The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. …
Category Archives: Composition
She’s Leaving Home
My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”, which I learned about a thousand years ago on guitar and haven’t thought about in a while. It’s …
The twelve bar blues
The twelve-bar form is a central convention of the blues. It’s so closely associated with the blues generally that jazz musicians use the term “a blues” to mean any tune using the twelve-bar form. However, it is surprisingly difficult to define what the twelve-bar blues actually is. That’s because there is no such thing as …
Strawberry Fields Forever
The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music …
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.
Don’t Sweat the Technique
I did not expect to hear a classic Eric B & Rakim track on The Crown, but at the end of season five, episode five, there was Dominic West as Prince Charles, dancing to this: There is a lot going on here! The track opens with an upright bass and a drum kit playing a …
I Want To Hold Your Hand
My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on …
I Heard It Through The Grapevine
My first exposure to Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was on the Big Chill soundtrack, which my baby boomer parents kept in heavy rotation. Here’s a live version. Nobody wore a glittery tux like Marvin Gaye.
The Ghostbusters theme song
It’s Halloween, and that means that everyone is scrambling to find seasonal music beyond Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In the pharmacy this morning, I heard “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr, and remembered that it’s an absolute banger. This is one of a long list of songs that I loved as a kid, became embarrassed by as a …