Week 5

As I took a glance at the listening list for this week I saw two great songs that I really enjoy and connect with something.  "My Girl" reminds me of the movie My Girl and also it reminds me of my neighbor Krista and I.  Krista and I grew up together living right next door to one another.  Our parents always referred to us as Vada and Thomas J. from the movie.  We were inseparable.  Every time I hear this song I think back to our childhood days and all of the fun times and memories.  The second song is "You Can't Hurry Love".  This song has always been a fun and catchy tune.  If you listen to "My Girl" and "You Can't Hurry Love" they each start with a bass intro that works as a hook.  In "You Can't Hurry Love" there is a heavy back-beat played within the rhythm section and the bass part is also prominent through the piece along with rhythmic figures within the guitar.  The tambourine is a driving force with its strong beats on two and four.  In "My Girl" as stated above, the bass lays down a pattern as a heartbeat in my mind and then the guitar plays the 'hook'.  The horns are what make the layered chorus so impactful.  The layering of horns and strings along with vocals makes the built up each time great.  Also, the finger snaps on two and four is a typical strong beat pattern such as the tambourine.  Both of these pieces are great examples of Motown music.

Then the Beatles craze hit America.  The U.K. band hit American soil and ran with what they started in Great Britain.  The technical aspects of their music is genius.  The musical movement, chords, lyrics, rhythms, everything is precise and thought out.  These gentlemen are some of the greatest musicians of all time.  "Please Please Me" was recorded in 1962 and was the Beatles' first top 10 hit in Britain.  In America, this was not thought the same way until later.  "Please Please Me" follows the typical AABA form, which we know so well from previous weeks.  Some clever items that the Beatles included in "Please Please Me" were the rhyming of lines, descending chords, upbeat tempo/energy, rising melody, and then descending melody after hitting the melodic high point, and lastly, a song in two minutes.  In "A Hard Day's Night" an interesting beginning is that there is a big hit with dissonance and then the group comes in.  This gets the attention of the audience/listener and then it follows an AABA pattern, and also follows along the lines of the 12-bar blues figure, but it doesn't.  Does that make sense?  There are 12-bar but with three 4-bar phrases.  In this, there are also blue notes, which differs from the actual '12-bar blues'.  Here, the Beatles also veered away from the traditional chord structure and substituted other chords in place of the traditional ones.  Many consider "Yesterday" by the Beatles a rock ballad, with the accompaniment from all the electronic instruments, and also drums, which stay at a low dynamic through the entire song.  When listening deeply to the words of the song, when each new section starts, there are strong words.  For example, A section- Yesterday, A section- Suddenly, B section- Why she/I said, A section- Yesterday.  It follows a typical AABA form, which is very similar to that of Tin Pan Alley and how it is a solo voice throughout.  "Eleanor Rigby" was a song that went a totally different direction of a lot of other music.  This did not follow your typical rock band style or sound.  This followed more of a traditional folk ballad, and did not have any drums or guitars.  It was accompanied by a string orchestra.  This song opens with a strong chord of voice and orchestra.  The strings are very straight forward with their rhythms of keeping a steady beat and not much movement.  This also alternates between minor and major chords.

When the Beach Boys are heard you know it is them by their distinctive voice timbre.  "Good Vibrations" was performed by the Beach Boys and is probably still one of their most famous songs.  To me, this song plays on its title almost the whole song.  In the beginning you hear the entrance of the solo high voice, but underneath you hear a distant keyboard and bass.  In the keyboard there is a reverb effect in my mind is like a vibration.  Then when the low bass voice enters the keys begin to use pitch bend and 'vibrate' the sound.  In a sense there is no exact form for this song rather than an ABAB pattern, which comes to ABABCD with an instrument interlude along with transitions.  There are times where the song just changes feeling totally.  In the D section it offers a totally new but known melody and then transitions into the already known B section, which has variations.

Bob Dylan is a musician who took a different approach and had a different sound to his vocals within his music than anyone else.  In "Like a Rolling Stone" Dylan sounds like his vocals are a spoken-sung style.  With his poetic style, his voice cuts through everything with no problem.  In this song, the combination of organ, keyboard, guitar, bass, drums and the addition of harmonica give it a folk style sound.  It follows a strophic verse-chorus pattern.  Bob Dylan was the one who gave Jimi Hendrix the want to sing and know that if Bob Dylan could do it he could do it.