of Montreal - "Requiem for O.M.M.2" (2005)

The chorus of this song has a pretty simple harmonic vocabulary of diatonic chords (I, ii, IV, and V) plus one blue chord (bVII), but the melody is quite unusual. The fact that it sounds fairly natural is remarkable and somewhat mysterious.

The first two phrases revolve around D#, the third of the scale. It's an odd tone for everything to be centered around because it's not a part of the ii (C# minor), IV (E major), or V (F# major) chords that we are hearing.


The third phrase starts off on D# once again, but has to slip up a half-step to E when the A major chord is thrown in to avoid a tritone. E is a part of the A major chord, but the phrase goes up a pitch and then descends to B (a longer note on a strong beat), which is not.

The last phrase emphasizes D# on the downbeat once again over C# minor.

Bruno Mars - "When I Was Your Man"/Justin Timberlake - "Mirrors" (2012)

Two current chart hits. The Mars song subverts rhyming expectations when line two of the verse doesn't rhyme with line one. This is nice in itself, but nicer still when he goes the extra mile and a half by (also unexpectedly) rhyming line three with line one and line four with line two.

The fifty-one second chorus in the Timberlake song strikes me as something utterly extraordinary. Its length, of course, is outrageous, but what a construction the entire thing is. There are two parts to it, but both occur over the same chord progression. The composers shape the sense of two distinct parts out of melodic configurations.

The first part consists of what are essentially eight lines of text, with line five rhyming with line one and line eight rhyming with line four. Lines six and seven involve a single, extended melody and are essentially one long line.

In the second part, you finally get the refrain line twenty-five seconds into the chorus. This section is more melodically concise, has more immediate rhyming, and repeats the refrain line at the end, creating a sense that it's truly a sort of chorus on top of a chorus.

As if all of this weren't enough, there's a combining of lines five and six as one long melodic passage, echoing the similar event in the first section even though these two parts are otherwise melodically distinct.

The Three O'Clock - "When Lightning Starts" (1983)

I believe there's a ninth chord in this song on the dominant of B major. When played by barring the top three strings on the ninth fret of the guitar (if that is indeed what guitarist Louis Gutierrez is doing here), it's as though you're just extending the IV chord that precedes it by adding the sixth (E, G# and C#) or like the ii chord.

The bass outlines B-A-E-F# throughout both the verse and the chorus. A is played underneath a V/IV (B7) chord, so that makes for unusual stuff happening in two out of only four chords that are played for much of this song.

The Who - "La La La Lies" (1965)

Two minutes and sixteen seconds:

1. No chorus, just a refrain line that comes at the end of each verse.
2. A bridge after two verses followed by a third verse with new words.
3. Key change and run through the I-IV-V verse chord progression in the new key one time to get revved up for the rest of the song.
4. Repeat verse one and verse three because they're so sweet. Magnify the sweetness with wordless background vocals on the last one.

That's an AABAAAA structure - an awful lot of As!

Laura Nyro - "Wedding Bell Blues" (1967)

There seems to be a casualness to how this song defies verse/chorus distinctions, as though it's just standard practice. It starts with what we might call the refrain of "Bill/I love you so/I always will," but it's not a refrain that stands by itself.* There's either liaison to the next section ("I look at you and see the passion eyes of May") or it's all one. What you might call this section is the question.

Really, it's all just verse, but if there's something like a chorus in the song, then this is it. The next section ("Oh, I was on your side Bill") is another verse segment. Up through this part, everything has been metrically square, in groups of four bars, but when you get to the "Kisses and love won't carry me" part, she cuts it off after two and makes liaison to the second long verse by ending on the first word of the refrain. The slight metrical disorientation contributes to the sense of falling heard in the melody, which subsequently settles once again into metrical squares.

The whole song consists of nothing but three of these go-arounds plus a coda.

 * This is particularly obvious in the second go-around, where the refrain is followed by a line starting with the word "and" - "And in your voice I hear a choir of carousels."

The Monkees - "Sometime in the Morning" (1967)

The verse in this song starts off with an eight bar section (tonic, ii chord, and iii chord harmonic vocabulary) that's straightforward enough. The second section has simple harmonies, too - I, IV, and V chords - but it's thirteen bars long. This supports an unusual word/rhyming structure:

Your love has shown me things I never thought I could see
I didn't know...
It could be done so easily - now I know
You're where it is for me

Coolest thing is when they take the last nine of these thirteen bars and stick them in again after the bridge, where they fit so perfectly, and where outfitting them with lyrics that are supposed to come at the beginning of the verse structure is so clever:

Sometime in the morning
You'll just reach out and she will be there
Close as the summer air

The Young Rascals - "I've Been Lonely Too Long" (1967)

So, here we have a song that starts with the chorus but you don't really notice it. That's because it sounds like a verse!

