Obstacle 1, new podcast

Check out my latest podcast! This time I’m talking about “Obstacle 1”:

Click here to see my transcription of the song.

The part that immediately jumped out at me the first time I heard Obstacle 1 is the bass line. It starts out extremely high, and when it finally drops to its usual low register it creates a very powerful moment in the song. The tension of the bass being so high—and alternating between two notes only a step apart—is released and it makes the song feel very dramatic, and like it has something urgent and important to communicate.

Ultimately I think that’s a big part of why this is such a fan favorite and so much fun to hear live, through a specific combination of textures, rhythmic patterns, and harmonies, the song gives you the sense that it’s saying something you really need to hear.

Once the bass drops to its lower register it continues to be a source of tension, this time in its use of unpredictable rhythmic patterns in the verse. To me the two sixteenth notes followed by two eighth notes sounds like nervous or excited palpitation of a heart. Then, in the pre-chorus, the syncopation continues, but the pattern becomes steadier, leading to running eighth notes in the chorus.

There is one moment in the chorus that I particularly love, which is when the instruments play in sync during the “stabbing yourself” moment. Its a nice moment of word-painting as the two eighths followed by a rest sound like the stabbing of a knife, and it’s also one of the very rare times that Interpol adopt a punk/rock move to invoke a powerful sound. All the while Paul’s rhythms in the chorus are pushing against the beat.

As is so common in Interpol’s songs, the coda is a song in itself. Paul switches to triplet rhythms, while the guitar plays a two-measure pattern that repeats for the entire coda. The pattern consists of only three notes, which alternate in a way that feels like a pendulum to me, swinging back and forth and obfuscating the meter (which Paul’s triplets do as well). Creating even more metric ambiguity is the synth part, which plays a pattern that is *almost* identical to the guitar pattern, but with a slightly different rhythmic character, which makes it sounds like two pendulums are swinging around each other, just missing collision with each other. As if to help everyone keep track of the meter, the bass plays continuous running eighth notes. The second electric guitar, which comes in at 3:19, also plays running eighth notes, also in a two-measure pattern that repeats until the end of the song. (By the way, the entrance of this second guitar part is such a powerful moment for me.)

What of the harmonies? I always run into trouble trying to decide what key an Interpol song is in. Part of their music’s appeal is that it almost always stays in a gray area key-wise. The pitch collection is (starting with the first notes of the song) F-G-A-Bflat-B-C(-Csharp)-D-E. G mostly appears as a brief passing note until 3:19, when the second guitar enters in the coda on G. C-sharp only appears in the coda, and only as a passing tone in the bass part, so I put it in parentheses as not being essential to our understanding of the harmonies in this song. B-flat also only appears in the coda and only in the bass part, and while it is also essentially a non-chord tone, it creates more tension than the C-sharp.

In minor keys, the sixth and seventh scale degrees change by half-step depending on which type of minor scale is being used. B and C are the sixth and seventh scale degrees of D minor, but F major and A minor are also heavily hinted at throughout the song. The repeating guitar patterns that occur throughout the song acquire different harmonic meaning depending on how they are combined with each other and with the bass and voice parts. There is also a frequent use of alternating minor and major seconds in the voice and bass parts, which create more tension than harmonic clarity.

So I think the basic pitch collection here is a type of D minor that sounds F-major-ish or A-minor-ish sometimes.

Well, that’s all I have to say about Obstacle 1 for now. The next songs on my request-list are “Length of Love,” “Obstacle 2,” “No I in Threesome,” and “A Time to Be So Small.” And then after that maybe I’ll actually get to analyzing El Pintor and Marauder!

“Obstacle 1”

0:00 Intro (12 measures)

0:23 Verse 1 (18 mm.)

1:00 Pre-Chorus (4 mm.)

1:08 Chorus (8 mm.)

1:24 Intro (4 mm.)

1:31 Verse 2 (14 mm.)

2:00 Pre-Chorus (4 mm.)

2:08 Chorus (16 mm.)

2:40 Coda (mini-song, 44 mm.)

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Same Town, New Story, New Podcast

Hi again everyone! Today I’m going to talk about “Same Town, New Story.” Click here to access my transcription.

This analysis was inspired by a message I received from Maria on Twitter; she says:

“Maria Pacheco Amorim‏ @shadesformiles: I sense more urgency, built-in tension in their more recent songs (again so in Real Life) and I’d like to understand it better. Btw, if you could expand more on that (song structure in El P) when analysing STNS, it would be ace!”

So, yes, song structure in El Pintor is very important to the album’s unique sound. Like Maria said, the songs have a strong sense of urgency and tension, and a lot of that is because of the ways the songs are structured.

As I’ve talked about before, the standard song form—by which I mean the way in which the different sections of the song repeat—is basically intro->verse->maybe another verse->maybe a pre-chorus->chorus->verse->bridge->chorus->outro. Structured in this way, we can say that the different parts of the standard song form have a function. The intro functions to set up the soundscape of the song, the verse functions to introduce us to the story of the song, the chorus is the culmination or the climax of the story, the bridge acts as a sonic palette cleanser so that the return of the chorus feels even more powerful, etc.

