'Trans Bach Express' and 'Five' (2007)

Two short pieces of music I wrote and laptopped up about 5 years ago.

Hang with Me (how to finish a song)

Here's the original 2003 version of the song, Hang with Me, which Robyn has made famous:

Evidently the song's writer (and Robyn's regular collaborator) Klas Ahlund channeled his inner Benny Anderson, and saw (his wife-at-the-time) Bruna's record as just ver. 1.0 of the song. Robyn's version adds:

• the scatty B-section ('If you do me right, I'll do right by you...there'll be time for that too') of the verses
• the whole chorus/central tension of the song (yes you can HwM/But don't go falling in love with me)
• the little key-changes to bridge out of the chorus

And much else besides (e.g., R's version adds chords or at least lots of inversions even to the bits of the underlying song that are preserved from its first version, but I haven't figured all that out yet).

And here's a snippet of it performed on Gossip Girl:

R's HwM is the finished version (ver. 5.2 perhaps) of the underlying song: it's what others will now cover, not the 2003 original. It would, however, be interesting to hear a hipster lo-fi cover of the full/finished song. Does Paola Bruna do one?

Note that the underlying song is further improved from its acoustic version on Body Talk v.1 to the dance-pop version on BT v.2. E.g., the first couplet^[1] is ingeniously sharpened from 'Will you tell me once again/How we're gonna be just friends' to 'Pray tell me once again/...' That slight archaism (used idiomatically and non-religiously but nonetheless colored by its religious associations) is not just the perfect short syllable for the song, it also resonates with pop history (like a living on a save a little save a prayer) and with the church-singing that public singing about romantic love grows out of in the West. Further, there's a touch of an aria from a popular Bach cantata in Robyn's n-part harmonies in the dance-pop version's choruses, as if to confirm that the late lyric change is on the right track, but all of that remains to be figured out. For this and other reasons (e.g., it'll be quite an achievement to play a good approximation of dance-pop HwM's arpeggiation manually), I suspect that HwM is going to be huge with geeks at conservatories.

In sum, HwM exhibits always improving/refining song-craft of a very high order. HwM also demonstrates that a non-native English-speaker's command of English can be better than almost all natives' where it counts, while the non-native speaker's distance from the song's language can nonetheless occasionally allow him or her to make interesting, rule-breaking discoveries, e.g., 'headlessly'.^[2]

In some respects the big trick here is one that's very familiar, and that many of us associate with Bacharach/David and with Abba and with Quincy Jones (producing for Lesley Gore as well as for MJ): pop music is music for kids - for the kid in all of us - but it's often done best by people quite a bit older who really know what they're doing both musically and lyrically (Ahlund is 39, Robyn is 31, and her band's members aren't spring chickens). Such figures can end up making something slightly paradoxical: stellar music for kids that's exhilirating precisely because it's so pregnant with adult-apprehended meaning and technique.^[3]

---

^[1] The couplet recurs in the pseudo-'middle eight' of the dance-pop version. The acoustic version of HwM in fact never quite solves its own middle eight problem: a kind of jerk/hiccup in the strings and in Robyn's vocal gets us back to the final double chorus. What would Uncles Benny and Bjorn say about that? I therefore conjecture that (i) fitting the song into dance-pop's more metronomic frame created the opportunity and pressure to better solve HwM's middle eight problem, and that (ii) that led the writers to reuse the opening couplet, which in turn recommended the couplet's last lyrical polish. At any rate, the final version of HwM is near-mathematically perfect and beautiful. In my view it's going to reward a lot of subsequent study, much as, say, Promises Promises, Dancing Queen, and Rock with You do.

^[2] It would be interesting to think through witty tracks like Robyn's Fembot from this dual, super-competence+distance perspective.

^[3] Moreover, HwM's natty video successfully testifies that Robyn is one of those rare pop-figures (Elvis, Beatles, Jackson 5, Abba, MJ, Madonna, Gaga) who appeals to children, teens, hipsters, adults, grandparents...

Madonna's Holiday I: Music and Lyrics

Released without a stand-alone video in September 1983, Holiday became Madonna's first hit (and first signature song) early in 1984. And whereas Madonna has recently signaled her skepticism about or even disdain for some of her other early hits and signature songs, e.g., Into The Groove, she's evidently still very fond of Holiday, citing it as her favorite among her own (not necessarily self-written) songs in an interview in 2005. In this note I take a close look at this terrific record, focusing on Holiday's music and lyrics. In the sequel I discuss how Madonna made Holiday a pop landmark by getting out there and selling it and herself to the world.

