Songs I Like - Somebody That I Used To Know

Oddly enough, I first encountered this song not by the original artist Gotye, but through a YouTube video of the song posted by a Canadian band called Walk Off The Earth.  It was a very clever video, with the band members ALL playing the same guitar!

The last time I looked, they had over 87 MILLION hits of their version!  Amazing.  But I'm here to talk about the song itself.

Singer/songwriter Gotye is a Belgian-born Australian who had three previous albums to his credit.  This song, however, really took off for him and he's had #1 status all over the world.  If you listen to Gotye's version of the song, something that really stands out for me is the simplicity of the production.  I know that good songs stand on their own...or they SHOULD.  But sometimes the production behind a song is what makes it so identifiable;  in other words it is completely unique.  I'm sure artists or producers have used xylophones before, but Gotye actually uses it over a sample of Luiz Bonfá's track "Seville" (here's a link to that track if you're interested, you'll hear the guitar right away, just the first bar, that Gotye samples).  I didn't even realize it was a sample until I started to research the song.  Bonfá is a Brazilian guitarist and composer who passed away in 2001.

Vocally the delivery goes from a quiet, almost plaintive tone in the verses to real belting in the chorus.  My husband, who is a fan of earlier Australian bands like Men At Work and Midnight Oil, says he can hear the Australian influence especially in one line "Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing.".  The way he breaks up the word "happened" starting on a G on the first syllable and sliding up to a C on the last syllable, is what my husband claimed was the sound that was familiar.  Interesting.

New Zealander Kimba provides the female vocal in the third verse, a lyrical response to the first two verses that are sung by Gotye.  It's an interesting contrast;  one of my students, a female, says Kimba's verse is her favourite, especially the first line "Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over"! After that verse there appears to be a pre-chorus that happens only once in the song and only before the second time the chorus is sung.  It builds up nicely (which is why they often call a pre-chorus a "lift"!) into the chorus.  A clever songwriting technique;  every now and then throw in something unpredictable.

Walk Off The Earth's version only brought more attention to the original...along with making it their own by coming up with such a unique way to perform it.  Recently I saw a YouTube cover version of the song with the lyrics changed to reflect how poorly my hockey team, the Canucks, are doing in the NHL playoffs.  As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery;  and the more popular a song is, the more cover and satirist versions you'll find everywhere.

Great song and definitely an earworm!  Get your earworm version below on the YouTube video :-)

~ IJ

From The Mailbag April '12

 I recently received this email from Joel Patterson (link to his website below), who describes himself as "the enfant terrible of the recording website Gearslutz".  I'll let you read his email and my response is below:

Hi Irene,

Great site! Glad you're so willing to help out the neophytes out here.

I've got a question, it goes like this: every so often I will hear a familiar phrase in a "new" song, I guess the latest was in the Enrico Iglesias "I Like How It Feels." This may be an ancient song… I'm not too exposed to the current scene… anyway, he weaves the phrase "ticket to ride" into his lyric.

Or, whoever wrote the song did, is Enrico a talented guy? A front man for a larger organization? Isn't he descended from Julio Iglesias, some kind of star of a previous era? So many questions, so much I don't know…

"Ticket to ride" is obviously a quotation from the Beatles' tune "Ticket to ride." I am on the fence between thinking this is a heavy-handed, blatantly obvious, cheesy play, and thinking it's cool and hip.

If I were to work the phrase "rolling in the deep" into a new, original song, in a way that worked within the song and had a completely different melody from the Adele hit, I'm just wondering how that would strike you, overall? Cheesy? Hip? What's your take?

Thanks!

Joel Patterson
www.joelpatterson.us

"Hi Joel,

"This is a great question!  First of all, I think timing is everything.  If you encompassed “rolling in the deep” into a song in the very near future, I would consider it tacky because it would APPEAR to be the use of a phrase in order to draw attention to your own song.  You have no idea how many people hit my website using that phrase just because I did a bit of a critique on Adele’s song!  So people out there looking for that song lyric, or a discussion or critique of it, would also potentially find any other song containing that lyrical phrase if it was posted on the web.

Cool Chords

This is geared mostly towards guitar players, but could still apply in some respects to those of you who write with a keyboard.  Are your chord choices and your chord progressions getting boring?  You might find yourself always turning to the same chords when you're sitting down to write...and let's face it, you can probably only sing in certain keys so those chords work for you.

However, they're not very inspiring after awhile, are they?

Maybe you need to introduce yourself to some new sounding chords, chords that have different extensions (more about that in a minute), but still work for your voice.  There are many, many chords out there, but most of the time we stick to the common chords.  It's not that common chords are bad, but they are what we know.  I get an awful lot of visitors to one of my articles entitled "Chord Keys" because people aren't sure what chords sound good together.  In fact, they often use the search terms "what chords sound good together" to find that article!

So if you aren't sure about chord keys, that's a good primer.  However, beyond that, why not teach yourself some less common chords.  Chord "extensions" are simply added harmonic notes that change the sound of a chord.  For instance, a basic G chord changed to a Gadd5, gives it a fuller, more majestic (for lack of a better word) sound.  A Gadd5 is fretted like this:

 Gadd5
 -----------
 | | | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 | 1 | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 2 | | | 3 4
 |_|_|_|_|_|

Just adding that third finger to the third fret of the 2nd string gives the G a whole new dimension.  In fact, I know some guitar players who have permanently replaced any G they play with a Gadd5 because they like the sound of it better! But there are many other  G chords with different extensions, so I'm going to give you a bunch of them here just so you can play with them:

  Gadd5            G6              Gadd9              G11
 -----------     -----------     -----------     -----------
 | | | | | |     | | | | | |     | | | | | |     | | | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|
 | 1 | | | |     | 1 | | | |     | 1 | 2 | |     | | | 1 | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|
 2 | | | 3 4     2 | | | | |     3 | | | | 4     2 x 3 | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|     |_|_|_|_|_|

(Note:  the "x" in the G13 chord means that you mute that string

with the back of your second finger)

So you can see that just by changing a couple of notes from a normal G chord, you can find lots of variations.  Sometimes I have found myself fingering some kind of chord without even knowing what to call it!  All I know and care about is the fact that it sounds cool.  Eventually I have found the names by using a website called Gootar.com and typing in the fingerings on their little Java chart.  It gives me a few names to choose from :-). The point is that you should explore how you play your regular chords to get out of your regular chord "rut".

The web is an excellent place to find chord charts if you are looking for new ones to try out. Chordie has a great one that gives all kinds of variations of all of the standard chords, and I'm sure you can find others just by Googling "guitar chord chart".

There is something about the sound of a new chord that can do all sorts of things to your ear when you are trying to write a song.  Sometimes the subtlest change can inspire something entirely new for you.  So find yourself some cool chords and get busy!

IJ