However, with many of Interpol’s songs, but especially in El Pintor, the song forms are not structured this way; the sections cycle at unpredictable intervals, thwarting our being able to “hear ahead” to what the song will bring. In this way, Interpol takes away any sense of “function” to the songs’ sections. We don’t get a verse that sets us up for a climax, and we don’t get a chorus that gives us that climax. So, what is it that we do get?

We do get sections that repeat, though when they repeat they’re longer than the first time they appear. It was difficult for me to decide how to describe the structure of the song; I ended up using the guitar and bass patterns, along with the patterns in the lyrics to guide me, and came up with:

Intro, Section A at 0:19, Section B at 0:36, return of Section A at 1:10, and return of Section B at 1:44. At 2:33 we get the mini “bonus song” ending that Interpol is so fond of, where they begin a completely new section that is minimally related to the previous sections, and which ends the song (as opposed to, say, Section A or Section B returning and ending the song).

The urgency and tension that Maria mentions partly arise from the fact that we can’t predict what will come next in the song, especially since the sections are all different in length: the A section is 8 measures, the B section is 15 measures (normally formal sections contain an even number of measures), the second A section is 16 measures and the second B section is 21 measures (again another odd number of measures).

Tension also arises from the fact that we can’t really assign “function” to any of the sections (like, “ah this is the verse; ok and this is the chorus”). After I listened to the song the first time I thought to myself, “Wait, was there no chorus in that song?”, and after subsequent listens my analysis is that there is no chorus—that is, there is no culmination section.

The vagaries of the form account for part of the urgency and tension, but—as in all formal structures—the harmonic and rhythmic character of the song play an important role in how we perceive the function (or lack thereof) of the song’s sections.

For example, throughout the first two and a half minutes of the song, Sam strikes the kick drum on every beat of the four-beat measure and maintains roughly the same closed hi-hat pattern. He doesn’t use any other part of the kit, and there are no fills. For two and a half minutes it’s the same one-measure pattern repeated for 70 measures. This is highly unusual for any rock song, even for an Interpol song.

I think Sam’s choice of such a repetitive drum part, especially one that has the kick on every beat, is related to how rhythmically unstable Daniel’s guitar lick is. It took me a while to transcribe that opening lick, which starts on the second half of beat two and has a short-long character that makes it sound like someone struggling to get out a sentence. It’s so complex that without Sam’s striking each and every beat it would be easy to lose your place while you were playing it. (A side note: I think this is why, in the live performance I saw at Bowery Ballroom, Sam started the song playing the kick on every beat, so that Daniel would be able to coordinate himself when he entered the song.)

Having the kick on every beat in and of itself lends the song a sense of urgency, and having no drum fills means that it’s very difficult for us as the listeners to keep track of where we are in the song’s micro-form—usually fills tell us when the end of one phrase and the beginning of another is happening. Having Daniel repeating that rhythmically complex, almost uncertain-sounding, rising, and very high-pitched pattern also makes the first half of this song feel tense and urgent.

At 2:33, the drum part changes. For 12 measures we have an even more tense and urgent drum part, with the kick fluttering out sixteenth notes, before finally—for the first time in the song—breaking out into a normal rock drum pattern, with the kick on beats 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4. This break into normalcy is counteracted by the harmonies, and thus even in the second half of the song we continue to feel that urgency and tension.

Like in a lot of other Interpol songs, the pitch collection in the first half of the song is mostly hexatonic. It’s a G major-ish hexatonic: E-G-A-B-C-D, mostly avoiding the leading tone of G major, which is F-sharp. In fact, when F-sharp does appear, like at 1:03, it sounds like an altered note—hence my calling this G hexatonic even though I’ve transcribed it as if it’s in G major.

However, in the second half of the song, the harmonic character shifts. The pitch collection is still largely G hexatonic, but there’s a noted emphasis on the note C, and F-sharp makes more appearances as part of Daniel’s new guitar pattern. So, even though Sam’s drums have lessened in urgency, this section still feels on-edge because the various musical patterns feel perpetually on the verge of resolution but never arrive there—the last guitar note is an A, and the synthesizer spends the final 13 measures (from 3:34) climbing up from C to C: C-D-E-F-sharp-G-A-B-C, in other words the G major scale but starting on the fourth scale degree.

The El Pintor song forms to me are like the natural outgrowth of Interpol’s earliest song forms, which are a combination of cyclical and through-composed (in some posts from 2008 and 2009 I called this type of form “peregrinated”). There are sections that cycle, and extended sections that are completely separate from the cyclical part of the song. Some day I’ll do a review of all the albums to see how many of these hybrid forms there are in Interpol’s catalog.

