There’s so much about this genuinely funny production that I absolutely love! The melodic contrast between ferociously virtuosic patter (in the verses, middle section and outro), soulful diva melismas (in the prechoruses) and pure heads-down catchiness (in the chorus). The smoking-hot arrangement, assembling an army of horns over spectacular funk-bass riffage, and then bejewelling it with so many great vocal fills, such as “need you to tell me” at 1:45, “want it, want it, want it, want it, want it” at 2:17, “your husband is coming” at 2:53, and (my personal favourites) the unexpected mid-flow “doubt it” and “ooh!” at 2:17 and 3:02 respectively. The truly dazzling vocal arrangement, which not only showcases Raye’s effortlessly prodigious range of vocal techniques and timbres, but also maintains a textural restlessness that magnetically draws the ear – we’re constantly switching between solo, double-tracked, and harmonised lines from moment to moment, as well as layering numerous lines against each other and bouncing them back and forth in various call-and-response configurations. It’s enough to make your head spin!

But what elevates this song even beyond the heights already scaled by such lyrical, performance, and arrangement heroics (and that iconic Glastonbury set-opening) is a harmonic structure which underpins the song with that rarest of things in pop music: a solid foundation of musical momentum. And the MVP in this respect has got to be the fabulous prechorus progression first heard at 0:38, leading all the way from the tonic chord at the start of the section to the tonic chord at the beginning of the chorus, via an irresistably propulsive octave-spanning upwards line in the bass.

There are a couple of things that I think are particularly clever about the way this is done. Firstly, as we all know, there are seven notes in a basic scale. So if you want to fill an eight-bar section with a constantly rising chord-per-bar bass line stretching from tonic to tonic, then you’re either going to have to repeat a bass note, or you’re going to have to introduce some kind of chromatic addition along the way. Raye chooses the former path, and it’s interesting to see how she avoids her bass-note repetition stalling the sense of harmonic motion, which is always a risk. For the first four bars, the bass rises every bar, via a Bm-Adim/C_b-D_b-E_b progression. Crucially, however, that fourth chord starts off as an E_bsus, only resolving its suspended fourth ( A_b) to the third ( G) halfway through the bar, and this sets up a chromatically falling line in the harmonic voicing that continues onwards to G_b as the bass repeats its note in bar five, resulting in the chord mode-switching to E_bm. It’s this mode-switch that really helps maintain a sense of musical momentum across the mid-section boundary, in my view, and after that it’s plain sailing, because the bass is then free to continue rising stepwise right up to the tonic at the start of the chorus.

That’s not the end of the fun, though, because there’s still a lovely surprise in store: for the final bar of the prechorus, the bass note doesn’t land on the A_b you’d have every right to expect, but instead chooses an A, giving us not only a more exotic augmented-second melodic leap, but also a spicy clash with the lead vocal line’s A_b, as well as the powerful harmonic impetus of a traditional dominant-tonic cadence. What’s more, when we get to the second half of the mid-section at 2:19, there’s a lovely falling bass line too, proceeding chromatically from B_b to G before dovetailing neatly with the second half of the prechorus pattern at 2:27.

It’s a production for the ages, and I’m delighted to see that it’s also given Raye her best US chart position so far. If you ask me, there’s such incandescent star quality on display here that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the next song of hers I critique has nailed down the Billboard top spot. Watch this space…

There’s a long tradition of songwriters extending four-bar phrases to five bars – the prechoruses of Psy’s 'Gangnam Style', Britney Spears’ 'Toxic', and Madonna’s 'Like A Virgin', for instance, or the middle sections of Dua Lipa’s 'Love Again', Luis Fonsi’s 'Despacito', and Harry Styles’ 'As It Was'. What is much more unusual, though, is using five-bar phrases as a structural device, in other words as a recurring feature that characterises specific song sections. The only famous examples I can think of are The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and Corona’s ‘Rhythm Of The Night’, which contrast five-bar verses and choruses (respectively) against more four-square sections elsewhere in the song.

