2025 Mix 6: Paper planes, Sleigh Bells, horse girls, hyperbops, Belgians robbed, Misoverse, Lynchoverse, and the second ever "first ever" Other Dave Heidi Montag legacy poll
I know less than the rudiments of music theory, and more crucially don't know how to tell an interesting story out of what I do know, but here goes:
One feature of the drop of a sixth in "Good Luck, Babe" is that, with the chord being an A, the notes to "boys in bars" are Mi Fa La, the drop from Fa to La being the sixth. Now, the Fa and La are hardly dissonant, but they're the so-called "upper" notes of a chord (11th and 13th, right?). Their "role" in the composition is kind of to say, "these notes being so far from the root, the melody can't *stay* here," and what the song does is to then switch to the D chord, D being (is this right?) the basic key of the song (and "in bars" would've been nice, complacent Do and Mi had we been in that D chord). I assume, without having done any study of songwriting, that this is pretty standard: a melody takes a song out on a limb tonally, setting up a pleasing suspense that the song then resolves by moving back towards the main trunk. (An alternative would be to keep playing around on the limbs, which I guess a lot of jazz musicians do.)
This doesn’t say anything about the rarity or lack of rarity of a sixth drop.
I think you need to think do-re-mi in the key it's resolving to -- Chappell is singing a pattern of ti-do-mi on "boys in bars." This is the same thing Billie Eilish sings in "What Was I Made For" but it's "ti-do-mi-SOL," do-mi-sol being the full triad.
For what it's worth most of the other examples I could think of use mi-sol as the interval ("No Surprises," "Weaver of Dreams," "Man in the Mirror").
You don't need to spell out the full triad -- just happens to sound nice when Billie does it -- but do-mi on its own feels kind of stranded, like you've thrown this lower note down there for no reason, unless you're yodeling, which also might be a source of inspiration for Chappell. But it doesn't sound like a yodel -- that's why it reminded me of the schoolyard taunt feel of "Paper Planes," and I think both have a taunting quality to them.
EDIT: got my solfege wrong in the first pass, think I fixed it
I think you're right, though -- regardless of why it is, you do get the sense in the lower note that you can't stay there, but you also don't really go anywhere, or rather, you go back to what you just heard, so you wonder what that detour was all about.
Was bugging me which other song uses a seventh drop (as I describe Radiohead doing on "No Surprises") but thankfully I figured out it was Taylor Swift on "You Belong with Me" -- "see-ee-EE," the final "ee" is the seventh interval (do-re, where re is an octave lower), resolving down to the root on "me."
One reason I think Taylor would do well with "Good Luck Babe" is that she's improved her voice enough to handle the higher parts, but that drop to the sixth would be right in her comfort zone, so I think the overall effect of the whole song would shift. It would become more Taylor-y, in that it would sound more "reasonable," something like that -- until you think about what the words are saying and realize how much hurt there is in it. That is, it would become a counter-intuitively SOFT-sounding song in Taylor's voice.
Salt water thru nose is scientifically proven to be a good idea if you get exposed to Covid and such, so Heidi is safe.
Here's a cover of Paper Planes from a band that once wrote a song about me, or rather about one of my songs I played when I supported them (Their song is "George Says" and mine is The Puddle's "I've Lost My Way In This World")
I just noticed at 3.15 Alister sings the opening line from 'Since K Got Over Me', the first song on Strange Geometry, an album that obsessed me for years and which I can still replay much of in my head.
I know less than the rudiments of music theory, and more crucially don't know how to tell an interesting story out of what I do know, but here goes:
One feature of the drop of a sixth in "Good Luck, Babe" is that, with the chord being an A, the notes to "boys in bars" are Mi Fa La, the drop from Fa to La being the sixth. Now, the Fa and La are hardly dissonant, but they're the so-called "upper" notes of a chord (11th and 13th, right?). Their "role" in the composition is kind of to say, "these notes being so far from the root, the melody can't *stay* here," and what the song does is to then switch to the D chord, D being (is this right?) the basic key of the song (and "in bars" would've been nice, complacent Do and Mi had we been in that D chord). I assume, without having done any study of songwriting, that this is pretty standard: a melody takes a song out on a limb tonally, setting up a pleasing suspense that the song then resolves by moving back towards the main trunk. (An alternative would be to keep playing around on the limbs, which I guess a lot of jazz musicians do.)
This doesn’t say anything about the rarity or lack of rarity of a sixth drop.
I think you need to think do-re-mi in the key it's resolving to -- Chappell is singing a pattern of ti-do-mi on "boys in bars." This is the same thing Billie Eilish sings in "What Was I Made For" but it's "ti-do-mi-SOL," do-mi-sol being the full triad.
For what it's worth most of the other examples I could think of use mi-sol as the interval ("No Surprises," "Weaver of Dreams," "Man in the Mirror").
You don't need to spell out the full triad -- just happens to sound nice when Billie does it -- but do-mi on its own feels kind of stranded, like you've thrown this lower note down there for no reason, unless you're yodeling, which also might be a source of inspiration for Chappell. But it doesn't sound like a yodel -- that's why it reminded me of the schoolyard taunt feel of "Paper Planes," and I think both have a taunting quality to them.
EDIT: got my solfege wrong in the first pass, think I fixed it
I think you're right, though -- regardless of why it is, you do get the sense in the lower note that you can't stay there, but you also don't really go anywhere, or rather, you go back to what you just heard, so you wonder what that detour was all about.
Was bugging me which other song uses a seventh drop (as I describe Radiohead doing on "No Surprises") but thankfully I figured out it was Taylor Swift on "You Belong with Me" -- "see-ee-EE," the final "ee" is the seventh interval (do-re, where re is an octave lower), resolving down to the root on "me."
One reason I think Taylor would do well with "Good Luck Babe" is that she's improved her voice enough to handle the higher parts, but that drop to the sixth would be right in her comfort zone, so I think the overall effect of the whole song would shift. It would become more Taylor-y, in that it would sound more "reasonable," something like that -- until you think about what the words are saying and realize how much hurt there is in it. That is, it would become a counter-intuitively SOFT-sounding song in Taylor's voice.
Salt water thru nose is scientifically proven to be a good idea if you get exposed to Covid and such, so Heidi is safe.
Here's a cover of Paper Planes from a band that once wrote a song about me, or rather about one of my songs I played when I supported them (Their song is "George Says" and mine is The Puddle's "I've Lost My Way In This World")
https://youtu.be/64Nrjr1yxTY?si=ceLuXzH57DihMM2t
!!!
Also he doesn't sing the sixth interval!
I just noticed at 3.15 Alister sings the opening line from 'Since K Got Over Me', the first song on Strange Geometry, an album that obsessed me for years and which I can still replay much of in my head.