Song 1

Intro

Section A (8 mm)

0:19, mm.10-17

Same town, new story

They bridged the fated span

He was bound for glory

She found her winning man

Section B (15 mm)

0:36, mm.18-25

That she stood by him

Through it all

Then she stood by him

She was pounding on the wall

0:54, mm. 26-32

She said it feels like the whole world

Is upon my shoulders

Feels like the whole world coming down on me

Section A’ (16 mm)

1:10, mm. 33-41

How many bones were lost?

He just had to play his hand

What is a woman’s duty?

She was always tougher than (same town, new story)

1:29, mm. 42-48

She said who’s gonna save them from you?

(Same town, new story)

Who’s gonna save them from you? (Same town, new story)

I ain’t gonna chase another stake until he’s gone

Section B’ (21 mm)

1:44, mm. 49-59

Then she stood by him

to the law

Then she stood by him

When he was down on his knees

She said we’re still alive

We are still alive

2:08, mm. 60-70

Feels like the whole world

Is upon my shoulders (coming down)

Feels like the whole world

Is upon my shoulders (coming down)

Feels like the whole world’s coming down on me

Song 2

2:33, mm. 71-78

2:51, mm. 79-90

Why I pinch her so slowly

Pinch her so slowly

Why I pinch her so slowly

Why I pinch her so slowly

Pinch her so slowly

3:34, mm. 99-111

Hey, c’mere, you (podcast)

Here’s my second music theory and Interpol podcast! You can hear it on Soundcloud (see below) or on Mixcloud. Below is my musical transcription of C’mere (or, “come here”), followed by my analysis of the song’s form, and then a transcript of what I say in the podcast. You’ll notice at the end of the podcast I’ve included a MIDI-export of my transcription (which I then ran through Studio One using some of their built-in sounds); I did this because I thought it might be helpful to parse out the individual instrumental lines without all the fancy production that’s used in the real recording of the song.

Cheers!

Click on the image to open the full PDF.

“C’mere”

VS1
0:00 It’s way too late to be this locked inside ourselves
The trouble is that you’re in love with someone else
It should be me. Oh, it should be me
0:30 Sacred parts, your get-aways
You come along on summer days
Tenderly, tastefully
CH1
0:53 And so make, we make time
Try to find somebody else
This place is mine
VS2
1:04 You said today, you know exactly how I feel
I have my doubts little girl I’m in love with something real
It could be me, that’s changing!
CH2
1:27 And so make, we make time
To try and find somebody else
Who has a line
Post-CH1
1:43 Now seasoned with health
Two lovers walk a lakeside mile
Try pleasing with stealth, rodeo
See what stands long ending fast
Interlude
1:58 Oh, how I love you
in the evening, when we are sleeping
We are sleeping. Oh, we are sleeping
CH3
2:21 And so make, we make time
We try to find somebody else
Who has a line
Post-CH2
2:37 Now seasoned with health
Two lovers walk a lakeside mile
Try pleasing with stealth, rodeo
See what stands long ending fast

Transcription of the podcast:
Welcome again to Sound Meets Sound! Today I will be talking about the song “C’mere” by Interpol.

“C’mere”—to me—is the closest we’re going to get to a happy or uplifting Interpol song. Or maybe I should put it this way: this song has always made me feel warm and fuzzy. Yes, like most of the ANTICS tunes it’s bouncy and you want to dance around your apartment when you listen to it. But there’s just something warm and comforting about it, at least musically speaking (I honestly hardly ever know what Paul means by his lyrics so I can’t really speak to those).

You know I love to talk about pitch collections so let’s go there first. Like a lot of Interpol’s music, the pitch collection is hexatonic, that is, consisting of only six notes because they really like to omit the leading tone (aka the seventh scale degree of a diatonic scale). Specifically, it’s F major hexatonic, because the music clearly centers around the F major triad. The only time we hear the leading tone is in what I call the “post-chorus” section (where Paul sings “now seasoned with health”) and the outro, which is essentially an extension of the second post-chorus.

In the post-choruses, the leading tone—the note E—is played simultaneously with an A. This weakens the effect of the leading tone, because A and E together in an F scale imply a iii—or, mediant—chord, which is not a “directional” chord; it’s doesn’t pull you very strongly anywhere harmonically speaking.

Interestingly, in the outro, the E is paired with a note that is VERY directional in this context, that note being B natural. While one of the guitars plays the part heard in the post-choruses—that is, the F major collection with the simultaneous E and A—the other guitar shifts to F lydian by stacking E and B-natural and having those resolve very firmly to their resolution tones, F and C. I’ve always loved this outro, it just feels so much like the culmination of the whole song. Little did I realize at the time that there were these crazy cross relations happening (a cross relation, also known as a false relation, is a type of dissonance in which we hear a note in one voice, and immediately afterward we hear a note that is one half step higher; both of the notes go by the same name but belong to different pitch collections. In this case, the B-flat is part of the F major collection, and the B-natural is part of the F lydian collection).

