Songs I Like - A Team

This is another song discovery that came from one of my guitar students, a young girl of course :-).  Ed Sheeran is only 21 years old but he already has a maturity in his songwriting and guitar playing far beyond that.  He's from the UK, which is obvious when you hear him sing certain words.  This particular song is about a young woman who has been brutally beaten up by a world of drugs and prostitution, but instead of telling you anything beyond that, I'll post the lyrics.

White lips, pale face
Breathing in the snowflakes
Burnt lungs, sour taste
Light's gone, days end
Struggling to pay rent
Long nights, strange men

CHORUS:

And they say
She's in the Class A Team
Stuck in her daydream
Been this way since 18
But lately, her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us

'Cause we're just under the upper hand
And go mad for a couple grams
And she don't wanna go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the motherland
Or sells love to another man
It's too cold outside
For angels to fly
Angels to fly

Ripped gloves, raincoat
Tried to swim, stay afloat
Dry house, wet clothes
Loose change, bank notes
Weary-eyed, dry throat
Call girl, no phone

[REPEAT CHORUS]

BRIDGE:

An angel will die
Covered in white
Closed eyes and hopin' for a better life
This time, we'll fade out tonight
Straight down the line

[REPEAT CHORUS]

LAST CHORUS:

And we're all under the upper hand
And go mad for a couple grams
And we don't wanna go outside tonight
And in the pipe, fly to the motherland
Or sell love to another man
It's too cold outside
For angels to fly
Angels to fly
Fly, fly
For angels to fly, to fly, to fly
Angels to die

The two things that appeal to me most about this song are Ed Sheeran's voice and guitar playing.  But there are some interesting he does with the lyrics, especially this section:

Been this way since 18
But lately, her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream

This is a series of five lines that rhyme;  not perfect rhymes on all occasions, but each two syllables long whether they are one word or two.  And on each of those he uses the same two notes, higher than any other note in the song.  Now my rule of thumb has always been to only repeat something three times or it starts to feel like too much, but in this case that rule appears to go out the window.  It just works.

I also like the phrase "in a pipe, she flies to the Motherland"...there are a lot of visual elements in the verses, which have short, descriptive phrases in contrast to the chorus which expands into longer lines and phrases. One of the things songwriters often struggle with is the idea of contrast;  you want the verses and the chorus to be distinct from each other (and other song parts like pre-choruses and bridges too), and there are a number of ways to achieve that contrast.  One obvious way is by creating distinct melodies and chord progressions, which this song also does.  But look at this first verse:

White lips, pale face
Breathing in the snowflakes
Burnt lungs, sour taste
Light's gone, days end
Struggling to pay rent
Long nights, strange men

You don't need to watch a video to get a sense of a cold and tired person and difficult circumstances.  Line 1, 3, 4 and 6 are mostly two sets of adjectives and nouns (white lips, pale face, where the words "white" and "pale" are the adjectives and "lips" and "face" are nouns, for those of you who forget those terms!).  Simple, but powerfully succinct writing.  The chorus begins with shorter lines, but then builds into longer ones as the chord progressions.  It's almost like the first 8 short lines are actually a pre-chorus and some might label them as such.  However, they contain the title of the song, which some might argue denotes the chorus.

When I worked this song out, I instinctively put the capo on the 2nd fret because I could hear the bass run down from a "G" to an "Em", and in watching a solo acoustic version of Sheeran performing it, I saw that he had his capo exactly there.  He has a nice, percussive style of playing, where he'll throw in a chord or bass change for a beat or two just to make it more interesting.  In fact, I chose to show that video below as opposed to the fancier, produced version, because you get a sense of how a great song stands on its own with the right performance of it.

I certainly recommend listening to the recorded version as well.  Nothing in the production gets in the way of the song.  I've listened to his song "Drunk" and was not as impressed, but I'm certainly going to check out some of his other songs.

In the meantime, have a listen to the song in the video below.

~ IJ

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.