A Change of Heart Halfway Through the Drive
Background: I’m sure my dedicated readers have figured this out by now, but I’m a sucker for a good story song. I even dedicated a whole blog to story songs, and also talked about example songs and hybrid songs (a mix of the two). But there’s a fourth type of song we are going to focus on in this blog: non-sequiturs. The lyrics don’t necessarily make sense sequentially, but it works somehow. In this blog, we will be chatting about four songs that use non-sequiturs and look at how they work!
Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground
Lyrically: “Sex and Candy” was written by Marcy Playground’s lead singer, John Wozniak, when his roommate came back to their apartment, and told him it smelled like sex and candy. Like any good songwriter, he wrote the line down and turned it into the song. He has stated in interviews that his goal was to write a song that was just full of non-sequiturs, where one line had nothing to do with the next. Even with that in mind, there are still some very memorable lines in there. For example, in the first verse, he says, “And there she was, like double cherry pie, and there she was, like Disco Superfly” and in the second verse, “And there she was, wearin’ that platform leather suede, and there she was, like Disco Lemonade.” The words flow well enough, so it doesn’t necessarily need to make sense (disco lemonade was my first mixed drink, and comparing someone to that was intriguing to someone who loves lemonade and analyzing lyrics). And of course, who could forget about the opening line to each verse, “Hangin’ ‘round, downtown by myself”? Like I said, it’s an intriguing, memorable set of lyrics, even if no one ever compares them to those of Bob Dylan.
Melodically: The song uses Bm, G, and F# for the intro and the verses. The song is written in B minor, so this is a i, bVII, V pattern. The chorus then uses Bm, G, A or i, bVI, and bVII (played three times), before endings on D, A, Bm, G (played twice), then ends on F#. This is a III, bVII, i, bVI, V pattern. Part of the aforementioned intrigue of the song’s lyrics is aided by the melody. There’s a tension that comes during the chorus with it starting off on the III chord, but there’s also tension in the intro and verses with the use of the i chord.
Structurally: The song uses a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, ending format. The ending is him repeating “Yeah, mama, this must be my dream.” In my story songs, example songs, and hybrid songs blog, the three example songs I focused on were “Welcome to the Future,” “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The first song on that list has three verses, while the last one has four. And although “Movin’ Out” contains more cohesive examples than “Sex and Candy,” they’re worth comparing in the sense that two examples, portrayed in the verses, are sufficient to get the narrator’s point across. It didn’t need to be as prolific as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (which had the added pressure of being the last song on the album and having to tie the frustrations of those living in the U.S. in the 60s in a bow), and it didn’t need to be as thought-provoking as “Welcome to the Future.” It’s just what it needs to be!
Closing Note: I can’t believe I almost forgot about this, but John Wozniak grew up in Minnesota. His elementary school was called Marcy, and his band (founded in New York), named themselves after the playground at the school.
You can listen to “Sex and Candy” below. There’s also an excellent Maroon 5 cover that I’m embedding as well., both in a Spotify playlist.
2. “Catch My Disease” by Ben Lee
Lyrically: There’s a strange self-confidence immediately apparent in the lyrics of “Catch My Disease” from the very first verse. If you knew it was a love song, you’d immediately say “Good luck” to a narrator who opens with, “My head is a box filled with nothing” but he then concludes, “And that’s the way I like it.” It’s not only himself that he’s confident with, but also the life that he leads and the people he’s met. For example, he says, “My garden’s a secret compartment,” and says, “They don’t play me on the radio,” again concluding with “And that’s the way I like it,” as well as talking about a girl who “Told me about the winds from Santa Ana.” One cool thing about the lyrics to this song is that he recorded different versions for different markets. The album version says, “I was backstage at Pomona” but the radio version I grew up listening to saw him “Backstage at First Avenue.” This wasn’t pandering to the Minnesota crowd like the last line I mentioned, but I can confirm that the winter is long in the city, and that’s not the way I like it. The chorus then begs the person he’s talking to, “Open your heart, catch my disease,” basically asking them to take him as he is, because that’s what he does with himself. This blog is all about non-sequiturs within songs, and although I just tied together the theme very nicely, there’s no real consequential sequence to the things he says in each verse. Yet it works very well nonetheless!
Melodically: The intro, played twice, uses A, Bm, D, and E. This pattern gets repeated throughout the entire song. With the song written in A major, this is a I, ii, IV, V pattern. The breakdown does change things up slightly, staying on the D major for one bar longer, but still uses the same chords, and the outro only uses the A major. Instrumentally, the song uses guitar, bass, drums, and a toy piano. To me, the last two instruments are the most prominent. The drums use a doo-wop rhythm that’s so distinct, my initial idea to feature this song in a blog was to focus on the drum part. And the toy piano gets at the playful nature of the song and his request to this love interest he’s speaking to.
Structurally: The song uses a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, breakdown, verse, chorus, chorus, outro format (with the outro repeating the na na na na na na na lines from the breakdown). Unlike the last song we looked at, the three verses in this song are important. Not because the lyrics are any more cohesive, but because he’s trying to convince someone to pick up what he’s putting down, and he wants as many reasons as possible for her to be convinced.
“Catch My Disease” is embedded below, and that’s the way I like it.
