Journey's "Too Late"
For a couple of decades, it was in vogue to trash the band Journey. With their at-times schmaltzy lyrics, histrionic videos and sappy ballads, the band were easy targets and critics were quick to dismiss them, but I’ve always felt that Journey were a cut above their arena rock peers; their musicianship alone took them beyond bands like Head East, Def Leppard, Loverboy, Foreigner and April Wine. And during the transitional period from their fusion prog-rock roots to radio-friendly AOR during 1978-1980, they achieved – in my mind – rock gold with the studio albums Infinity, Evolution and Departure. Subsequent years would bring the band greater success, but I love the period when Steve Perry shared vocal duties with keyboardist Gregg Rolie, culminating in 1981’s live Captured, which I received as a present for my thirteenth birthday that year.
It’s this live album that came to mind recently as I drove from Chicago to Cincinnati, where during the commute I spied the exit sign for “Dixie Highway,” which also happens to be the title of a song off of Captured. For the next hour of my drive, my mental jukebox went through the entire album track by track, and then replayed a song that I’ve always loved but is largely absent from radio these days, not to mention Journey’s setlists. Journey may have experienced a resurgence over the past decade in a half, perhaps even garnering some respect that had been denied the band early on, but along the way some of their old radio standards have gone by the wayside. One such song is “Too Late,” one of my favorites off of Evolution, and while I replayed the song in my mind several times during my trip, I noticed a nifty melodic trick that the band employs.
The song’s verse has a simple chord pattern – D A Bmin F#min G (I V vi iii IV) – and the chorus continues in D, employing the non-diatonic flat-7 chord, C major. It all works well, with Perry’s singable melody working nicely on top.
What elevates the song is twofold: first, the solo section has some fun with the chords, first transposing to the key of E and then leading us to the key of A, eventually building on a sustained E chord, begging to resolve back to an A.
But then the second interesting thing happens. Instead of the next verse starting on A and continuing the verse in that key, we hear the same chords as in the first verse: D A Bmin F#min and G. But they now sound like the song is in the key of A, so instead of hearing it as I V vi iii, we hear it as IV I ii vi. When the band hits the A chord, it sounds like the tonic, and by the time they get to G, we’re back in the key of D, and the song resolves to the chorus as heard twice before.
How? How the heck does this work? I’ve tried figuring it out and it isn’t a no-brainer. It all seems to stem from the altered melody. If Steve Perry had sung the same melody as in the first verse, our ears would quickly adjust and accept that the band is now back in the key of D. Instead, Perry does a wonderful melodic variation:
The original verse has the melodic motif: F# A B A F# D F# E. D pentatonic. Cool.
But AFTER the solo Perry sings A A B B B C# B A.
And THAT is all it takes to make the verse sound like it’s in a different key. Why does this work? After all, all of the notes are diatonic to both the key of D and the key of A. What the heck is happening here?
Truthfully, I don’t know. I’ve sung the second melody over some different chords in the key of D, and it isn’t required that our ears hear it in the key of A, but they do. Part of it is the fact that the solo ends on an E chord, which at that point sounds like the V chord. But dang, I find it all a bit baffling.
It just goes to show how melodic alterations can totally flip a chord progression around, and I have to give guitarist Neil Schon and vocalist Steve Perry credit for employing this technique, whether it was by design or by pure chance, and whether or not they could articulate why it works. It does work, and that’s what matters. I wish I could understand it enough to employ the technique to my own songwriting, but I’m not sure I’d know where to begin.
And this is one little example of why Journey was not your average arena rock band. And why seeing a sign that reads “Dixie Highway” can take you down a long ‘journey’ of musical discovery. Rock on.