{"id":19841,"date":"2020-02-19T08:36:22","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T13:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=19841"},"modified":"2020-02-20T19:51:05","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T00:51:05","slug":"what-is-going-on-in-this-ariana-grande-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2020\/what-is-going-on-in-this-ariana-grande-song\/","title":{"rendered":"What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Top40Theory\">Asaf Peres<\/a> recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Let_Me_Love_You_(Ariana_Grande_song)\">Let Me Love You<\/a>&#8221; by Ariana Grande.<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5WL672bjJgM?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">The Wraparound Leading Tone in @ArianaGrande ft. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/LilTunechi?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@LilTunechi<\/a> &#8211; &quot;Let Me Love You&quot;<br \/>(it&#39;s really called a double leading tone, but I like wraparound better)<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TBHITS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@TBHITS<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VictoriaMonet?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@VictoriaMonet<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jeremih?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@jeremih<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/MrFranks?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#MrFranks<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/qVyY1BP7Nm\">pic.twitter.com\/qVyY1BP7Nm<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Top40 Theory (Asaf Peres) (@Top40Theory) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Top40Theory\/status\/1229521060724445184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">February 17, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>When I went to listen to the song, I immediately heard all kinds of weird things in the rhythm: that the chords were falling on weak beats, that the downbeat was displaced, that the drum pattern was misaligned somehow. I wasn&#8217;t alone in hearing these things. Asaf was puzzled, since he was confident in his hearing. Finally, I put the tune into Ableton and carefully transcribed it. I was totally wrong! But in fairness to me, the song is a rhythmically unconventional one, especially its opening few bars. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my transcription of the intro, first verse, prechorus and chorus.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.noteflight.com\/embed\/24e9c5b299f0fc05c1a27b34fa40a8633c1640da?scale=1&#038;displayMode=paginated\" width=\"800\" height=\"640\" allowfullscreen><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>There is a lot going on here! First, as Asaf points out, the roots of the chords go a half step above the tonic and then a half step below it before resolving again. This isn&#8217;t very exotic for jazz or 19th century classical music, but it&#8217;s not something you hear in pop. I mean, pop hardly ever uses leading tones, much less double ones. To my ears, though, the really remarkable thing here is the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Harmonic_rhythm\">harmonic rhythm<\/a>. The change from Em to F falls on the &#8220;and&#8221; of 3. Putting a chord change on a syncopated beat is standard practice for pop styles descending from the African diaspora, but usually you do it on the &#8220;and&#8221; of 2, not of 3. This strange placement is the reason I heard the entire rhythm being displaced by a beat.<\/p>\n<p>When the vocals enter, they contribute to the confusion. In the first line, &#8220;I just broke up with my ex,&#8221; I originally heard the word &#8220;ex&#8221; as falling on the downbeat. Since there are no drums under the verse, just those metrically ambiguous synth chords, that&#8217;s an easy mistake to make. A few bars later, there&#8217;s the line &#8220;I know they&#8217;ll be comin&#8217; from the right and the left, left left.&#8221; That&#8217;s a weird phrasing, and I would believe any of those &#8220;lefts&#8221; as falling on the downbeat if I heard them out of context. I knew the chords were syncopated somehow, but I couldn&#8217;t tell how immediately, and that added to my confusion.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, in the prechorus, the drums enter, playing a style that Wikipedia calls &#8220;trap lite.&#8221; Here the rhythm is more conventional, but there&#8217;s still some oddness. Check out bar 13, the line &#8220;And if it feels right.&#8221; On the word &#8220;right,&#8221; the melody goes down to C. That note would fit well over the F chord, but the melody lands on it a quarter note before the chord changes. To further destabilize things, there&#8217;s a kick under the backbeat in bar 16, which is rare in hip-hop. In the chorus, the vocal phrasing is more conventional, but it&#8217;s easy to be distracted from it because of the weird stuttering sixteenth notes. The kick drum pattern is strange too, with some unexpected triplets in it.<\/p>\n<p>Once I got the song onto the grid and transcribed it, I could see how it&#8217;s not really all that complicated. It&#8217;s still strange though! How does a person write a song like this? It isn&#8217;t something you&#8217;d just organically arrive at through scat singing; it feels more like something you&#8217;d work out intellectually. I don&#8217;t know how the writers worked, but I&#8217;m 99% confident that they did it by moving audio and MIDI around on the screen. The kick drum pattern sounds like something you&#8217;d get by putting the kick sample in an arpeggiator and twiddling the rate knob around while randomly poking the pad until you get something cool semi-accidentally. Those repeated &#8220;left left&#8221;s sound like copying and pasting. The song might be intended to be romantic, but it&#8217;s so chilly and posthuman sounding that it could be a love song about robots. Pop music is weird right now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Asaf Peres recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in &#8220;Let Me Love You&#8221; by Ariana Grande. The Wraparound Leading Tone in @ArianaGrande ft. @LilTunechi &#8211; &quot;Let Me Love You&quot;(it&#39;s really called a double leading tone, but I like wraparound better)@TBHITS @VictoriaMonet @jeremih #MrFranks pic.twitter.com\/qVyY1BP7Nm &mdash; Top40 Theory (Asaf Peres) (@Top40Theory) February 17, 2020 &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2020\/what-is-going-on-in-this-ariana-grande-song\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[909,9,498],"tags":[2252,568,610],"class_list":["post-19841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-composition","category-music","category-music-theory","tag-ariana-grande","tag-pop","tag-rhythm","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pAPdE-5a1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19841"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19855,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19841\/revisions\/19855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}