Reason #877 for why the terrorists hate us!
I posted a thread quite a while back asking why country bands tended to have high-voiced tenor lead singers, when the traditional male country singer is a baritone. One possibility we came up with was that a lot of these bands started out as rock bands. They weren’t having much success in that genre and so decided to try their hand at “country”, or else they got a record contract and the record company for one reason or another decided to market them as country instead of rock. I mean, there’s a lot of songs by these bands where, if you just take out the banjo and fiddle and change the harmony, you’ve got straight ahead pop rock songs.
A posting on the Christmas song thread has reminded me: George Michael singing “Last Christmas, I GAV you my heart …”
Huh. I always thought it was ‘rises like an Empress’, and vaguely figured it was to do with haughty grandeur and stuff, but Olympus does make WAY more sense. Thanks!
Not just pop rock songs. “I Swear” was a #1 country hit for John Michael Montgomery then a #1 hit on the R&B charts when covered by All-4-One no more than three or four months later and the arrangements were remarkably similar, the significant discernable difference was the solo male voice with heavy contemporary country music faux twang versus a very polished male close harmony.
I always chuckled at the way the line basically describes one mountain as rising like this other mountain. “Wow, that mountain is very … mountain-like.”
In a weird twist of fate, my youngest sister dragged me along to a JMM concert where I heard him sing that song, and within a year a female coworker dragged me to an All-4-One concert where I got to hear them sing it. I liked All-4-One’s version better, despite generally liking country more than R&B.
The reverse, though, was “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, a hit for both Aerosmith and Mark Chesnutt. That song works much better as a country song.
Agreed. “Like an empress” would actually be a better line. But he very clearly says “like Olympus.” :rolleyes: