Wednesday, March 11, 2020

The Kinks - "Village Green Preservation Society" (1968)

Song starts with a vamp on the main chord progression, then into the first verse. There are three verses and they're eight bars, except for the third one, which is twelve.

My question is this: What do you call the section after the first verse? It's not really a chorus, even though it does repeat once. Could we call it a bridge?

We probably can, even though a bridge is not usually a repeating part and not usually something that occurs for the first time at twenty-eight seconds into the song. A bridge does not usually keep the same chord progression as the verse going either, although this one does go to a cool little plagal cadence by way of a non-functional secondary dominant chord (the E major chord in the key of C).

I don't know, maybe the cadence that closes the section does suggest that it's a chorus. I tend to think that both "chorus" and "bridge" sort of fall short of describing what's going on here and that we've ventured into some kind of expository style of songwriting that's just different.