It s Been Snowing Again a Familiar Sting

I of the ironies of music genre categorization these days is that Sting'south solo work now tends to be termed 'soft rock.'

Part one of the irony is that that genre is functionally the successor to 'piece of cake listening,' which I think has go more or less extinct.  (Correct me if I'm wrong on that, and information technology'due south merely become increasingly obscure and irrelevant.)

Part two is that Sting has consistently challenged genre boundaries, not only by invoking stylistic types at will whenever they serve the narrative purpose of a song's lyrics—say, the 'country music' style of I'one thousand So Happy—but also past using really challenging musical materials, such equally composite meters and complex harmonies.  These, too, are often related to what a given vocal is near.

A instance in point is I Hung My Head, the 2nd runway on the 1995 album Mercury Falling, which, Wikipedia tells us, "marked Sting's transition from heavier jazz-inspired rock to the adult contemporary* genre."  Although the narrative is set up in the old American West, the musical style is anything but 19^th century:  the original setting of the song is congenital around a heavily distorted electric guitar riff—i whose rhythm is strangely elusive and unsettled.

The Wikipedia article on the song describes it this mode:

The song is written in chemical compound fourth dimension 9/8.  The curious offbeat rhythm has the outcome of alternating 5-beat and four-beat bars. The drum crush is syncopated, on the 3rd and 8th beats.

I conceptualize it a flake differently.  Ix-viii time is normally (as the article says) a 'compound' time signature, pregnant that the beat unit is not a simple note value such equally a quarter notation or half note, but rather a dotted annotation value—in ix-eight, the dotted quarter annotation.  The implication is that the measure consists of three beats, each farther subdivided into threes:  "1 2 3 FOUR v vi SEV'N eight nine"—or "I and-a Two and-a THREE and-a."

That'southward a very different beast from the 'curious offbeat rhythm' nosotros hear in I Hung My Head.  My interpretation proceeds partly from the 'pulsate beat', which evokes the familiar rock and gyre "back crush" drum 'hits' on beats two and four:  "one 2 3 FOUR."  Here, though, we've got an extra eighth note inserted into beat three:  "i and Two and three and-a FOUR and."  Thus the meter becomes a 'distorted four.'

Transcribed in the resulting 'composite' meter, the vocal melody looks similar this:

Information technology's really unusual.  Even in styles where composite meter is fairly normal—say, the Rumanian folk music whose melodies Bela Bartok famously collected, and which so influenced his compositional way—it's much more than mutual to have the 'augmented beat' (the one with three subdivisions) fall at either the outset or the cease of the measure, where its tendency to create an emphasis makes a corking start or ending.  Inserted in the heart, it'southward unsettling, destabilizing.

It'south also appropriate.  Like the narrator, we listeners wait for clarity—nosotros, also, take "time to kill."  (An innocent-sounding phrase with a sinister double significant—"Early one morning/With fourth dimension to impale" starts outset and final verses, framing the entire vocal.)  That 'fourth dimension to kill' is inserted correct into the middle of each and every measure for united states.

But there'due south more.  Consider the bass line in conjunction with the melody:

That bass line is office of the guitar riff mentioned above, performed on the lowest two strings of the guitar.  (The higher bits of the riff are omitted from the transcription for clarity.)  The accented quarter notes catastrophe each bar help to stabilize the meter, setting up the coming downbeat.

But if focused upon—if the listener concentrates on the bass and lets the melody recede into the perceptual groundwork—those quarter notes tin induce an alternative metric scheme, a whole new meter.  It'southward withal composite, merely now it's ane in which the second shell is the augmented one, and "trounce three" arrives non on the 8^th  eighth notation of the mensurate, but on the nine^th.

Y'all might say that beat 3 of the 'distorted four' is perpetually disrupted, torn apart, by this conflict betwixt unlike layers in the musical texture.  Again, information technology's unsettling, disruptive.

And once again, information technology's appropriate:  the whole song revolves around a moment which, 'inserted' into the narrator'due south life, disrupts information technology—in fact, utterly derails it.  And the metric structure I've been describing gives us a compelling analog for that—one that helps us feel imaginatively what is felt by the narrator.

In setting a musical text, it doesn't get much meliorate than that.

*"Adult contemporary is rather a continuation of the easy listening and soft stone way that became popular in the 1960s and 1970s with some adjustments that reflect the evolution of pop/rock music."  –Wikipedia

Sting'south performances of I Hung My Head:

The 1995 original:  (Mercury Falling version)  (Click on links to navigate to Youtube videos.)

A 2010 performance with the Majestic Combo in Berlin:  (Purple Phil)  (Many other performances from this tour are also online.)

Y'all can really option out the bass line; the whole symphonic bass section is playing it.  And that guitar riff is still in that location, if much further back in the mix.  There are a couple of good shots of Dominic Miller, Sting's long-fourth dimension guitarist and collaborator, flat-picking it on his white Les Paul.

Johnny Greenbacks version:

A very interesting alternate version is Johnny Cash's 2002 cover.  In that recording, the characteristic meter is changed to straight 4-4, and the harmonies are simplified as well.  Some listeners prefer information technology; Sting is said to have considered the cover an honor.  My take on information technology is that the unsettled, disrupted quality removed by these changes is taken on past Cash's vocal performance.  Readers hither tin judge for themselves, if they wish.

2002, American IV:  The Man Comes Around: (Johnny Cash version)

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Source: https://snowonmusic.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/metering-i-hung-my-head/

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