It starts with the refrain line repeated twice, followed by two rhyming lines, for a total of eight bars. When the refrain lines come back afterwards, it sounds like the second verse is starting. It cuts off after the two repetitions of the line, though, and then the actual verse of the song ("As I look back/I can see me lost and searching" etc.) finally begins.

The contrast you get with this verse, however, feels more like the contrast you normally get from a bridge. That's attributable to the fact that the chorus that preceded it sounded like a verse, of course, but the whole thing strikes me as being super clever and, perhaps, very unique.

The other thing I really like about the structure is that the verse has two parts, with its twelve bars divided up as eight plus four. This exactly mirrors the way that the chorus, which is eight bars, is always followed by the extra four bars of the refrain lines being repeated twice afterward. These repeating twelves (all eight plus four) throughout the song makes for some really pretty symmetry.

Camper Van Beethoven - "She Divines Water" (1988)

Almost four minutes long and completely viable as a strong album track, this song is nevertheless comprised of only two verses and a (lengthy) coda. The verses have two parts, the second in waltz time and with irregular groupings of bars, both elements echoed in the imagery of "feel the world spin slightly off axis."

Bob Dylan once said something to the effect of dreams being "the place where the bottom falls out from reality" and that is what happens here. At the end of verse number two, singer David Lowery starts telling about a dream but then never stops, the chords continuing to circle around and back. We begin to feel that power on the level of a planet going off its axis now, the dream suddenly including images of fortune-telling, playing cards, and then, by a master stroke, the operatic chorus that seems to be overseeing the cosmic event.

Al Stewart - "Year of the Cat" (1976)

The question arises as to how the contrasting major key sections function in this otherwise minor key, wistful song. These modulations are a big part of the expansiveness of this almost-seven minute composition, but the way they contribute to the tone and theme of the song may not be immediately apparent.

The main one is heard three times - in the intro, solo, and closing. Each time, there's clearly a sense of emotional contrast and it does seem to have depth and a real relevance to the story. It's as though we're not just hearing of these scenes from the protagonist's life, but, like the protagonist, being swept away by them a bit. The movement in these sections is not only a simple shift from the home key of E minor to G major, but quite breathlessly to E major only four bars later, only to be pulled away and back into the home minor key almost immediately. The parallel in the story, of course, is that the protagonist will stay with the woman, but only for a time.

The return to the minor key is a pull back into the passing of mythological time as depicted in this song. So close to the tick-tock pulse of 120 BPM, time in "Year of the Cat" is framed by sadness over the knowledge of its finite context - one year, perhaps - and draped ultimately in that wistful E minor key to which it returns.

Husker Du - "Makes No Sense at All" (1985)

I always sensed that there was something rich in this song's harmonies and finally figured them out. Take a look at the extended chords implied by the melody in the first phrase here.

The G sung over the F chord in the second bar makes for an added ninth harmony, while the same note over A minor in bars three and four gives that chord a minor seventh quality. In both cases, it's the tonic pitch accounting for the harmonic extension, and this centering around G anchors the song in its key while the chords (which are really more native to C major) are stewing about. The second part of the phrase is sung in harmony and the last two notes are on D, which is also not a part of that A minor chord but is, of course, the fifth of the "home harmony."

It's impossible to say what the contrasting section of this song is; its different set of chords give the impression of a bridge, but the part is heard with different words after both of the verses. (There is no chorus.) The more functional G major chord vocabulary here provides a sense of relief from the strange harmonic goulash of the verse, but the melody remains insistent with its extensions, emphasizing D as a major ninth over the C chord in measure three and as a minor seventh over the E minor chord in measure four.

The Shins - "Simple Song" (2012)

A couple of instances here of a songwriter going the extra mile. First, the chorus at the very end of the song, heard for the third time but now with new words introducing, quite surprisingly, a whole new temporal reference point to the first person narrative - a sad little personally revealing anecdote when one was not expected, left as a final impression before the song disappears.

Second, that little guitar solo that precedes the final chorus. At this point of the song, there's already been an instrumental break, but hey, let's have another one. It occurs over the buildup to the chorus, but the approach here is nuanced and subtle. We hadn't heard this buildup since the first chorus, when it was two bars long. Second chorus, it's not there at all. Third and final chorus, it's back with the guitar solo over the top and now extended to four bars to give things a kick, the guitar playing a lovely little variation on the melodic descent to the first chord of the chorus (heard originally on the keyboard). That's a classic rock move, big time, executed by somebody who knows.

The Monkees - "You and I" (1968)

Love how this track just blazes forward with its appealingly strange harmony.

As a matter of fact, the forward momentum begins immediately with the lead vocal coming in after an intro that's only two bars long. The verse is twelve bars and seems to be working up to a cadence in F# minor towards the end. Measure nine has a i chord, followed by a V chord in measure ten, and then back to the i chord for measure eleven. Here, everyone starts playing quarter note triplets, though, including a lead guitar with a repeating figure of C#-B-A. These three notes emphasize the five (C#) and the three (A) of the F# minor chord, but the bass moves down to E on the second set of triplets in the middle of that bar, giving a suggestion of a VII chord (E major). This E then holds for all of measure twelve, with the repeating lead guitar figure of C#-B-A continuing in a sort of raw, expressive counterpoint.