3. “Summer Girls” by LFO (Lyte Funkie Ones)
Background: Everyone reading this blog should consider themselves lucky that although I had a master plan to get the Backstreet Boys to play at my 8th grade graduation and then run off with them, that somehow didn’t work out. And while I also enjoyed NSYNC, there were a few Boy Bands that were more of a flash in the pan, but who I still appreciated, such as O-Town and LFO (Lyte Funky Ones).
Lyrically: In a previous blog, we chatted about the song “People Are Crazy” by Billy Currington, where the narrator in the song, after talking to an old man at the bar, concludes that “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.” And although “Summer Girls” takes on a similar tone in its chorus, by saying, “New kids on the block had a bunch of hits, Chinese food makes me sick, and I think it’s fly when the girls stop by for the summer,” the non-sequiturs come in because everything leading up to that final universal truth is unrelated to the last. You’re tricked into a false sense of narrative in the verses, when the narrator talks about meeting a girl over the summer and what she was wearing “The great Larry Bird, Jersey 33,” but then he starts in with the non-sequiturs again: “When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets.” What makes it work as a song, though, is that although all these random things he’s saying are non-sequiturs, it’s somewhat clear, like from the line, “When I met you, I said my name’s Rich, you look like a girl from Abercrombie and Fitch,” there are some memories attached to what he’s saying, and not just random lines.
Melodically: The song’s chorus uses G, C, Am, D, D7, G, C, Am, D, and D7. With the song written in G major, this is a I, IV, ii, V, V7, I, IV, ii, V, and V7 pattern. The verses use G, C, Am, and D, a I, IV, ii, V pattern, played three times, followed by Bm, Em, Am, and D, a iii, vi, ii, V pattern. There is also an bridge that uses G, C, A, D, a I, IV, II, V pattern, which gets played twice. Of note (literally), each section starts on the I and ends on the V, forming a half cadence. As I mentioned, this song is all about scattered memories, in general and about this long lost relationship. If the two of them had reunited, maybe the last part to the song would have ended on a I with a perfect V to I cadence. But since this is all about the narrator’s memories, it’s more important that we be left in suspense as the listener, to feel for the narrator. More on this in the structure section. Instrumentally, the song uses acoustic and electric guitar, turntables, and a drum machine.
Structurally: The song uses a chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus format. There are many reasons for this structure. The melody is very repetitive, so of course the structure would be too. I have studied boy band songs recently, and one emphasis is on letting all the members have some sort of vocal part, especially with songs that would start off live sets. For the Backstreet Boys, this was a song like “Larger Than Life” or “I Want it That Way,” and for One Direction, this was “What Makes You Beautiful.” I bring this up in the structure section because although it’s very common to start a song with a chorus in pop music today, you didn’t typically see it happening in the boy band era (and of note, Max Martin wrote both “Larger Than Life” and “Payphone,” the latter of which starts off with the chorus). The other thing that’s interesting about this song’s structure is the bridge. It’s kind of a conclusion, resigning to the fact that summer girls are only meant to be flings and not forever. I mentioned earlier how each section ends on the V chord, with some semblance of suspense each time – but when you’re concluding what he does in the bridge, it’s a cool contrast. Had he finally found the one in the bridge, maybe it could have ended on the one and gone back into the chorus to say, “Well, now I don’t need those summer girls,” but with the theme and the vibe of the song, it’s a perfect structure.
You can listen to “Summer Girls” below.
4. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan
Background: While writing for this blog, I had initially envisioned Fountains of Wayne’s “Radiation Vibe” as a non-sequitur song, but the lyrics ended up being cohesive enough to get pushed to my next blog (so stay tuned for that). I’m ashamed to admit that it took a Google search to remember “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was filled with non-sequiturs, which provides you with a nice break of me praising Mr. Storyteller.
Lyrically: Part of the reason this falls into the non-sequitur category is because it takes a bunch of characters and gives little snippets of what they’re going through without actually saying they have the subterranean homesick blues. You’ve got Johnny in the basement mixing up the medicine and a man in a trench coat (who’s unnamed) and a man in the coon skin cap who “Wants 11 dollar bills but you’ve only got ten.” There’s also Maggie in the second verse (who may or may not be the one with the farm), trying to avoid orders from the DA and ends concluding that “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” These seemingly unconnected vignettes are connected by the warning to “Look out kid, you better keep yourself hid,” and slight variations. My favorite part about these lyrics were that they were so fast-paced, that a promotional video was filmed for it, where Dylan was holding up cue cards containing keywords from the verses. “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first music video on MTV, but I consider this to be one of the first music videos.
Melodically: The song is a blues riff that uses the chords A7 and D (played three times) in the intro. This pattern gets repeated throughout the verses, and the only other chord that gets played is E. The song is written in A major, so this is a I, IV pattern, with the E being the V chord. The IV provides the tension at the end of the verses, the way the V chord does in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which is also written in A major, but to me, the tension isn’t as noticeable. Instrumentally, the song uses guitar (both acoustic, electric, and bass), as well as drums and harmonica.
Structurally: The song uses all verses, of which there are four. Even in one of Dylan’s most complicated bits of character study, “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” there are only four main characters, so even though it’s spread out over more verses than are in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it doesn’t overdo it. Since there are already four characters in the latter song, and it takes the form of vignettes, Dylan made the decision to condense it to four (though he famously said after his producer asked him if there was a short version of his song “Highlands,” which clocks in at 16:31 (mm:ss), he responded, “That was the short version.” So he has it in him, he just knew the moment. This song, by contrast, is one of his shortest, at 2:15 mm:ss.
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is embedded below.