But there’s a particular sweetspot that this song hits with its structure, by creating a certain logic to the five-bar phrases by virtue of the alternating pattern of 5+5-bar verse, 4+5-bar prechorus, 5+5-bar chorus, and 4+5-bar chorus coda. It manages to somehow be regular enough to ingrain itself in your memory after a few listens, but nonetheless irregular enough to gently wrong-foot you repeatedly before that – especially when combined with a couple of more traditional ‘one-shot’ section extensions (at 1:24 after the first chorus and at 2:57 after the 5+4-bar middle-section) and a sly arrangement drop midway through the second verse at 1:36.

The question of what key/mode this song occupies is also thought-provoking. The whole harmonic pattern uses the notes of the F major scale, but there’s no strong sense of cadence into that key (or indeed its relative D minor) in either of the song’s two chord progressions ( Gm-Dm-F-C and B_b-F-Dm-C), which gives the song a much more modal flavour for me – the strong ‘unresolved’ E in the chorus, for instance, argues against it being F major’s leading note. But if it’s modal, then what are we calling the mode’s home chord? The Gm at the start of most of the sections (putting us in G Dorian)? The B_b at the start of the choruses (giving B_b Lydian)? Or the C onto which all the sections settle in their final bar (giving C Mixolydian)?

In the light of this general ambiguity, I therefore find myself asking what (if anything) is giving the harmony its sense of purpose or momentum, and in this case I think the root progressions provide some coherence and direction here by focusing heavily on falling-fourth patterns, not only within each pattern ( G-D and F-C in the main pattern and B_b-F in the choruses) but also whenever either pattern loops back into the main pattern (giving a longer C-G-D chain). The relationship between the melody line and the chords is another important factor too, I reckon, by varying the former’s degree of dissonance. Notice, for example, how the verse melody keeps stressing its G and B_b notes beyond the first chord over which they’re consonant ( Gm) and over into the second and third chords ( Dm and F), where they’re not – and then switches to stressing A instead of G over the fourth chord ( C). The prechorus also pits a melody E against its second-bar Dm chord, G and D against its third-bar F chord, B_b and E against its seventh-bar F chord, and F against the final C chord. But then when we get to the chorus and chorus coda, the melody stresses almost exclusively consonant notes instead, creating a characteristic contrast in overall sonority.

And while we’re on the subject of the vocal melody, there are also some nice examples of subtle question/answer phase-endings here. For example, where the first half of the verse ends with a rising A-B melodic contour ‘question’ (on “all alone” at 0:16 and “fantasy” at 1:32), the second half ends with the falling A-G ‘answer’ (“watch it blow” at 0:26 and “sanity” at 1:42). And there’s also the end of the first half of the chorus, where “see it all” ends on an E, leading on to the next phrase’s rising G-A pickup, while the second half sustains the final syllable of “Ophelia” into a falling E-D-C melisma.

[Incidentally, if you’re a fan of Swift’s music, do check out the What’s In A Song podcast, where the hosts are currently analysing all the songs on her latest album Life Of A Show Girl one track at a time, with loads of great audio demonstrations. Here’s the episode dedicated to ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’, for instance.]

There’s something distinctly reheated-sounding about this song. The endless eight-bar Mixolydian chord pattern, as in his previous big hit ‘Seventeen Going Under’. The constantly chiming upper pedal notes, as in his previous big hit ‘Seventeen Going Under’. The plodding kick-snare-kick-snare drum pattern, as in his previous big hit ‘Seventeen Going Under’. If it ain’t broke, I suppose…

It doesn’t help, though, that all this (and the sax solo too) reminds me so heavily of Bruce Springsteen’s 'Dancing In The Dark', a song that matches Fender’s socially conscious working-class lyrics and impassioned vocal delivery, but raises it with an actual song structure featuring several well-judged changes of chord-pattern. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Sam’s yet to make much of an impact in the States, where The Boss casts a much longer shadow than over here in Blighty.

