual 3/8 arpeggios in the bridge (Ticket 9).

Another hook that might not be so obvious is Harrison's “do do do do” in the chorus. Play those four notes (C# A B C#). Can you tell what it is? Right. It's the same tune as he's singing on “Little Darling”. No wonder that ear worm is jammed in good and tight by the end of the song. You're hearing it every couple of seconds!

It's not something I can reduce to a formula, but there some beautiful melodic stuff going down in the chorus. Sun in the first line is sung as an A over an A chord, the second line is an exact repeat melodically but we end with the A sitting on top of a B7 chord. So the super stable root note A has become a super unstable b7. What are we gonna do next? The D# in B7 pulls up to E (you can hear it clearly in the cello line) over the A chord and we resolve. That there is a thing of beauty.

Here's someone who spotted the do do do do/little darling link

And for something completely different (and a lot classier)

Next time - things get heavy...

12:21: George Harrison Wants Me For A Sunbeam (Here Comes The Sun)

Abbey Road is a dizzying mix of Beatles songwriting, from McCartney's career low point to arguably Harrison's best song. Abbey Road showcases a genuinely happy sounding Harrison devoid of the grumpy hectoring or more-enlightened-than-thou attitude that blights many of his other songs. Here Comes The Sun is a lesson in perfect balance between the verse and chorus on one hand and the bridge on the other.

The verse & chorus have an almost childlike simplicity – the melody is nearly all conjunct, wandering gently up and down a very small part of the major scale (5 notes), sticks closely to chord tones, no blue notes and nearly every phrase starts on the 2nd beat or the and after one. Chord wise the verse progression is

A A D E7

where the bulk of the chorus is

A A D B7

The song is full of lyrical parallels (Ticket 24) and straight repeats. We get the verse 4x (though the first verse is instrumental) and the chorus 5x.

Every line of the verse starts with Little darling, we get Here comes the sun twice in the chorus (by way of a change we get sun, sun, sun, here it comes 5x in the bridge!). Throw in It seems like years since it's been here/clear and it feels like/I feel that and we're dealing with a very limited lyrical palette.

Imagine the song without the bridge. For all it's catchiness and feel good mood it would get tiresome. But the bridge is left of centre enough to keep the song fresh without adding yet another ill fitting medley to Abbey Road (Ticket 5) .

• The V&C are mainly diatonic but the bridge has some solid out of key moments (C & G the bIII and bVII respectively). 
• The V&C are in 4/4 but the bridge uses odd time signatures - 3/8 and 5/8 (Ticket 15). 
• And overall we have a folky V&C compared with an almost prog rock style bridge.

More on Here Comes The Sun next time...

Coverville, George Harrison & the Legend of the Templeton Twins

There's an interesting podcast called Coverville that feature covers of famous songs by other famous (and not famous) bands. The episode on George Harrison (555) has a nice mix of Beatles and solo stuff (check out Show Of Hands doing If I Needed Someone) but nothing could have prepared me for the psuedo 1920's version of Something by (are you ready for this?) 

The Templeton Twins 

backed by Teddy Turner & his Bunsen Burners. 

What struck me (apart from the hilarious poker faced arrangement) was how easily the song translated into a jazz crooner vehicle with so little reharmonisation.

 But the plot thickens. The album Trill It Like It Was is long out of print (in fact I'm not sure it's ever appeared on CD) so I did a little research. It turns out The Twins are better known as Van Halen producer Ted Templeman!!!

Check out the podcast or find out more about the album.

Here's one other Beatles Templeton/man cover I managed to track down.