Since we’re talking about pitches let’s just touch on Paul’s vocals. He overwhelmingly emphasizes the note A, specifically the A below middle C, throughout the song. The note A being the third of the F major collection, it’s like he’s trying to make it as clear as possible that this is a major key, and by centering his whole vocal line around A he both stagnates the sense of harmonic movement while also maintaining just the slightest bit of tension. That is, his melodic contours don’t move toward and away from and back again to the tonic, they just hover on that very non-directional note A.

I think the other aspect of this song that makes me feel all warm inside is its texture. For the majority of the song the texture is both homophonic and homorhythmic. Homophonic in that the instruments provide back-up for the vocal line (as opposed to playing their own independent melodies), and homorhythmic in that the instruments play basically the same rhythms. In verse 2 we do get a guitar countermelody, but as it creates a voice exchange with the voice melody and is more of a little riff than a melody it doesn’t disrupt the sense of homophony much (a voice exchange happens when one part moves down a third at the same time another part moves up a third, all on the same notes).

The only time in the song where we hear polyphony—which is independent melodies stacked on top of each other, and very common in Interpol—is in the “now seasoned with health” section, and by extension the coda.

This juxtaposition of simple homophony with moments of polyphony, I find it extremely effective. The homophony is comforting somehow, like, the boys are all getting along together in this safe hexatonic pitch space. But it wouldn’t be an Interpol song without at least *some* polyphony, which coincidentally is the only place in the song where we hear the leading tone.

Ok, that’s it for today! I’ll be looking at Same Town, New Story next time. Until then…

Stella, stellaaaah (podcast)

Here’s my first music theory and Interpol podcast! Below is my musical transcription of Stella, followed by my analysis of the song’s form, and then a transcript of what I say in the podcast. Cheers!

Click here for my transcription of Stella (update 2017 April 7: this is an updated version of my transcription; Chris pointed out to me that one of the lines at the beginning I was hearing in the bass is actually played by the guitars reminding me once again how fickle ears can be!)

Intro 0:00-0:17 (8 measures) D natural minor

Vs1 0:18-0:52 m. 9 (16 mm.) D natural minor

When she walks down the street…

(0:36 m. 17)

She once fell through the street…

Pre-Ch 0:53-1:12 m. 25 (8+2 mm.) F lydian

Days…

Ch1 1:13-1:40 (12+1 mm.) D dorian

She was all right ’cause the sea was so airtight she broke away…

Post-Ch 1:41-2:07 (12 mm.) D natural minor

She broke away broke away…

Interlude 2:07-2:39 (16 mm.) D natural minor-ish

Stella is a diver…

Vs2 2:40-2:57 (8 mm.) D natural minor

Bottom of the ocean she dwells…

Pre-Ch 2:58-3:18 (8+2 mm.) F lydian

Stella…

Ch2 3:19-3:45 (12+1 mm.) D dorian

She was all right ’cause the sea was so airtight she broke away…

Post-Ch 3:46-4:12 (12+1 mm.) D natural minor

She broke away broke away…

Transition 4:13-4:37 (12 mm.) D natural minor

“Catatonic” section 4:38-5:02 (12 mm.) D natural minor

Well she was my catatonic sex toy love-joy diver…

“Right on” section” 5:03-5:35 (12 mm.) D natural minor

Oh yeah…

“Say goodbye section” 5:36-6:09 (16 mm.) D natural minor

There’s something that’s invisible…

Outro 6:10-6:28 (4+1 mm.) D natural minor

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

This episode I’ll be analyzing the music of Interpol. Let’s start with a couple of reader questions I received a while ago…

Christopher wrote to me to discuss the range of Paul’s vocal melody in All the Rage Back Home, suggesting that this song would sound good as a chord melody on the guitar.

Christopher:
“I’d like to call out the range in Paul’s vocal melody [in all the rage back home]. Most modern music vocal melodies span, what? 3 notes? In the intro alone Paul sings 5 notes over a range of 6 notes and then nails the missing “A” in the chorus am I correct? Impressive. This is tune, due to the moving melody and interesting voicings would be cool to arrange using chord melody on a guitar.”

So I learned a thing thanks to Christopher’s comment: there’s a term for when a guitarist plays both the chords and the melody simultaneously and it’s called “chord-melody”, and there are a gazillion guys on the internet who want to teach you how to do it, at least according to Google. So yeah, I totally agree that a chord-melody arrangement of Rage on the guitar would be awesome, as Paul’s vocal melody really is quite gymnastic in this song compared to how he usually sings. Let’s look at how his melodies are constructed:

In the intro he sings in a low baritone range, spanning an entire octave between G2 and G3. In the verse he jumps up into a tenor range, sort of hovering just above and below C4 (also known as middle C). In the chorus he moves into a high baritone range, spanning almost a complete octave from middle C down to D3.

There is definitely a sense of arrival on the note A in the chorus, like Christopher mentions, which is interesting because the chord that surrounds that A in the vocals is D7, which is the dominant seventh of G major. So we “arrive” on A in the vocals thanks to the contour of the melody (C – B – A), but harmonically we’re propelling forward thanks to the two tendency tones in the D7 (the leading tone and the chordal seventh).

