By my hearing, the melody of the first line of the chorus (“It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you,” before the harmony comes in) is repeated in the next two lines. What I wonder is, when you imagine this song or sing along, when, if ever, do you switch over to the harmony?
By the way, with all the attention this song’s been getting from young’uns these days, I tried to imagine what an equivalent for me would be, ie if I were doing this at their age, I’d be doing it with a song released in 19xx, if I were going back an equal amount of time.
Okay, I’m mentally singing it, since that’s what you asked about. My mental version:
Line 1: Maintaining the same (high) pitch all through the line until “from you,” when I drop a half-step (I think).
Line 2: Back to the same high pitch, drop a half-step on “could ev,” then jump up a third on “er do”
Line 3: Different melodic line altogether, involving a big jump down (a fifth?) then back up (a sixth?) and descending
Disclaimer: I am not a good singer, and especially bad at harmonizing by ear.
It’s definitely a song that benefits from vocal harmonizing. There’s a quite nice low-key cover by Low here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWPx5N3rCvU
ETA: Why is it “*there’s *nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do”? Why not “that’s nothing …”? The more I think about the lyrics as written (I assume they’re correct), the worse that line is. In a song full of clunky lines.
Just because I found it interesting, I used sixteen as my “young’uns” age (born 2002) with this song released in 1984, eighteen years before that. Eighteen years before my birth was 1955 and, in that year, “Unchained Melody” charted three times in the US by different artists. In 1990, “Unchained Melody” (albeit the 1965 Righteous Brothers cover) had a resurgence of popularity after it was featured in Ghost.
Granted, I was actually 17 in 1990 but if you kind of squint and ignore all the technicalities, I can pretend that there was an old song getting this attention when I was a “young’un” and not feel so old
Ah, but there was much more of a “generation gap” in music back in the day. My kids could easily like some of their parents’ favorite bands. But not when I was a kid.
My parents really believed the Communists were using “the Rock and Roll” to subvert the youth of America (and my fundamentalist pastor preached that it was demonic… and he was using Country-Rock bands as examples!).
Music really did change a lot in the mid-to-late 60s, so finding a song from the mid-80s popular today wouldn’t be hard now. Easier than a song from the mid-50s, when most songs sounded like “easy listening” (until Elvis, but he was mostly late 50s/60s).
Interesting question. The melody of the first line is indeed present in the following two but the harmonies become progressively more dominant so that by line three the original melody has almost become the harmony itself. I think I switch to the harmony for the third line and can go either way on the second line.
This is what kills me about old timey (before manufactured beats became more common than instruments) music. Look how complicated something like this was to make, but it was barely taken seriously at the time … it was just “pop” music. But it feels more musically complex than 98% of the new mainstream stuff I hear these days.
I used to think it bizarre and sad that so many teenagers love older music, and then I realized: What’s their alternative?
Perhaps I have just become an old fogey.
Yeah, I get that, and I’ve always filled in the blanks/known what was meant. It just seems like clumsy writing to me. Change the first word to “that’s” or “which’s” or something and there’s no ambiguity, and your listeners can spend their mental energy on Kilimanjaro and the wild dogs and the rest of it. (Don’t tell me that “which’s” doesn’t “sound natural” when we’re talking about this song with its “Serengeti” bullshit.)
(PS: Clumsy lyric writing is not unusual in pop music, even great pop music! I led a high school class through Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” today, and the consensus seemed to be that without the music video the song doesn’t tell a coherent story or even address a coherent theme – though it still kicks butt. As does “Africa.”)
Thank you both for articulating why I found this question/topic immediately fascinating!