The lead vocal is the standout part in this production for me. Not only is the performance effortlessly loose-limbed and authentic-sounding, helped by well-judged bouts of tuning waywardness (eg. during the drop-down at 3:01), but it also boasts a briliantly fluid and inventive lyric structure which makes a real feature out of creatively extending short phrases into longer ones.

Let’s start with the first phrase: “I grew up pretending sticks were little guns”. Now, a simple rhyme scheme might give a second line something like “I was happy eating sweets and sticky buns”, or an alternating rhyme pattern might continue it into a four-line stanza with “I’d be practising my aim on empty cans / I was happy eating sweets and sticky buns / I’d get sugar on my face and on my hands”. (Pure doggerel, I realise – I’m just demonstrating rhymes!) But what Kahan does here is much more sophisticated. He follows up that first phrase with “I would point them at my Dad and he’d get mad, cause God forbid I hurt someone” extending the melody of the first line by inserting a shorter rhyming couplet (“them at my Dad and he’d get mad”) midway through, thereby pushing the “[some]-one” that rhymes with “guns” a full two bars later than you’d expect. So not only has he introduced an unusual rhyme scheme, but he’s also created an unusual melodic phrase-extension into the bargain – in addition to rhyming the stressed syllable of “guns” with the naturally unstressed syllable of “[some]-one”, which is itself an ear-catching inversion of expectation. There’s a lot going on!

And this internal rhyming-couplet trick is reused elsewhere too. You can hear it twice in the third verse, for instance (“at the rattle of your keys, oh are you leaving” at 2:02 and “I’m left staring at the ceiling, counting reasons” at 2:12), and there’s even a kind of doubling down on the idea during the breakdown at 3:06, where two different couplets (“on-[ly]”/“known” and “now”/“how”) are shoe-horned in together to create the line “I’ll be only what you’ve known of me ’til now, oh how I hope you’re moving on”. You can hear another variation on this theme in the chorus lyric too, where the “red”/“bet” and “see”/“me” couplets help join together the longer melodic phrases “You’re putting money on red, I’m a sure bet at a losing streak” and “Cause it gets harder to see me the closer you try to look”. And I love how the the third verse (at 1:50) not only inserts the rhyming couplet “close-[ness]”/"[ex]-posed", but also an extended patch of sibilant alliteration “Have you ever stared directly at the sun? Have you ever shared some closeness, so exposed, to have it spit back by someone”.

One final cool variartion on this idea can be heard early in the song, where a few repeated syllables, rather than a rhyme, are used to create the structural scaffolding that supports the extension of the melodic line. In the first verse, for example, we get “I’d hurt anyone I could / Anyone who got too close, and anyone who wouldn’t look” (0:38), while in the second verse we get “Foot of ice across Vermont, and in that dark, and in that frost a heart was formed” (0:55).

There’s a characteristic indie jankiness about the mix tonality here, with a significant upper-midrange spectral emphasis that gets increasingly grating the more the track’s texture builds. But I don’t think there’s any single root cause – it’s more like an unhappy confluence of several different contributing factors. The first of these is the sustained upper-register rhythm-guitar part first heard at 0:13, which has such a strong 3kHz presence peak in its response that any lead-vocal part would struggle to compete with it in terms of upfrontness (if that’s a word!), even were it not for the tidal wash of Bon Iver-esque feature reverb. I suspect that the fact that the vocal has then been actively distorted in this mix is partly a response to this guitar, the aim being to increase the vocal’s upper harmonic density, and thereby counteract the presence-region masking effects of the guitar’s dominant spectral peak. As a result, we get two different distorted parts pushing a lot of aggressive frequency energy into the 2-4kHz region, skewing the overall mix tonality towards harshness. It’s also plausible that further midrange boost might also have been applied at mastering in an attempt to aid lyric intelligibility, as the vocal balancing feels a little haphazard – the opening phrase of the choruses in particular feels really buried.

