I isn’t no drummer. (Maybe a wannabe drummer–I do play around on them–but keys are my instrument.) You can easily do this melody as a 7/8 waltz, too, if you want–just elongate that first beat by an eighth note. Even 11/8. (And I can post examples if anyone is really curious.) This particular melody is easily adaptable to any time signature you can think of.
But, anyhow, these time signatures really are not that bad. They only seem difficult because we’re not used to them. Once you get the feel for the 5/8 pulse (which is basically a “slow-quick” (dotted quarter-quarter) or “quick-slow” (quarter-dotted quarter), it starts becoming fairly natural. It’s just that we’re surrounded by music that has an even pulse throughout that it throws us off. I mean, there’s plenty of folk music in the Balkans (and I’m sure elsewhere, but this is the region that immediately comes to mind) that is set to such odd pulses, and non-musicians clap and dance to them all the time, so it’s really just a matter of familiarity more than anything else.
What particularly amazes me is artists that can make the “odd” time signatures flow so easily in a pop context. One of my former bandmates used to drum in a Seattle band called “Flop” (if you saw “Hype!”, they were briefly featured on there.) Most of their stuff was in normal 4/4 time, but they’d effortlessly go in and out of weird time signatures with such ease and pop sensibility, that it feels completely natural. Here’s one legal snippet I could find. It kinda starts in the middle of the song, but if you count it, here’s the quarter note measure subdivisions you get:
4-3-4-4-4-5-4-4-4-3-4-3-4-4-4-3-4,etc.
(That 4-5-4 section might be more accurately 6-3-4 or 4-2-3-4, but it all resolves to the same idea. I’m not totally sure how I would score it, but it probably would be 7/4, 4/4 (for two measures), 6/4, 3/4, 4/4 (for two measures), 7/4 (two measures), 4/4, etc.)
Looks bloody insane, no? Yet sounds completely pop and natural, at least to my ears. That’s what I like to hear from bands that play in wacky time sigs.