There’s an art to making a catchy pop song in an odd time signature — “odd” meaning something other than the vastly popular 4/4 and 3/4 (“waltz time”) meters. Despite the overwhelming popularity of those two meters, if a great song has time changes that flow naturally, no reason it can’t top the charts.

Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” (1959) was the pioneer, a huge hit in 5/4 time (counted “ONE-two-three-ONE two” — listen for the kick drum on those “ones”).

The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 (or 6/8) in the turnaround (the phrase “Strawberry Fields Forever”), with a possible bar of 7 thrown in…

Redbone’s “Witch Queen of New Orleans” (1971) is in 4/4, but adds in a bar of 2/4 — that little hiccup — after every other measure in the chorus:

Marie Marie la voodoo veau
She’ll put a spell on you (hiccup)
Marie Marie…

The Beatles went crazy in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” — you can hear 4/4, 3/4, 5/4, maybe 9/8, 10/8, — all over the place.… Continue reading

Some song lyrics are cryptic, but we don’t need to “figure out” the meaning. We can suspend disbelief and just live in the mood or the world they create.

“Here At The Western World” is certainly an oblique lyric (like those of most Steely Dan songs), but it’s one of those where the details are so specific, and hang together so well, that it’s hard to resist trying to sleuth out the story.

The music is laid back, smooth, almost innocuous (but this is SD, so the lyrics scratch the surface to reveal the darkness underneath). There’s an implied bossa nova rhythm (similar to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”/“Song for My Father”), which brings us to… South America.

No way could I pin down this song’s meaning on my own, so I googled a few times over the years, and found that the most coherent explication was this: it’s about Nazi war criminals who found refuge in South America after the war.… Continue reading

This record changed my life.

I was ten years old. How many of us, at around that age, heard new music because of a friend’s access to his or her older sibling’s records? Summertime — a friend said, “You ever hear U.S. Bonds?” And then (to quote Lou Reed), my mind split open.

I grew up in a pre-rock family. As a little kid, I lived in the world of my mother’s music: classical and pop from the 1920s through the 1950s. I latched onto this set of RCA Victor albums she had called “60 Years of Music America Loved Best” (1959-1960). This was my musical education. The collection was eclectic, to say the least:

• Marian Anderson, “Go Down Moses”
• Vladimir Horowitz, “Variations on Themes from Carmen”
• Paul Whiteman, “Whispering”
• Perry Como, “Prisoner of Love”
• Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy, “Indian Love Call”
• Fritz Kreisler, “Liebesfreud”
• Harry Belafonte, “Day-O”

…and many more (Duke Ellington, Eddy Arnold, Jascha Heifetz, Artie Shaw, Mario Lanza, Toscanini, Rachmaninoff, etc.…)… Continue reading