And another one – maybe I’m the only one who enjoys this fill – is on Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me.” The whole song has a triplet/shuffle feel to it. As is to be expected, in all the verses, Liberty DiVitto finishes the musical thought with your typical triplet tom fills; however at the end of the B section, he snakes back into the verses with a straight sixteenth note roll on the toms, which is a bit unexpected against the triplet pulse of the song. I hear triplets over eight notes often enough in rock music that it is a bit of a cliche, but I don’t very ofter hear fours in a triplet-based/shuffle groove. It’s a nice bit of rhythmic color that gives the song a feel of accelerating into the A section before hitting the brakes. (And like Stewart Copeland, in the example above, he ends the fill without slamming emphatically on a cymbal or otherwise over-emphasizing the one – but this song isn’t really full of crashes, anyway.)