Anyway, it’s cool how Paul sings low in the intro, high in the verse, and midrange in the chorus, it creates a nice double-neighbor macro-contour that contributes to the chorus feeling like the culmination of the song.

(click on the image to see more)
—
HoldenCaufield:
“Hey Meg, i have a question. This is regarding OLTA’s No I In Threesome. Why does the song sound dark, even if it is in C-Major?”

First of all, I’d like to thank HoldenCaufield (if that is your real name) for bringing up this song because it contains the line that I named this podcast after. One of the reasons that line “sound meets sound” appeals to me is because Paul is singing the seventh of a major-major seventh chord, which is a chord I LOVE. In fact, the whole song is full of MM7th chords, which is why I think it sounds dark in spite of generally feeling like it’s in a major key.

In case you don’t know, a major major seventh chord is a major triad with a major seventh from the root stacked on top. What I love about it is that dissonant major seventh that’s just aching to be resolved up to the root of the chord, making it a stable major triad again. And Paul plays with this tension by singing a TON of minor seconds, which is the inversion of the major seventh.

Another thing I think that adds to the dark sound is those high guitar notes that swell in and out at the beginning and in between sections and also that synth sound that kind of cuts through the air like a knife, playing a high A. The overall texture of the song is jagged, like those aggressively staccato piano chords in the verse.

That’s my shortish take on why No I in Threesome sounds dark, but I will definitely be doing a full analysis of it at some point. It’s always been one of my favorite Interpol songs.

—
Ok now for the main event. I’ve been keeping a list of songs that readers asked me to analyze. The next song on my list is Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down.

The form of this song is interesting because the first 4 minutes are cyclic (meaning that the sections repeat in a pattern or cycle), while the last two minutes are almost like a totally different song. Really, the song could technically end at 4:12, but instead we get a guitar transition that ushers in three new sections that are not cyclic.

This way of constructing a song is pretty common in Interpol; we often get a “bonus” mini-song at the end that puts the length of the song over the 5 minute mark, which is an unusual thing for most rock songs. To my ear it signifies the band’s overall willingness to get experimental without ever veering into prog-rock territory (don’t worry I’m not bashing prog rock, I admit I have a soft spot for the band Yes). You can go to my blog to see how I’ve analyzed the formal divisions of Stella.

As usual for Interpol, the key is not immediately recognizable in the intro; eventually, it becomes clear that the song is D natural minor. You can see my transcription on the blog. Carlos repeats F-F-D-A, which is the D minor triad starting on the third of the chord, moving down to the root, and then down to the fifth.

Above and around him Daniel is repeating the fourth E-A, briefly dropping the E down to D to make the fifth D-A. I like this textural move by Carlos, to play so high up on the bass that his notes overlap with the guitar. In fact, at first I thought Carlos’ notes were actually being played by the guitar, until I heard the little rhythmic ornamentations that are characteristic of Carlos’ bass playing.

Four measures later Paul comes in and it becomes a little easier to identify the scale being used for this song, which is D natural minor; I say natural minor because of the C-natural that the guitar plays beginning in measure 13. Normally a minor key contains a raised 7th scale degree to create the leading tone (in this case it would’ve been C-sharp), but again, Interpol likes to eschew the leading tone in their songs, particularly their songs in minor. The leading tone would send too clear a message about what the key of the song is, and Interpol often like to maintain a certain level of ambiguity about that.

The progression from the Pre-Chorus to the Chorus to the Post-Chorus has always felt really powerful to me; the Pre-Chorus sets up a feeling of anticipation, which pushes through during the Chorus, and then we finally get this really nice feeling of release in the Post-Chorus, which aligns nicely with the lyric “she broke away”. What’s really cool is how the key shifts during these three sections. In the Pre-Chorus one of the guitars introduces B-natural, and considering that the bass is arpeggiating an F major chord, I hear this section as F lydian (lydian being a major scale with the fourth scale degree raised).

The B-natural persists in the Chorus but this section sounds more minor than major to me, which means this is D dorian (dorian being a minor scale with the sixth scale degree raised).

Then, in the post-Chorus, B-flat is back with a vengeance and we’re back in D natural minor. I think it’s this return to D natural minor, combined with all of the guitars playing mostly octaves with each other that make the Post-Chorus feel like a big release of tension.

The bonus mini-song that begins at 4:13 is through-composed and all that tension and release of the cyclic part of the song is gone and we are left in this dreamlike stasis for the final two minutes. I think it feels static to me because the four measure guitar part that begins at 4:13 repeats over and over right to the end of the song. The other parts change around it but that 4-bar pattern keeps repeating. And not long after this pattern first appears the other guitar starts its own pattern, which is D and F on beats two and four, and this pattern also repeats to the end of the song. Also, starting with the “right on” section, Paul only sings E and F for the rest of the song. And can I just point out that Carlos plays a low D in the “say goodbye” section, which is not only extremely gratifying to my ears but also kind of backs up my thesis that the overarching key for Stella is D minor.

