Simplicity to a Fault: Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

Some of the greatest rock and roll songs ever have also been the simplest.  Whether you’re a fan of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, The Clash and The Ramones or Green Day and Nirvana, sometimes the simplest songs capture emotions with a charge unattainable by more complex arrangements.  Are you telling me that “Baba O’Riley” doesn’t still give you chills?  Come on.

In two weeks, I’m attending my first Bruce Springsteen show in thirteen years, this time with my fifteen year-old daughter.  In preparation, I thought it made sense to purchase The Boss’s latest effort, Wrecking Ball, but while digesting the material over the past few months, I keep coming to the same conclusion: the album is simplistic to a fault.  There isn’t a chord or a note on the entire album that surprises me, that gives me pause or a reason to take notice.  By track six, I’m so bored, I inevitably turn it off and wait to digest the final five songs at a later listening session.

To confirm my instincts, I tracked the chord changes of each song on the eleven-track album.  Here are the results:

• Every song is in a major key.
• Not one song changes key.
• Every song but one is in 4/4, with an occasional 2/4 measure thrown in.
• On the entire album, there are a total of five chords, with an occasional altered root note: I, IV, V, vi minor and ii minor.  That’s it.   And the ii minor chord only appears on one song, so 10 songs have at most four chords in them.

Now, I’m not dissing simplicity.  Give me a good Johnny Cash album or Green Day album or classic Stones album, and I’m a happy guy.  But Springsteen’s latest album is nothing short of a bore.  Just as Yes and Genesis became too complex for their own good in the 1970s, Springsteen has become so simple that there isn’t any reason for listeners to care.

One could counter my conclusion by saying that Springsteen has always been simple, so why start complaining now?

But it wasn’t always this way.

Take a song like “Hungry Heart.”  Simple?  Yes.  But what really makes the song work is the unexpected key change leading into the organ solo, and then changing keys again for the final verse.  Nothing fancy, but just enough alteration to make the listener take notice.  The song “Born to Run” is also a relatively simply song (though the chorus alone contains more chords than the entire Wrecking Ball album), but what really lifts the song from good to great is the interlude that contains an odd key change, a chromatic descension and a four measure pause before resolving back to the one chord in an achingly satisfying way.

So much of Springsteen’s new album could have benefitted from a bridge with a different chord, a key change, a pause, a tempo or meter change, a something.  Tracks like “Wrecking Ball,” “Shackled and Drawn,” “We Take Care of our Own” are fine for a while, but listen to them successively and sleepiness sets in.

I’ve no doubt that hearing “Death to my Hometown” or “Easy Money” will be great fun when shared with 40,000 fans come September 8^th, but I’m afraid that after the Wrigley Field concert, Wrecking Ball will no longer make it into my regular rotation. 

(I should note that “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which appears in studio form for the first time on this album, is on par with Springsteen’s greatest songs ever.  As I said, sometimes simple is good.)

Musical Cliches - guilty as charged

Two summers ago, I posted twoblogs on musical cliches and highlighted one in particular: the descending major scale in the bass line, used by virtually every rock band since the early 60s, me included.  It's an oldie but goodie, but there are plenty of other cliches out there, and when someone as unmuiscal as my wife notices one, it might be time for an artist to change his tune.

Last week, after a year of work, I finally completed my new album Warts and All, and while we were in the car listening to the beginning of track four, "There is no Reason"my wife turned to me and said, "Wow, you sure like that theme."

What she was referring to, and what I'd hoped noone had actually noticed, was a recurring theme I've used in multiple songs, whereby I play an octave in my right hand along with a minor or major third below the upper note, and then generally ascend up the scale for a bit and back down again.  For whatever reason, this phrase appeals to me, and I've used it in no fewer than four songs to date.  Give a listen...

Those were snippets from four songs: "Car Alarms" from 1996, "File It Away" from 2000, "What You've Done" from 2003 and "There Is No Reason" from 2012.  An oldie but goodie, indeed.  I also have an unfinished tune that I'm intending my daughter to sing that employs the same tecnnique.  But how that my wife has discovered my secret: that I have very few tricks up my sleeve and that I need to "lean on old familiar ways" (if you guess where that lyric comes from, you win a free copy of my new album), then maybe it's time to put that particular theme away for a while.

But the biggest cliche ever?  Check out the Axis of Awesome performing forty songs with the exact same chord progression:

That chord progression has GOT to be on my next album.

The Hush Sound Blows the Top off the Bottom Lounge

The Hush Sound may have disbanded in 2008 to pursue other musical opportunities, but on Saturday night at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago, they played the second of two reunion shows to a sell-out crowd that may have left wondering if a full-blown reunion might be in the cards. 

With Bob Morris and Greta Salpeter taking turns at lead vocals, the band ripped through a 70 minute set to an enthusiastic crowd, most of whom knew many if not all of the words of the seventeen songs.  Leaning a little heavier toward their last of three albums, 2008’s Goodbye Blues, the five-piece band played well despite the hiatus.  Opening with “I Could Love You Much Better,” the band settled in after tackling a few technical issues.  Singer and guitarist Bob Morris took the role of band representative between songs in an easygoing and lighthearted tone, joking before one song, “I want to encourage understanding relationships, because none of my songs represent that.” 

Morris’s singing contributions had dropped considerably on the band’s last album, and as such he sang mostly earlier material, including several from 2005’s So Sudden.  Many of these garnered the greatest audience response.  “City Traffic Puzzle,” “Crawling Toward the Sun,” and “Echo,” electrified the listeners, as did “Sweet Tangerine and “Intertwined” from Hush Sound’s second album, Like Vines.

On the other hand, Greta, who’s red skirt matched her keyboard, stuck to songs primarily from the band’s last album, and one gets the sense that as her voice matured from So Sudden (when she was only seventeen), she became more comfortable with her singing and songwriting.  Her voice cut through the band's instrumentation brightly and strongly on standout tunes such as “Molasses,” “Medicine Man” and “Honey.” 

As a keyboardist, Greta remained stationary throughout most of the set, coming out of her allotted space only when playing acoustic guitar.  Bob played a more visible role, coaxing the fans to clap along repeatedly.  Drummer Darren Wilson and bassist Chris Faller laid down the rhythms steadily and proficiently without stealing attention away from the two lead singers.  Mike LeBlanc backed up on guitar, keyboards and bass.

“Did you know Bob and I went to prom together?” Greta asked the audience at one point.

I did, and it is my great misfortune of not having taken advantage of the opportunity to see the band play in its embryonic state at my neighbor’s garage early last decade.  Little did I know then that the rumblings from next door would lead to three masterfully done albums, and – last night – a masterful live performance.

Here’s hoping it’s a sign of things to come.

Deceptive Downbeats, part one (a musical observation)

When listening to music, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as a surprise: a harmony that doesn’t resolve as expected, a lyric that takes a comedic twist or a melody that jumps an odd interval away.

What excites me the most (and what lays to rest any question of my geekdom) is a rhythm that doesn’t change time signatures, but that still manages to fake the listener out, intentionally or not, by calling the downbeat into question.  In this scenario, what you initially hear as the “one” beat you come to find is someplace else entirely, and your ears are left to add or subtract a beat or a half a beat in order to get back in synch with a song, like dancing to a CD that skips and having to make an adjustment before you step on your partner’s toes.

My favorite example occurs in the Yes song, “Yours is no Disgrace."  For over three decades I’ve never failed to hear the first chord as landing on the “and” of four in a 4/4 measure.  Give a listen:

I hear the song as: 

But once the band kicks in, it sounds like Yes has subtracted a beat, inserting a measure of 3/4 instead of 4/4 (and with Yes, this is an entirely plausible proposition).  In truth, the time signature remains constant for this part of the song, but my ears hear the downbeat incorrectly.  The first note lands on the “and” of one, not four:

Even with this knowledge, I still hear the rhythm the way I always have, and after thirty years, I guess I kind of like it that way.

Another example is Sting’s “Ghost Story.” This song starts similarly, with an instrumental passage absent an obvious count-in.  But even when Sting’s voice enters, the downbeat is in question:

I’ve always heard first note coming on beat two of a 4/4 measure: 

But as soon as Sting sings “Another winter comes, his icy fingers creep,” a half a beat is added, and it become clear that all along the initial note of each phrase had in fact landed on the “and” of one:

Sting uses this deceptive tactic often, though I suspect in his mind there’s nothing deceptive about it since he hears the downbeat where it should be, and there are probably many listeners who hear it correctly right off the bat.  But to me, my faulty instincts add to the pleasure of the song, providing just enough jolt to keep things interesting.

