I recently have been very intrigued by the song I Think I Love You by David Cassidy and the Partridge Family.
This song is so interesting and unusual. Has there ever been a pop song of such caliber that was so, for lack of a better word, “baroque” sounding? From the bizarre minor-sounding vocal intro, to the harpsichord accompaniment behind the chorus, to the harpsichord solo right before the bridge, the song is heavily dominated by this baroque sound.
Was there any precedent for this kind of song when it first came out? Were audiences surprised by the sound of it? It just seems so removed from the typical formulaic pop music of the time.
LOL … you’ve actually stumbled onto one of my wife’s research areas. Her specialty is medieval music, but she also looks at “medievalism” – how more contemporary audiences reuse old sounds to construct new meanings. In fact she just finished teaching a class about it this quarter at UCLA and was talking about songs like “I Think I Love You” just last week.
There was a whole wave of “pop baroque” in the mid 1960’s. It was triggered by the baroque revival of the 1950’s where harpsichords and other period instruments were rediscovered for real baroque music. (Prior to that most people heard baroque music played on piano and other anachronistic instruments.) As a result, the harpsichord was an exciting new sound in the early 60’s, but an exciting new sound that conveyed a strong “olden times” message. It was the creaky, tinny sound of antique music, stuff older than normal classical music.
So pop arrangers in the 60’s picked it up as a way to inject an old-fashioned vibe into some songs. Or sometimes just because they thought it sounded cool. It had a run of about ten years before people got bored with it and started looking for something new. “I Think I Love You” from 1970 was actually close to the end of the harpsichord craze. For example the Beatles had recorded “Fixing a Hole” with harpsichord three years earlier, and there were plenty of other songs before that. “I Think I Love You” would not have been seen as particularly weird at the time.
That is a great answer, Hamster King. This is great! Does anyone know other songs with harpsichords from the same time period? Does that “Bus stop, wet day…something umbrella” song also have a harpsichord? I can’t remember. I feel now as if there are lots of songs from that time period that had harpsichords that I have just forgotten about.
If you like pop songs with harpsichord, you’ll definitely want to check out mid to late 60’s era Kinks. “Two Sisters”, “Village Green”, “Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home”, “Session Man” all have harpsichord, usually featured prominently.
Yes, 1:30 into the song. But I think it’s actually guitars being picked - it does have the baroque sound though.
That’s another thing - sometimes even if there wasn’t an actual harpsichord, there was baroque or Medieval sounding music. Yeah I know those are two very disparate time periods, but it seems as though both styles were used:
Intro to Maggie May (the “May” part never actually appears in the song, BTW) by Rod Stewart.
Roundabout intro by Yes - I always thought this guitar sounded “Medieval.”
The picked guitar in the background in Out of Time by the Rolling Stones (used to great effect in the intro for the movie Coming Home.) Again, it’s a picked guitar playing a baroque-harpsichord-sounding melody.
For Your Love by the Yardbirds, circa 1964 is another one. Saw them live in the summer of '66. Pissed me off that they wouldn’t do this song. Keith Relf (R.I.P.) explained that the song required use of a “harp-si-chord”, and since they didn’t bring one on their tour they couldn’t do the song. They could have faked it though, as this television appearance from 1965 shows. (Faked, no less, by Jeff Beck in a coat and tie and using a pick :eek:). It really pissed a lot of us off that they wouldn’t play it. It was still pretty cool seeing them though. The venue was a small pavilion at an amusement park and the band played on a riser set up on the dance floor. Saw them both nights they played there, spending most of my time about three feet away from Jeff Beck, who was chomping gum and feedbacking (intentionally) like a mofo.
I think you can go to George Martin and the Beatles. Those trumpet calls in Penny Lane, the string instruments in many songs, (Yesterday, A Day in the Life).
I think I Think I Love You is one of the worst songs in the world. Not as bad as You Light Up My Life but seriously a bad song.