But there’s more. One of the problems with using distortion to emphasise vocal presence is that noise-based consonants tend to be over-emphasised in the process. As such, it’s usually necessary to do some extra processing and/or editing work to avoid this. But what it sounds like they’ve done here is primarily just de-ess the vocal to get the sibilance under control, but without similarly reining in the remaining noise consonants – in the chorus, for example, things like the ’t’ of “to being friends” or the ‘j’ and ‘sh’ of “just shared”. So in addition to the overall upper-midrange emphasis, we’re also getting flashes of more extreme HF abrasiveness from those unchecked consonants.

Finally, this track has been absolutely hammered into loudness processing, a key component of which is clearly digital clipping, judging by the copious flat-topping of the mix waveform. Now, I have nothing against clipping as a loudness-maximisation tool in principle, but in practice I find that it tends to work best when the clipping threshold is set to catch only the waveform’s drum peaks, in which case the added distortion components will usually merge fairly benignly with the noisiness of each drum hit’s attack phase. In this track, however, the more steady-state sounds in the mix also seem to be hitting the clipper, adding an unwelcome sprinkling of continuous digital clipping distortion, which gets pretty fatiguing on the ear pretty quickly.

This production demonstrates one of the things I think hip-hop does best: taking a bunch of disparate sonic elements that many traditional music makers would disregard completely, or would never dream of using in combination, and fearlessly juxtaposing them into a unique tapestry that convinces almost by sheer force of character. Just the wayward tuning of the opening whistle, for instance, would have spurred many producers to retake the performance or fire up Melodyne, but not here, where the phrase’s unflinching repetition instead pulls the ear magnetically into the breathy texture of the whistle itself, and immediately adds a sense of authenticity to the production.

But what really caught my ear in this particular case was unapologetic dissonance of much of the bass part. This first becomes apparent at 1:12, where the line not only contains a prominent internal F-B tritone leap, but the main E and F pitches clash strongly against the sustained F_# of the “it’s getting sticky” vocal hook and a clear F_# pitch in the upper percussion loop. Then at 2:23, that same bass part is joined by brass layers which introduce a D_#-E pitch contour that doubles the bass in parallel major sevenths. Although the bass seems to fall back into a more traditional consonant role following the arrival of the main brass riff (sampled from Young Buck’s ‘Get Buck’) at 2:36, the jazzy chord extensions that appear at 3:13 once more clash repeatedly, pitting E^maj7 and Bb^b5 chords against its F_# note and D^maj7 against its E note.

What this approach does is undermine any expectation of traditional harmonic function (ie. that dissonances create a tension that requires a consonant resolution), allowing the coloristic and textural qualities of dissonance to be celebrated in their own right. The Second Viennese School made a stab at this in the classical world back in the 1920s, but unfortunately managed to exclude the bulk of the listening public in the process, something I’ve always felt was a enormous setback. What I love about the kind of hip-hop production Tyler The Creator has given us here is that it feels like it’s essentially pursuing the same underlying goal, but in a much more constructive and inclusive way, straining against the confines of functional harmony, but still maintaining broad appeal amongst musicians and non-musicians alike. With Viennese Schools, as with many things, perhaps three is the magic number…

There’s a fun little piece of production sleight of hand going on in this track. Notice how, towards the end of the prechorus the drums start to develop a roomier sound and the cymbals begin to open out in a classic “here comes the chorus!” build up. Have a listen: play_arrow | get_app Crucially, though, I’ve deliberately stopped that audio file right before the chorus downbeat. So just close your eyes for a moment and imagine what you think the chorus entry should sound like, based on that preamble. Got that sound in your mind? Great!

And now listen to what it actually sounds like: play_arrow | get_app I don’t know about you, but I’d have imagined some kind of indie-rock overdriven guitar texture, as a contrast to the cleaner, tighter band texture of the verses. But in reality, it’s only the drum sound that really opens out at all here, wheras the guitars remain pretty clean and restrained, with only a hint of overdrive and very little upper-spectrum energy at all to speak of. Effectively, this production is doing its best to present the illusion of rock chorus dynamics, except without the guitars!