Though twelve bars long, the verse feels irregular, perhaps partly because of the way the chords cut off and end without the expected cadence, but certainly in great part because of the melodic structure and rhyming pattern on top. Lines one and two of the verse each take two bars and seem to set up a pattern where the listener is going to get the rhyming word in line four at the end of measure eight. Instead, lines three and four have an internal rhyme of their own that has nothing to do with the lines that preceded them. Over the last four bars, we get three more lines sung over the triplets that all rhyme with one another:

We've got more growing to do
Me and you
And the rest of them, too

It's these three rhyming lines at the end that really account for the sense of irregularity over the course of the verse's fairly regular time frame of twelve bars.

The song has two verses, an eight-bar bridge, a guitar solo over the verse chord progression, and then ends really quickly with a repeat of the first verse. As we saw above, the verse ends with a descent in the bass from the tonic F# to the seventh scale degree (E) in measures eleven and twelve. This being the last verse, the song then ends on a downbeat after the final bar, but instead of returning to the tonic, the musicians continue the descent down to a D chord. The D is played as a major seventh - quite clever given that a D major seventh chord contains all three notes (F#, A, and C#) of the tonic triad that we were expecting to hear.

John Lennon - "I Know (I Know)" (1973)

This song goes to the chorus right away after the first verse. More unusual is the fact that the chorus then repeats! There's only been one verse, but we're hearing the chorus twice. It has different words the second time.

After that, there's another verse and then it seems to go to a bridge section ("Today I love you more than yesterday" etc.). A repeat of the chorus with a derivation on its first set of words follows, but then what? The bridge repeats here?

Looking back at this point, we can see how those three choruses with the different sets of words are actually functioning like verses in relation to the bridge, which frankly sounds kind of like a chorus itself and is indeed functioning like one now in the way that it's repeating.

This notion seems to be borne out by the fact that Lennon then proceeds to use a derivative of the first part of this bridge/chorus as a refrain line that repeats four times for the song's closing.

The Move - "Blackberry Way" (1969)

There's a chromatic chord movement in the second half of this song's verse that descends from the iii chord in G (B minor) to the ii chord (A minor) by way of the chord in between (A# minor). Of particular interest here is the melodic sequence of two descending thirds that's sung over the top. The melody starts on D, the third of the B minor chord, then moves down a third to the root, and then another third to the sixth (G). The chord then switches to A# minor and the melodic pattern is repeated: third (C#), root (A#), and sixth (F#). The melody then ends with the final note of the line back up at C natural, the third of A minor.

The only thing that might be considered unusual about this is the sixth, a nonchord tone appearing in what otherwise seems to be a triadic melody. Surely, one of the reasons it's used is that these notes are happening quickly and a bigger melodic jump from the root down to the chord tone, the fifth, would have been awkward. These sixths cannot be accounted for in terms of melodic analysis, though; they are not neighbor tones, escape tones, or passing tones. They are, seemingly, pure color, and their use here by composer Roy Wood is quite remarkable.

The Seeds - "The Wind Blows Your Hair" (1967)

This song starts out moving back and forth between G minor and C minor chords for one measure each. The organ riff repeated (with variations) over these two chords very much feels like it resolves on the note C played over the C minor chord, so you have a strange situation where C minor is felt to be the key center but you're hearing the tonic chord in rhythmically weak bars (i.e., you don't hear the tonic in the first and third bars, but the second and fourth instead).

When they get to the end of the first verse, however, they play D as a dominant chord and resolve it to G minor (with the vocal melody resolving on G as well). Given that it's the end of the verse, this is a rest moment and organist Daryl Hooper momentarily leaves off on repeating the organ riff, picking it up again half way through when the chord change starts again and they move to C minor one measure later. Starting the riff here, in the middle, is a bit of acknowledgment that C minor is the key center for the verse (which is starting again), but there's this beautiful awkwardness to the fact that it begins in the middle and in a rhythmically weak bar.

In my experience, the tonality I'm describing here in the verse is a very unique situation. The key center is not really, technically, ambiguous; it's C minor, but they play on the fact that it's G minor that you're hearing in the rhythmically strong bars by resolving it there at the end.

The other unique feature of the verse is that the vocal melody takes up the melodic emphasis on Eb as an emphasized upper neighbor tone heard over the G minor chord. Every line of the verse starts on the G minor chord (strong bar) and ends on the C minor chord (weak bar), and every line starts on that non-chordal tone of Eb. This is done so casually, and so comfortably, that it honestly sounds a little like sprechstimme and the extremely clever harmonic aspect of what's going on here is easily glossed over.

Note: This entry refers to the wedding-themed version of this song, not the one labeled as "Reprise."