Overall, I think the reason Stella is such a compelling song and an enduring fan favorite is because of how elusive it is. The narrator spends a lot of time describing Stella and her struggles against the world but in the end she finally manages to break away, waving goodbye to the narrator even though he seems to want to hold on to her. The music likewise does everything it can with its notes and texture to resist a clear harmonic interpretation and pushes and pulls at the listener with this ambiguity. I don’t know about you, but I’m always happy for Stella that she gets to break away from the hostile world and slightly creepy narrator of the song (what is with Paul and his penchant for creepy narrators??).

Ok, that’s it for today! Next on my list is “C’mere” from Antics. Let me know in the comments if you like the podcast format, or if you think the written blog or the video blog format is better!

My Desire

The musical tension in this song in unbelievable. It doesn’t matter how many times I listen to it, I still get goosebumps. One reader, Liz, said something similar in a comment thread: “I can sense unrelenting tension and can’t really put my finger on why.” So let’s think about that.

As with All the Rage, I think the form of “My Desire” plays a big role in messing with our expectations. As you can see in my break-down below, only some of the sections are of a length that’s divisible by 4 (4 being the most common way of dividing up musical form and creating a sense of balance).

The intro is 6 bars long, while the first Verse is a mammoth 18 bars long. We finally get what might be a chorus (due to the fuller texture) nearly one minute into the song, but it turns out this section is another “anticipatory” one. Another 6 bar interlude, a shortened Verse, a second Pre-chorus, and at 2:25 we finally get this intense “release” section. Then we get another interlude, short Vs, Pre-chorus, and an extended Chorus. The really powerful thing about reaching 2:52 the first time I listened to the song is that, now that I’d heard the Chorus, I was pretty sure it was coming back at least once more, which, for me anyway, increased the feeling of anticipation even more.

Sam’s drum part is crucial to my perception of the form and all its wonderful imbalanced, anticipatory affect. A big part of how a drummer indicates, or demarcates, phrase structure is through the use of fills. There’s the normal drum pattern and then at crucial points in the song’s structure there will be added cymbals or a cascade of syncopated snare hits, etc. to indicate that we’ve arrived at certain markers within the song.

The first real demarcator we get (after the drums enter at 0:14), is a crash cymbal 11 bars into the 18 bar Verse 1. This is notable because fills/demarcators tend to split the sections evenly, so for an 18 bar section we would expect the cymbal to happen at the end of bar 9 or beginning of bar 10 to mark the halfway point, but Sam delays it another bar, dividing the section as 10+8 instead of as 9+9.

The fills we get in the Pre-chorus mark the section more evenly, but they (the fills) begin earlier than one would expect; in the fifth and sixth bar of the 12 bar Pre-chorus Sam hits the crash and does an extensive snare pattern, making it feel like we’ve hit the end of the section and are moving into a bigger sounding section, but this expectation is “thwarted” by the continuation of the section. The fill reappears at the end of the Pre-chorus; for the first Pre-chorus, the build-up is again “frustrated” by a return to the intro material, which makes the eventual release into the Chorus after the second Pre-chorus even more ecstatic. The Chorus, by the way, has a perfectly expected crash hit at the beginning of the seventh bar, thereby dividing the 12-bar section evenly in half.

All of this unevenness and creation of tension of course begins with Daniel, whose guitar pattern consistently pushes against the strong beats, only hitting the downbeat every other measure. Here’s his opening measures:

Paul’s vocals also create tension with syncopated rhythms, and he sings very high in his register until we hit the Chorus, where he relaxes into a much more comfortable range.

When I have time to transcribe the entire song I’m sure I’ll be able to elaborate more on the ways in which Interpol sets up expectations (anticipation) and delays resolution (release) in Desire. In the meantime I’m going to continue to enjoy listening to it over and over again!

“My Desire” (quarter = 104; 4/4 time)

[pitch collection: B natural minor hexatonic scale; like the B natural minor scale but with the G omitted]

0:00 Intro: 6 bars

0:14 Vs 1: 18 bars

0:54 Pre-ch: 12 bars

1:21 Interlude: 6 bars

1:35 Vs 2: 10 bars

1:58 Pre-ch: 12 bars

2:25 Ch 1: 12 bars

2:52 interlude: 6 bars

3:05 Vs 3: 10 bars

3:28 Pre-ch: 12 bars

3:55 Ch 2: 24 bars + 1

Rest My Chemistry – drums

So, I have a special treat to share: Robbie Vehse transcribed the drums for “Rest My Chemistry”! (Click here to see his whole transcription.)

As many of you know, my transcriptions so far have not included the drums, partly because of my lack of time but mostly because I don’t *really* know how to do it, which has always caused me sadness because I absolutely adore Sam’s drum playing.

About four years ago, I posted a little chart that illustrated when I heard a pattern change in each of the instruments. Looking at Robbie’s transcription, I can see now that there are at least three drum patterns (as he pointed out to me in his Facebook message); the Pre-Verse and the Verse are definitely different patterns, with the Pre-Verse containing an extra snare drum hit on the second half of the fourth beat.