I’ll have another three or four songs with this idea in mind when I write part two of this essay.  Stay tuned.

Sting at the Rosemont in Chicago

In the liner notes of Joe Jackson’s first live album from 1988, Jackson writes that artists should play the music they want to play when performing live shows because an audience will always see through a canned performance.  Sting appeared to have taken this advice to heart for many of the earlier shows on his “Back to Bass” theater tour, as he ignored a great number of hits in favor of deeper cuts from more recent releases.  You couldn’t blame some fans if they walked away from these performances a little disappointed. 

At the Rosemont Theater near Chicago on Saturday night, Sting’s stance appeared to mellow just a bit, as a few additional audience-pleasing songs were inserted into the set-list.  Still, it’s interesting to note first the songs Sting didn’t play: If I Ever Lose My Faith In You, Brand New Day, Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot, You Still Touch Me, Why Should I Cry for You, Soul Cages, Fragile (or anything else from his second solo album, Nothing Like The Sun), and Set Them Free.  If he’d denied the audience “Desert Rose,” “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Every Breath You Take,” there might have been a riot.  As it was, Sting did a nice job of interweaving various highlights from his repertoire, including stellar deep cuts, into the set-list, though the show still hit a bit of a lull about two-thirds in when he focused on tracks from his last studio album of originals, Sacred Love.

Supported by a first rate 5-person band, including a fiddle to take up many of the solos heretofore handled by woodwinds, Sting looked – let’s be honest here – fabulous as a sixty year-old man, sporting nothing more than jeans and a t-shirt.  Yes, I’m happy he no longer takes off his shirt as he used to do while singing “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” but I’ve no doubt he looks better shirtless than I do at 17 years his junior.  Ho hum.  He plays better bass than I do, too.  Absent on this tour were keyboards, and with rare exception, they weren’t missed in the least (and this is coming from a keyboard player).  Like Joe Jackson, Sting manages to rearrange his songs to fit the instrumentation at hand and still have a full and exciting sound.

My three favorite Sting songs were all played, with “I Hung My Head” and “Seven Days” two of the show’s best of the evening.  My other favorite, “Ghost Story,” which was preceded with an explanation of how String wrote the lyrics for his father, didn’t fare as well.  The song was rushed and its climax was in need of additional instrumentation.  Better represented were “The Hounds of Winter,” “Stolen Car” and “Dessert Rose,” the latter coming off surprisingly well considering the absence of keyboards, and one that coaxed the audience to its feet all the way up to the balcony.

Fiddle player Peter Tickell handled much of the solo opportunities with terrific results, the most memorable being an impassioned run during an extended outro of “Love Is Stronger Than Justice” (among the worst Sting songs ever recorded, though the fiddle helped to make it at least palatable). 

Sting’s voice was mixed expertly, with nearly every syllable clearly understandable.  Though the low-end of the band suffered a bit in the mix and the acoustic guitar came out sounding tinny, I appreciated being able to actually hear the stories in the lyrics unfolding during some of the more compelling songs.

Six Police selections were included, including “Driven To Tears,” “Next To You,” and the deeper track, “Demolition Man,” which came out even better than the original, as did “Sacred Love,” another subpar track from Sting’s last album, but which played better live than in the studio.

My three children attended the concert, and despite not knowing a good percentage of the material, they were able to enjoy the musicianship and the obvious talents displayed on stage.  Seeing Sting perform an acoustic “Message in a Bottle” to finish the show is a memory I believe they’ll hold onto decades from now.  It reminds me of how we had to leave the Paul McCartney show six years ago while he played “Yesterday” because one of my daughters was falling asleep.  Perhaps fourteen is a better age to witness a legend.  Oh well.

Next week we see Paul Simon at the same venue, and 70 years from now my daughters will be able to tell their grandchildren that they witnessed the greatest American songwriter (Simon) and the greatest English songwriter (McCartney) as youths.   Throwing Sting in the mix is icing on the cake.