![]() ![]() 3 compilation, which seems cleanly and clearly mastered at a very conservative loudness of -18LUFS. My favourite was the version I found on The Scepter Records Story Vol. 'We'll Meet Again'), and this song’s a case in point, because I downloaded four of the most popular versions from iTunes, and was pretty appalled by the obvious disparities between them. These days, though, the litany of remasterings and compilations can make it difficult to find a decent-sounding version of early singles releases (something I mentioned when critiquing Vera Lynn’s It’s as well to mention that this song was actually recorded in two distinct versions: one for the film soundtrack itself (on which the singer’s voice is noticeably rather ragged on account of a bout of laryngitis) and one which was recorded for the separate chart single (which I’ve been critiquing here). (I would criticise the pianist’s weirdĪ b after “done” at 0:34, though, which just sounds like a mistake.) I’m also pretty sure that the piano sound we’re hearing is a so-called ‘ tack piano’, in other words an upright piano where metal thumb-tacks have been pressed into the felt hammers so that the strings end up being struck by the metal heads of the tacks. But this is by no means a criticism, because that gives them a kind of ‘down-at-heel saloon’ character that feels very much in keeping with the film’s revisionist Western context – a salient reminder that tuning decisions can have an important aesthetic dimension. Speaking of pitching, notice how neither the opening ukulele nor the jangly piano first heard at 0:23 are particularly well in tune. Any wonder that B J Thomas struggles to hit that note’s pitch cleanly throughout the song? But Bacharach’s melody ends the phrase on the major seventh interval, and the next phrase then starts on the note a whole step below. Vocal church-music composers of the 16th century actively avoided melodic major-seventh intervals for this reason, for example, and even in modern song you’ll usually encounter melodic major sevenths only where the singer swiftly proceeds upwards a half-step to ‘complete’ the octave – it’s just easier to pitch a major seventh accurately when you’ve got the octave as a kind of mental framework around it. Take the rising major seventh first heard under the words “his bed” at 0:13, a highly dissonant interval that’s quite difficult to sing on an ‘instrument’ that has no keys or frets. The vocal line is quirky too, and far from straightforward to sing – something that Bacharach’s primary muse Dionne Warwick commented on in relation to the composer’s tunes in general. Does this help tie the bridge together with the verse musically speaking? It’s a thought-provoking question to consider, as it’s a technique that could be applied practically to fill out half-finished songs, extrapolating from, say, existing verses to missing choruses, or from existing choruses to a missing middle section. I-IV-iii-vi-ii-V outline, but adding extra Intriguingly, the bridge’s progression has a lot in common with the verse, retaining the basic Harmonically, the verse is based around a tonal cycle of fifths, leaving out just the diminished chord on theį major scale’s leading note and then repeating the That said, for me the bridges feel more like nine-bar sections too, but with a one-bar extension, and it made me wonder whether the nine-beat metre of the ‘where the hell did that come from?!’ outro at 2:25 might have been intended as a deliberate structural echo. Just the section lengths are weird to start with, comprising nine-bar verses with ten-bar bridges between them. (The song itself won the Oscar for Best Song as well.) Perhaps more surprising, given its gently reactionary ‘old-timey’ sound, is that it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first four weeks of 1970, beating out Diana Ross & The Supremes' ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Peter Paul & Mary’s ‘Leaving On A Jet Plane’, The Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’, and The Beatles' ‘Come Together/Something’.Īs an inveterate muso myself, I’d like to think that Bacharach’s penchant for unorthodox song construction helped its success. ![]() Following the recent death of Burt Bacharach, I was reminded of a little wind-up music box I had as a child that played this song of his, and how for years I thought it was just some kind of American nursery rhyme, rather than the soundtrack to a film about a pair of notorious career criminals! With hindsight, though, it’s hardly surprising that the song spawned its own merch, given that Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid was 1969’s highest-grossing film and Bacharach’s soundtrack picked up an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy for Best Original Score. ![]()
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