Did you guys all see The Big Bang Theory this week? That was cute, huh? Sheldon had that song stuck on his head for like two days? He didn't know what it was and he was super preoccupied with it? You could really relate to his frustration, couldn't you? Imagine. Two whole days. Jeepers.
One day in December of 1994, I was eating lunch in my car -- just chewing and flipping through the radio without an agenda. I heard the last few seconds of a song that sounded familiar and flipped past it. In a second or two, I realized that although I knew that song, I couldn't identify it. I went back, but the song had ended. I waited through two more songs and they didn't announce what they had played. This was going to be bad.
I have this thing where I can't stand the idea of irretrievably. I like the idea, even if it's an illusion, that the events of the world are being recorded and filed away for future reference, down to and including midsize market radio playlists. On two occasions in my childhood, I wrote letters to radio stations asking if they could give me a list of songs they played during a certain window of time. And even though the responses I got were polite variations on the theme of 'give it up, weirdo', I still kind of cling to the comforting idea that the answers to these tiny mysteries are out there, even if I'm not willing to take the time to find them.
Here's what I knew about the song I had heard...
After a couple of days, the urgency of the mystery faded, but the question didn't just evaporate into defeat. I listened to every Journey song on a friend's box set thinking it might be one of those lesser-played cuts with Neal Schon singing lead. It wasn't. I went through my LP's, CD's and cassettes once a year or so, hoping that time and coincidence would have brought a little clarity. A couple of times a year, the question would float to the top of my consciousness and swim around just below the surface.
And so it was...
* Interestingly, music doesn't fade out as much as it used to. I grew up in an era when fading a song was the default way of ending a recording, but the history of that practice is weirder than you might suspect. Here is a Slate article with a chart and everything.
Major shout out to Gustav Holst.
One day in December of 1994, I was eating lunch in my car -- just chewing and flipping through the radio without an agenda. I heard the last few seconds of a song that sounded familiar and flipped past it. In a second or two, I realized that although I knew that song, I couldn't identify it. I went back, but the song had ended. I waited through two more songs and they didn't announce what they had played. This was going to be bad.
I have this thing where I can't stand the idea of irretrievably. I like the idea, even if it's an illusion, that the events of the world are being recorded and filed away for future reference, down to and including midsize market radio playlists. On two occasions in my childhood, I wrote letters to radio stations asking if they could give me a list of songs they played during a certain window of time. And even though the responses I got were polite variations on the theme of 'give it up, weirdo', I still kind of cling to the comforting idea that the answers to these tiny mysteries are out there, even if I'm not willing to take the time to find them.
Here's what I knew about the song I had heard...
- It was familiar (this was encouraging because it meant I'd hear it again, eventually).
- It had distorted guitars AND piano (this made it feel like an early eighties, late seventies song -- it kind of reminded me of the closing theme to WKRP in Cincinatti.)
- It featured a male vocalist singing a long "oh" sound... either "whoa... whoa... whoooa," or "no... no... nooo". Or some combination of those two.
- It had a cold ending (not rare in pop music, but much less common at that time than songs that fade at the end) *
- Ended on the V chord (I could not and can not think of another song that ended on the dominant). **
After a couple of days, the urgency of the mystery faded, but the question didn't just evaporate into defeat. I listened to every Journey song on a friend's box set thinking it might be one of those lesser-played cuts with Neal Schon singing lead. It wasn't. I went through my LP's, CD's and cassettes once a year or so, hoping that time and coincidence would have brought a little clarity. A couple of times a year, the question would float to the top of my consciousness and swim around just below the surface.
And so it was...
...for nineteen years.
[Continued next week]
* Interestingly, music doesn't fade out as much as it used to. I grew up in an era when fading a song was the default way of ending a recording, but the history of that practice is weirder than you might suspect. Here is a Slate article with a chart and everything.
**
For the uninitiated, the V chord (written as V but read as 'five' or 'dominant', because musicians would rather die than make anything obvious to non-musicians, such is their pathology) is one of the three basic chords of western music. The other two are the I (the one, or the tonic) and the IV (the four, or the subdominant).
In "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", the V chord happens under the words 'what you'.
A more illustrative example comes from Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" which contains, in its first verse, words that mirror its musical structure. During the lyrics, "it goes like this, the fourth the fifth", the words "fourth" and "fifth" fall on, respectively, the IV and V chords just as the phrases "minor fall" and "major lift" fall on minor and major chords.
[This whole construct seems specifically designed to soothe the hearts of musicians, just as the preceding lyric, "but you don't really care for music, do you?" seems designed to crush them.]
Songs that finish cold on the VI chord (Journey's "Faithfully" or Adele's "Hello"***, for example) end solemnly. The tonic note is a component of the subdominant chord so you get this feeling of resolution that's at once final but incomplete, as if you've arrived at your destination, but that place is not home and never will be.
Ending on the V is rare in pop music, providing neither resolution nor finality. With no clear examples springing to mind (other than the mystery song described in the above paragraphs, consider "I Love You" by The Climax Blues Band, which achieves a similar impression, although through snakey modulations that actually lead us back to the tonic which, at the end of that windy road, feels like the dominant.
*** This weekend saw the moment that I transformed from a guy who really didn't get the appeal of this song to a guy who can hardly bear to hear it because it hits my soul in the face too hard.
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