Music
Holiday is musically very simple:

• Just four chords (in D-maj) arranged in exactly one 4-bar pattern: IV,V|V,vi|IV,V|iii,IV
• Each bar in the pattern has the same timing: 3/8 for the first chord, 5/8 for the second chord, i.e., the second chord in each bar is always a quaver ahead of the beat.

Since the first and third bars of the pattern are the same, the overall 'feel' of the pattern is (counted out): theme and theme and up and stretch; theme and theme and down and relax (repeat). That is, given its moderate-quick tempo, Holiday 'feels' very aerobic, or very like an aerobics class. This is crucial, in my view, and I'll make much of it in the sequel.
In part because of its extreme musical simplicity/directness, Holiday isn't musically especially original or forward-looking. Indeed, Holiday is more or less exactly like the direct musical offspring of Chic's Good Times (from 1979) and ABC's Look of Love (from mid-1982). Let's focus on Holiday's LOL-lineage:

• LOL bounces around the same four chords as Holiday – IV,V,vi,iii (only in C-maj)
• LOL's main verse pattern is the same as the final two bars of Holiday's sole pattern, i.e., IV,V|iii,IV with a 3/8, 5/8 timing within each bar, and essentially the same timbre (muted-chiming, synth chords) picks out the basic changes in both H and LOL
• LOL's and H's tempi, synth bass-lines, and string section embellishments are very similar, although in each dimension Holiday is simpler, more metronomic, and more synthetic/electronic than LOL.^[1]

Important musical differences between LOL and H include:

• Madonna's beat is a gloriously stiff Oberheim drum-machine, whereas ABC's rhythm track employs God's own army of electronic wizardry and low-flying orchestral percussionists, courtesy of Trevor Horn and Ann Dudley
• Holiday is fleshed out by a buffet of interlocking, Chic-/Nile Rodgers-style, disco guitar figures
• Holiday musically climaxes with a delightful piano part due to Fred Zaar. After plinking away in the background for 16 bars or so, Zaar finally breaks out into a solo, bringing the track joyously home.^[2] That piano overall is similar to piano in Nick Lowe's I love the Sound of Breaking Glass (from 1978), and Steve Nieve's piano parts in Everyday I Write the Book, a near-contemporary (July 1983) single from Elvis Costello and the Attractions. More generally, Zaar's solo is in the lightly vaudeville piano tradition that occasionally surfaces in the Beatles, as well as in things like Thunderclap Newman's Something in the Air, and then persistently in the mutant pub-rock piano of Nieve, Jools Holland (Squeeze), in Eddie Rayner's playing for Split Enz, and even in Benny Anderson (Abba) at least some of the time. This style of piano is very different from Ann Dudley's brilliant, cod-classical for ABC (and Benny Anderson much of the time), let alone from the (Korg M-1) 'House' piano that dominated dance music for years after about 1988 (and has arguably never really gone away).

It's worth mentioning at this point that the remix of Holiday on Madonna's first greatest hits package, The Immaculate Collection should be avoided at all costs. It barbarically omits the piano solo, thereby decapitating the whole track, and it coats the whole song in various kinds of obsolete audio processing whose micro-latencies destroy the precision-timing and stiffness of the rhythm track.^[3] Throughout this note, I therefore discuss just the original single mix of Holiday, which was collected on Madonna's first album, and which was sensitively edited for radio and for lip-synch performances.
Lyrics
As we've already seen, Holiday has little musical structure to speak of. Thus, almost all of the variation in the song, e.g., all verse/chorus/middle eight structure, etc., has to be created solely by the vocal line and the lyrics. Holiday doesn't disappoint in this regard, and its basic structure so conceived is as follows: Intro/Chorus/Verse1/Double Chorus (with responses)/Verse2/Chorus (with responses)/Middle 8 (just 4 bars really)/Intro/Chorus (with responses)/Intro (with responses)/Intro (with principal novel variant responses)/Intro+piano solo/Intro to fade (with various responses).
The key to Holiday from this structural-lyrical perspective is its call and response structure, which develops throughout the song. We originally perceive the Intro:

Holiday
Celebrate
Holiday
Celebrate

just as itself. But by the end of the song it's become a 'call' handled by backing vox, and we hear both Madonna and the piano respond to it. Similarly, in the case of the Chorus, we initially hear mostly just its 'call' part:

If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,

it would be so nice

Although the last response line is in place here, the full response side only gets filled in second time through, i.e., in the double Chorus after the first verse. For still another example, we don't originally hear the vocal in the Middle eight (just 4 bars) as a series of responses. But as the Middle eight's constituent parts get recycled as responses to Chorus and Intro calls in the final third of the record, all becomes clear. In sum, by the end of Holiday, we hear its bobbing and weaving vocal parts and apostrophes in place, and zippered together in a way that's immensely satisfying, even exhilarating

From the top, then, and, to be clear, writing all the calls to the left and all responses to the right, we get -
Intro
Chorus:

If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,

it would be so nice

Verse 1:

Everybody spread the word
We're gonna have a celebration
All across the world
In every nation
It's time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together
To release the pressure
We need a holiday

Double Chorus (with responses):

If we took a holiday

Oh...Ooo hoo hoo hoo

Took some time to celebrate

Come on let's celebrate

Just one day out of life

Holiday!

It would be,

it would be so nice

If we took a holiday

Oo yeah oh yeah

Took some time to celebrate

Come on let's celebrate

Just one day out of life

Just one day out of life!

It would be,

it would be so nice

Verse 2:

You can turn this world around
And bring back all of those happy days
Put your troubles down
It's time to celebrate
Let love shine
And we will find
A way to come together
And make things better
We need a holiday

Chorus (with mixed responses):

If we took a holiday

Holiday!

Took some time to celebrate

Come on let's celebrate

Just one day out of life

Just one day out of life!

It would be,

it would be so nice

Middle eight:

Ooh yeah oh yeah
Come on let's celebrate
We have got to get together

Intro
Chorus (with mixed responses):

If we took a holiday

Ooh yeah oh yeah

Took some time to celebrate

Come on let's celebrate

Just one day out of life

Holiday!

It would be,

it would be so nice

Intro (with mixed responses):

Holiday

Oh yeah oh yeah

Celebrate

Come on let's celebrate

Holiday

Just one day out of life!

Celebrate

It would be so nice

Intro (with principal novel variant responses):

Holiday

Holiday, Celebration

Celebrate

Come together in every nation

Holiday

Holiday, Celebration

Celebrate

Come together in every nation

Intro+piano solo
Intro (with mixed responses) + piano continuing to go nuts:

Holiday

We've got to get together

Celebrate

Take some time to celebrate

Holiday

Just one day out of life

Celebrate

It would be so nice

Intro (with principal novel variant responses) (repeat to fade).

Is there anything to these lyrics behind all of this busy, ingenious structure of Intro and Chorus call patterns, zipped and unzipped with varying responses? Probably not. In effect Holiday revolves tightly around the twin concepts Holiday and Celebrate/celebration for its whole length (perhaps drawing on the 'Holiday, Holiday, Holiday, Celebrate!' chorus of Change's A Lover's Holiday (1980)). But spinning though that so gracefully and unmechanically that a song with an unrelenting groove and a single chord progression nonetheless ends up powerfully expressing freedom and release is a significant achievement in my view. It may look easy to write and perform a lyric that invites and urges everyone 'all around the world' to get up and dance and 'get together' - to speak in a plausible 'we' without seeming obnoxious or ridiculous - but evidently it isn't. (I hail and discuss the significance of Holiday's egoless-ness in the sequel.)
The super-positivity that Holiday hymns became a key theme within dance music over the next 20 years (sometimes forming the attitudinal raison d'etre for whole sub-genres, e.g., Hi-NRG, Happy Hardcore, Italo, etc.), but rarely, if ever, was that theme as well articulated and demonstrated as Madonna and her producer managed in Holiday.

---

^[1] And whereas Holiday had a train journey on its single sleeve, LOL has lately (and deliciously) soundtracked Virgin Rail ads.
^[2] According to wiki, Zaar was a friend of Madonna's and her producer 'Jellybean' Benitez's, and his part was a last-minute, at-home/extra-studio addition to the track.
^[3] 'Jellybean''s straight remix of Holiday for Madonna's 1987 You Can Dance collection of dance versions is OK in my view, but the 'drier'/less processed sound of the original mix is still better. 'Jellybean''s 'Dub version' remix of Holiday for the same collection is more interesting: it's just a classic, largely instrumental, 'separate all the parts', 12" mix. If you're a fan, everything from the piano to the layers of Nile Rodgers-ish guitars to the backing vox to the drum-machine cow-bell on Holiday is worth hearing in (near) isolation. For me, then, Holiday (Dub version) 6:56 uniquely, nicely complements Holiday's original mix.