Dead Kennedys - Holiday in Cambodia. That Intro. How I love that intro. The version in Give Me Convenience that doesn’t have that intro is good, but it doesn’t come close to Fresh Fruit version with that intro.
They Might Be Giants - Don’t Let’s Start. “I don’t want to live in this world anymore, I don’t want to live in this woooorld!”
Tenacious D - Tribute. “He asked us: Be you angels? And we said: Nay - we are but men! Rock!” Especially in the video with the flowing light effect afterwards - never fails to crack me up.
Black Sabbath - War Pigs. “Generals gather in their masses - just like witches in black masses!” It’s somewhat corny and it rhymes “masses” with “masses”, but somehow, it fits there like your nose in your head.
According to an interview I saw with Carl Perkins, the script for the song “Blue Suede Shoes” had the term, “go, go, go”, Carl said he made a mistake during the recording session and sang “go, cat, go” instead.
He thought this made a big difference in the eventual success of the song. Who knows?
Tony’s Theme by the Pixies. “This is a song about a super-hero named Tony. It’s called Tony’s Theme!” (Kim Deal’s voice seems to have the same resonating frequency as my lower regions. Not to be crude or anything.)
Dirty Back Road by the B-52’s, for the cricket sounds at the end. Sounds just like being on a country road in Georgia in the middle of the night, and the B-52’s have just driven by singing a song.
Mr. Me is one of the few They Might be Giants songs I can still listen to, for the “Yo, yo, yo.”
Anything by Esquivel, who understood exactly the right place to add a “zoom! pow!” or a cheesy voice-over (“You muchacha, me muchacho, you know, like ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’”)
And while I can’t say it’s a great song, I’ve always kind of liked Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson just for the “Is that the end? No.” part.
Accidents Will Happen by Elvis Costello. Pretty good song by any standards. Then along comes the ‘middle eight’ section. A simple yet effective continuous ascending bass line supporting a sublime couplet: “It’s the damage that we do and never know / It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so”. Wonderful.
Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes. It’s a good song, but it has a superb eight bars in the middle where producer Trevor Horn shuts off everything and just lets the sampled acoustic guitar play. A wonderful touch in a very complex and elaborate production.
Walking On The Moon by The Police. As Sting himself has explained, he had the words, the tune, the bassline. But it needed something in between the bass phrases, and he didn’t have anything. Andy Summers came up with that jangling ‘crash’ chord, and another hit single was perfected.
I could probably give about 20 examples from the work of Linda Eder (the best singer I know of), since so often her handling of a song, and the arrangement, feature little ‘special’ moments. There’s a song called Unusual Way where Linda sustains a pure note as only she can, and it just blends perfectly into a phrase picked up by the piano, almost as if they had used acoustic ‘morphing’ software to blend her voice into piano. (This is technically do-able, but they didn’t use this kind of technology on this occasion - it’s just perfect technique.)
The famous edit :58 into Strawberry Fields Forever splicing together take 7 with take 25, which was electronically slowed down to match the pitch of take 7. Brilliant man, that George Martin.
I highly suggest doing an internet search for SFF and reading all about how they put this song together. It’s fascinating stuff, especially considering they only had 4-track technology at the time.
The “Strawberry Fields” story is even more amazing considering that Martin had to come up with a way to fulfill John Lennon’s request to splice the two together. Martin had protested that the snippets were in different keys and the measures wouldn’t match up. John said something along the lines of “You’ll figure it out.” And he did.
This is from a wonderful coffee-table book that described every single day the Beatles spent at Abbey Road: what they recorded that day and the stories behind it. Fab book.
The point in TV Eye by The Stooges where Iggy loses control and starts coughing, which gives the song (which was already off the map) even more of a wild feel than it already had.
ps I’m freaking out about the OP, because about an hour ago I was thinking about how great it is that there’s a song that rhymes ‘masses’ with ‘masses’. Spooky.
