Sunday, August 18, 2013

Hackamore Brick - "I Won't Be Around" (1970)

This song is only 1:35 and works almost as part of a medley with "And I Wonder" on the group's One Kiss Leads to Another album. The structure of the song is AABA, with two verses, followed by a bridge, and then a final verse.

The first verse is fourteen bars long and, seemingly accommodating the irregular set of measures, consists of three lines with no rhyming other than a nice internal one on line three ("Until then/You ain't no friend/Of mine").

Verse number two tags on a couple of measures at the end and a fourth line of text, but continues to forego line-ending rhymes.

The bridge starts off with another line sung as though it has an internal rhyme ("I can't pre-tend/You know what you're do-in'"). Four bars in, it then moves to the same B minor to F# minor chord progression that's heard in the very same spot in the verses.

Eight bars in we get the second half of the bridge, which looks like this:

 photo 99edcee2-42b1-4940-a877-62bb965d919d.jpg

The phrasing of the words over the first four bars here sounds like it's following the pattern the song has established of having one line of text over four bars of music, but the same line seems to be continuing in bar number five.

The whole thing is ten bars long and the clever part is that they start the last four bar phrase on the F# minor chord, which in other parts of the song ends phrases rather than beginning them.

Notice that throughout the bridge, including the half-cadence at the end with the secondary dominant chord, they continue to refrain from rhyming. This is true of the fourth and final verse, as well.