Saturday, March 8, 2014

Lynn Anderson - "Rose Garden" (1970)

Written by Joe South.

This song starts with the chorus. At 0:22, we get the lines "When you take, you gotta give/So live and let live/Or let go-o-o-o-o-o," leading into a repetition of "I beg your pardon/I never promised you a rose garden." 

What is this section? It doesn't repeat. You could call it a verse, but it's not the regular verse of the song.

Two regular verses are heard at this point, followed by another section not heard before ("Smile for a while and let's be jolly," etc.). Again, there seems to be no nomenclature for it. It ends with a half-cadence and leads to a repetition of the chorus, so perhaps one could say it's either a pre-chorus or an extension of the verse.

After the chorus this time, there is an instrumental section with a new harmonic progression (including an augmented chord), only four measures long. Looking back at the unique section heard at 0:22, we can note that it was four measures long, plus that four measure echo of the chorus.

What do you know? This section does the exact same thing.