At some point I’d like to integrate Robbie’s transcription with my own (of the other instruments) and write a complete analysis (a gesamt-analysis [gesamtuntersuchung?], if you will).

Until soon!

Follow up: Slow Hands, The New, All the Rage

Hello!

I’ve been having some lively email discussions with reader Christopher, and I thought it would be fun/interesting for others to read so I decided to post them here! I also respond to a Facebook message from Robbie about “All the Rage Back Home” at the bottom of this post. (Next up on the blog is more El Pintor, plus Chemistry, Stella, C’mere, Obstacle 1, Length of Love, and a fuller analysis of Obstacle 2.)

“Slow Hands”

You can read our full discussion here. We discuss the grey zone of the song’s key; in spite of the pitch collection strongly suggesting G major, the song lacks “the textbook quality of the key,” as Christopher pithily puts it. Here’s my transcription of the opening of the song:

“The New”

Christopher wrote, “I was recently listening to ‘The New’ and I remembered your blog where you discuss how it begins in the key of C major and modulates to B minor (harmonic).  It was bothering me, because of this ‘grey zone’ we recently were talking about.  Again, while the lyrics remains hopeful at the beginning and the notes suggest C major, it never felt particularly major-y…I’m feeling A natural minor….Also, when the lyrics begin ‘I gave a lot to you…’ I hear some arpeggiating of an A minor chord by one of the guitars, which could indicate the key of A natural minor before modulating to B harmonic minor…Then again I love the words that you initially used to describe the C major lyrics being hopeful to B minor lyrics conveying pain. Very poetic and beautiful, but it’s hard for me to get past such minor sound phrasing despite the bass melody beginning on C which would usually indicate C major.”

It’s weird to think that I wrote the post that Christopher references almost 8 years ago! I definitely think I was a little too prescriptive in calling the first key of the song “C major.” Actually, what I hear as the repeating chord progression in the first three minutes of the song is: C/G – G – Am – Dm7/A, which can be interpreted as both A natural minor (as Christopher mentions) and its relative major, C major. I agree that these three minutes sound more minor-y than major-y, and that they demonstrate perfectly how wonderfully Interpol’s music can inhabit the grey zone when it comes to key. I think that they achieve this mainly by never playing stacked triads; the guitars play their separate lines, the bass its separate line, and the vocals its separate line, and all combined we get “harmonies” and pitch collections that point to one or more keys depending on your interpretation. It’s the beauty of polyphonic music that you can have these grey zones while still maintaining a sense of tonality.

“All the Rage”

Robbie wrote to me, “By the way, I think ‘All The Rage Back Home”s tempo is 168, not 84 BPM, at least when the backbeat sets in at 0:49.”

So, I actually think both BPM designations make sense, depending on which instrument you’re focusing on. If you’re focusing on the drums, then 168 definitely makes more sense. However, for my transcription, I was focusing more on the guitar line and I really heard the rhythm “quarter-quarter-eighth-sixteenth-dotted eighth” as one unit; interpreting the song as 84 BPM allowed me to have that unit take up one full measure in 4/4 time. That being said, when I first listened to the song, my first thought was that the BPM was at 168 because of the drums.

Ok, more to come soon!

All the Rage Back Home

 

Greetings! It’s been too long!

Here’s my analysis of “All the Rage Back Home” — the image above is a mini-transcription of the guitar and voice parts from the Intro and the guitar and bass parts from the Chorus. At the bottom of this post is the “skeleton” of the song: the chords, plus the duration of each part.

My first thought when re-listening to this song earlier today was “this kind of reminds me of the way that Antics begins with ‘Next Exit’.” There’s something cheery about “Rage” (ha) that reminds me of “Exit”, I think because both songs are pretty clearly in a bright major key (C major for Exit and G major for Rage). In the same way that Antics was a big milestone for the band (their sophomore effort after the major success of TOTBL), El Pintor is also a big milestone; it’s the album that says “we can survive the loss of Carlos D.” Like I mentioned in my initial thoughts on El Pintor, there is something very playful and free-sounding about this album.

My other thoughts:

1. The form of this song creates a feeling of tension for me: The “normal” way to divide up the sections of a song is by numbers divisible by 2; this creates a sense of balance and predictability. But verse 1 repeats its four-measure pattern *three* times, and combined with the intro (which is essentially the same music as the verse but without the bass) that equals 7. Verse 2 repeats the four-measure pattern four times, but really the first four measures are like the intro in terms of texture, so the “feel” of verse 2 is more like 1 + 3 (instead of 2+ 2). The choruses are also structured very strangely. There is a three-measure pattern that repeats twice; this is followed by another three-measure pattern, which shuffles around the order of the three chords that make up the chorus (so, 3 + 3 + 3). By contrast, the outro feels like a “release” to me, because we get the same chordal pattern as the chorus, but it’s slightly extended so that we now have a balanced four-measure pattern.
2. As you can see in my transcription above, there is some complex counterpoint happening between the guitar and voice in this song. Both lines are very syncopated, which creates a sense of rhythmic imbalance. However, these two lines often move in contrary motion to and from the same notes, which by contrast creates a sense of spatial balance. For example, when Daniel moves from B up to E in measure 2 of the intro, Paul moves from E down to B, and then that’s reversed. In the next measure Daniel moves from B up to D, while Paul moves from D down to B.
3. Voicing is everything in this song. (By “voicing” I mean the way in which the individual notes of each chord are distributed among the instruments/vocals.) It was difficult to decide which chords were being played in some cases because of the voicing. For example, I decided to say that the first chord of the chorus is a D7 (D-F#-A-C) chord with the seventh (“C”) in the bass, because the bass is definitely playing a C there, while the guitar plays F# and C, the vocals sing on the notes A-B-C, and the synths sustain a D. This is an uncommon voicing of a major-minor seventh chord, and if you were to strum a D7 on a guitar you might not immediately recognize it as the first chord of Rage’s chorus.

All this to say: Interpol’s musical complexity remains intact in El Pintor. From the unusual phrasing, to the importance of texture, to the avoidance of strongly establishing the key (note that the song rarely ever “lands” on the tonic chord G major; instead D major is emphasized to keep the song pushing ever forward to a resolution that we never get). I’m really looking forward to digging into the rest of the songs.

(quarter note = 84; 4/4 time)

0:00 Intro: C | Em | G | G7 4xs

0:49 Vs 1: C | Em | G/D | G7/D 3xs [guitar F# starts at end of 3^rd rep]

1:23 Ch 1: ||: D7/C | Em | D :|| C/D | D7/C | Em

1:49 Vs 2: C | Em | G/D | G7/D 4xs [first 4 bars have intro texture]

2:35 Ch 2: ||: D7/C | Em | D :|| C/D | D7/C | Em

3:00 Outro: ||: D7/C | Em | D | D :|| 7xs (fade out) [Ch harmonic rhythm “normalized”]

A parting note: For those that have made specific requests/engaged in conversations with me—I haven’t forgotten! I am working on all of them, if a bit slowly!

Roland

Almost exactly a year ago today, reader Lorefin asked me to look at Roland and Stella — well, here’s Roland!

This song presents so many musical traits that feel very “Interpol” to me:

• A tight, clean texture consisting of highly repetitive riffs,
• modal mixture (the song is in E minor for the most part, but F-natural appears in a few places [e.g., 0:26] making it briefly in E Phrygian),
• non-tonic notes (in particular B and C) feature prominently and therefore create a sense of harmonic tension,
• and the last third of the song presents new material in which the melodic tension increases dramatically.

The song’s form is Intro – Verse – Chorus (“He severs segments”) – Interlude – Verse – Chorus – Coda1 (2:30) – Coda2 (2:58). I love the contrast between the Verse and Chorus, the former being a really dense texture with interlocking guitar lines, the latter being a really unified texture with the guitars and bass all playing almost exactly the same line in octaves. Whenever the Chorus starts in this song I want to start moving my body.

The Coda in this song is so…sexy, if I can get poetic here. Starting at 2:30 Carlos is playing extremely high on the bass in completely stepwise motion (so, the notes are all close together), while one of the guitars sets up a stable large-scale four bar pattern as the other guitar plays a melody with a wave-like contour that both metrically and harmonically pushes against this large-scale pattern. At 2:58 this all sort of releases into a two-bar pattern with a strong sense of forward motion; the pattern repeats three more times verbatim, and we end the song not on the tonic E, but on the sixth scale degree, C.

Those are my initial thoughts on Roland — I always feel bad not including Sam’s drum parts in my transcriptions, since his playing is such an integral part of their sound. Like, there would be no Interpol without Sam’s insanely amazing, disciplined, tasteful drumming. Ever since I saw them live at Bowery Ballroom last year my already high respect for Sam’s playing has increased dramatically.

Anyway! In order of request, next on my list is Stella, C’mere, Obstacle 1, Length of Love, Same Town, and My Desire. I fall more in love with El Pintor the more I listen to it and I can’t wait to dig into those songs.

Until next time!

2002 pics of Daniel and Paul (and Carlos’ back)

These were taken by my coworker Cassandra on 30 September 2002 at this place called Middle East (the downstairs venue) in Cambridge, MA (I incorrectly tweeted earlier that it was in Maine):

2002.09.30 Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge MA (US)

2002.09.30 Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge MA (US)

2002.09.30 Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge MA (US)

2002.09.30 Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge MA (US)

I just love the serendipity here: I’m from Florida, Cassandra’s from Maine, she went to college in Massachusetts and saw Interpol in a tiny venue just as they were starting out, and now she and I sit across from each other at a publishing house in NYC.

Also, I have a list of songs to analyze: Roland, Stella, C’mere, Obstacle 1, Length of Love, and, like, the ENTIRE new album — all of my free time has been wrapped up in other creative projects I’ve been working on but I am still planning on getting to these!

Much love!

Meg