But why the smoke and mirrors? Well, it strikes me that The Bieb’s breathy vocal tone wouldn’t fare very well against the masking from a bunch of distorted guitars. For all the tats, he’s fundamentally a pop vocalist, not a rock vocalist, so until he changes the way he sings, something else has to give.

A lot has been said about Young’s vocal performance here, and it is genuinely impressive in its loose, conversational style, navigating the fertile ground between pure song and melodic rap delivery. (And I love the little ping-pong delay on the last word of the first chorus at 1:28 too!) But there is plenty to be said about the backing arrangement and performances as well, which have a lot more heavy lifting to do here than in a lot of songs, given the lack of harmonic interest in the ever-present two-bar harmonic loop.

As with Olivia Dean’s 'Man I Need', which I’ve also critiqued recently, the keyboards provide some of the section definition, with the softly brassy pad first heard at 0:19 helping underline the verse’s brooding introspective character and a glassily modulated upper-spectrum synth layer (nicely showcased during the outro at 4:21) opening up the chorus texture – with the exception of the first half of Chorus 1, where a subtle stereo tambourine component effectively serves this function in its place. But it’s the live drums, bass, and guitar performances that really make this production shine, for me, introducing constant variations (and, crucially, of the tasteful human variety, rather than any kind of algorithmic pseudo-randomness) that meaningfully maintain the song’s sense of freshness, despite its almost five-minute running time.

The drummer, for instance, subtly announces the arrival of the first verse with the subtlest of pushed-snare fills at 0:18; reinforces the power of the vocal rhythm for “is that not allowed” midway through each chorus at 1:10, 2:36, and 3:45; and naturally lifts the sense of pace of the first chorus with a busier kick-drum line, and the second chorus by moving the tambourine from eighth-notes to sixteenths. The bass player delivers a tasteful upper-mordent fill heading into the second half of the first verse (0:35), then develops it into a double fill four bars later (0:44); and introduces more sustained lines at 0:16, 0:51, 1:43, 2:18, and 3:27 (none exactly identical, mind) to build towards the start of each of the verses and choruses. And the guitarist pitches subtle fills into gaps in the second-verse vocal line at 1:47, 1:57, and 2:09; gradually lengthens his sustain to build up towards the end of each verse, as well as then seemingly pushing the drive a bit harder to help the chorus sections deliver more power and edge; and contributes a range of spacey, effects-laden atmospheric overdubs such as the one-shots at 0:10, 1:44, and 2:06, the textural layering during the second and third choruses, and of course the soloing at 3:03-3:29.

This is the magic of using live musicians. Whether Young would have had a hit without them in this case, who can say? But I’m pretty confident that they have a lot to do with how big a hit she had, because they make this song more replayable than its core musical content has any right to be.

There have been a lot of productions which have used a sudden modulation towards the end of a song as a cheap means of squeezing out a bit of extra performance intensity, so the key-shifted final chorus repetition we get here has a good deal of precedent – but that’s about as far as things go in terms of it making any sense! For a start it shifts down a half-step, rather than up, which quite literally undermines the idea of giving the final chorus a ’lift'.

But on top of this, there’s not even the slightest musical warning or logic for the key change. The song clearly finishes with the exposed “in the back seat” vocal hook at 2:15. There’s nothing about that ending to suggest that there’s anything left to say, or any kind of build-up to indicate that there’s another iteration on its way – compared with the well-prepared modulations in, say, Abba’s 'Money, Money, Money' or Celine Dion’s 'My Heart Will Go On'. There’s not even the pure shock value of the willfully unprepared modulations in songs like Michael Jackson’s ‘Man In The Mirror’ or Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’.

