I’m over the moon many different ways about the new Radiohead album. You’d have to have been living on the moon to miss the story, but just in case you have, it can be summarised like this: You buy and download the album direct from Radiohead’s web site, and name your own price. That can even be £0 if you like.
Another “DRM-free” music seller arrives, and another disappointment - this time around it’s Amazon, who today launched the beta of their Amazon MP3 music store.
As I noted previously, I have Merlin Mann to thank for my current level of inbox efficiency. To add to that, today he was responsible for a very hearty chuckle indeed, when I stumbled across this, which is ridiculous in so many ways I don’t even know where to start. From what I can gather, it isn’t meant to be funny.
This really made me chuckle - Prince’s new album is to be given away free with a newspaper, and ‘the music industry’ is furious. The BBC’s article on the subject contains a string of amusing quotes from the co-chairman* of the Entertainment Retailers Association. This is a good one:
I’m going to have another little ramble about When You Were Young, following on from my earlier one here, where I claimed the song was in B Major, without much in the way of justification. To recap, the chord progression throughout the song is this:
E F# Gm B E
At first glance then, it’s not unreasonable to assume the song is in E, making the progression I II iii V I. The only spanner in the works there is the II, which from a basic harmonisation of the major scale you would expect to be a ii, i.e. F#m and not F#. Why? Because the F# chord contains the notes F#, A# and C#, whereas F#m has an A instead of an A#. The A# is not part of the E major scale.
In itself, this isn’t enough evidence to decide the song isn’t in E. There are a couple of reasons I can think of to explain the ‘out of key’ chord. Firstly, it’s not unusual to ‘borrow’ a chord from the parallel minor scale, i.e. E minor. I ruled that one out because on the second of the scale it would be a diminished chord. The other option to my limited knowledge was a secondary dominant, which in this case would make the F# V/V, i.e. it’s the fifth of the fifth of the original scale. I can think of a lot of examples where that’s used, but on the simplest level you would expect it to resolve to the V itself, i.e. the next chord would be the fifth, a B, which it isn’t.
Another thing to look at would be the melody, but I don’t think off the top of my head that he ever sings either an A or an A#, so there’s not going to be anything conclusive there.
Other evidence then - the descending line that leads to the bridge goes E D# C# B A# G# F#. All notes from B major, with the A# again being not a note from E major. In fact, with the exception of the initial E they’re all also notes from F# major, which suggests we might be modulating to that key for the bridge, but I’ll leave that for another day and just note that the evidence is still pointing towards B major.
One of my favourite songs of the moment is When You Were Young by The Killers. There are lots of good things about it, but one is that it’s what I call a repeater (same short chord progression throughout, verse and chorus) and yet you don’t tend to notice. By contrast, you don’t have to listen to Champagne Supernova by Oasis many times before that hits you, not that I’m knocking it particularly. Maybe it’s partly because CS uses a tired old progression anyway, whereas When We Were Young has a fine one. It’s this:
E F# Gm B E
The reason it works so well is because the song is in B Major, which means the above translates to:
IV V vi I IV
The progression rarely goes to the I chord and doesn’t hang about there long when it does, so on the one hand you’re hearing a sound that’s mostly based around the IV, but you know it’s really rooted in the I. Now whether you know what the hell I’m talking about or not (and you may argue I don’t either), your ears/brain do know it, and that’s why it sounds good.
You may be wondering what any of this has to do with good old Bryan Adams. Well, the only other place I can think of hearing this progression, off the top of my head, is the chorus of his ‘classic’ Heaven. Whether you like the song or not it’s hard to argue with the catchyness of it, which pretty much all comes from that progression in the chorus. If you’re insane enough to have both songs, listen and you’ll see what I mean.
What I’m saying then I suppose, is that The Killers’ song is a finely distilled and concentrated version of a Bryan Adams classic. Sorry guys. I didn’t set out to say that. Since that awful film/song/video, whenever I heard Bryan Adams I see his denim clad figure standing in Sherwood Forest with an arrow flying towards his head. From now I’ll know who fired it.
P.S. Neither of the songs I claimed were ‘repeaters’ actually are, since they both make a very brief excursion elsewhere (in the case of When You Were Young, it’s a “ii vi I V” bridge). However, since I made the term up, I can do what I like.
Tonight I thought I’d document the strange musical tastes of Baby Mia over the 13 months to date, mainly because I think it might be something interesting to reflect on in years to come, when she’ll undoubtedly be assaulting my eardrums with something hideous. She’s only really been able to choose from what we listen to, given that she doesn’t watch TV and we rarely if ever have the radio on, but since we listen to a very varied range of stuff, from dawn until dusk, I think she’s had plenty of options. From the word go she’s always found ways of making her preferences very clear, culminating in her current habit of jumping up and down and shouting until the correct music is selected.
It’s been nearly a month since I promised to write part 2 of this epic. As such, it’s possible I might get around to it sooner or later. Needless to say, I haven’t received a deluge of requests to do so, and thus I have to remind myself.
As I said, part 1 was mostly a personal history, while part 2 is likely to deteriorate into a rant. In the meantime, bartosz is doing a great job of highlighting many of my current irritations in his relisoft journal.
He must be a good ten miles away as the crow flies, but nonetheless we can hear him bellowing from beyond the woods for the second night running.