And to add a further whiff of flippant disdain to the proceedings, it sounds a lot to me as if many of the parts have been simply pitchshifted down, rather than being rerecorded in the new key, undesirably compromising the sense of ‘air’ in the sound as well overlaying a distinct flavour of formant-shift on the vocal parts. If you ask me, what we’re hearing here is a song which was originally recorded and produced to completion at a duration of 2:15, but that was then somehow rejected as too short by someone in a position of power (perhaps some suit in the record company or someone behind the scenes in distribution), leading to a certain amount of last-minute scrabbling around and eventually this threadbare bodge-job that now everyone involved is trying to style out as if it were some kind of bold artistic statement.

Come off it! You’re having a laugh…

In this MOBO Award-sweeping song, Dean continues the increasingly popular trend of two-chorus song structures, an approach that offers more space for chorus repetitions within a shorter overall run time. After all, why bother with a middle section if your song hardly lasts long enough for anyone to get sufficiently bored of the hook that a mid-flow injection of new material is required? That said, I do think it’s a bit of a poor show that the prechorus lead vocals appear to have just been copied between the section’s two iterations. It just seems like a shame that the producers wasted the opportunity for such a fine singer to increase their performance intensity as the song progressed. And what’s the thinking with that treading-water outro section at 2:45? Wouldn’t it have been stronger just to leave the singer’s final “man, man, man” tapering out at 2:43?

The mix features some nice depth and timbre contrasts, with the punchiness of the dry drums set against the warm, diffuse width of the synth-pad texture and the generally fairly reverberant vocals. It’s a configuration that has definite 80s overtones, especially in the chorusey bass synth, LinnDrum-adjacent drum part, and the brightness of the reverb on the vocal and tambourine. But the aspect of this song that I’d say is most rewarding from the perspective of students of production is the keyboard arrangement. I’ve often talked about how, in most mainstream commercial styles, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about a vocal part or a guitar part, because in both cases ‘arrangement’ is usually a more applicable word than ‘part’. (For more on this topic, check out my previous critiques of Noah Kahan’s 'Stick Season' and Billie Eilish’s 'Everything I Wanted'.) Well, this is a great example of the same kind of situation in the realm of keyboards.

Changes in the keyboard arrangement are being used to define the different song sections, for a start. The opening verse (at 0:08), for intance, is underscored with warm-sounding stereo pads that also seem to have some kind of gentle piano layer mixed in (presumably the one you can hear briefly during the drop at 1:45), but when we hit the chorus, a brighter, highly compressed piano component (which you can hear more clearly during the arrangement drop at 1:14) joins in to give the hook a lift. Then when we get to the “talk to me, talk to me” post-chorus section, the upper-spectrum sonics thicken further with the addition of some kind of rich stereo string synth.

But there are small-scale nuances too. Notice, for instance, the slow increase in the synth’s low-end warmth over the course of the first eight bars of Verse 1 (0:08-0:24) up until the entry of the bass synth in bar nine, which I think is quite effective in giving a sense of build-up through those crucial first few moments of the song. And how about the fact that the intro’s chords are noticeably brighter than those of the first verse, which makes a lot of sense in terms of balancing the need not only to announce the song’s arrival with sufficient presence, but also to keep the vocal’s upper spectrum dominant over that of the synth for maximum lyric transmission.

A good deal of the arrangment interest here, however, is in the fills, of which there are plenty! There are the fairly regular melodic bass fills every two bars in the verse from 0:23, for example, and syncopated piano/synth stabs between phrases of the prechorus (first heard at 0:45), but there are also lots of situations where the sudden absence of some/all of the keyboards itself constitutes a fill: across the opening of both post-choruses (1:12-1:17 & 2:25-2:30); at the end of both post-choruses (1:30 & 2:43); in the seventh bar of Verse 2 (1:45); and on the last beat before Chorus 2 (2:04). And before I leave the subject of arrangement, let me also point out the sensitively managed off-beat guitar ‘skank’ (with a lovely tight slapback feedback-echo) that first enters halfway through Verse 1 at 0:22, but which then tastefully drops out for bars 1, 2, 5, and 6 of the prechorus, supporting that section’s pleasing call-and-response quality.