Re: Songs in 5/4 Time? Other Odd Signatures?

On Jul 22, 3:10 pm, "RichL" <rpleav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Kyle" <kylej...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On Jul 22, 1:54 pm, "RichL" <rpleav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Kyle" <kylej...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On Jul 22, 1:11 am, Nil <rednoise+n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 22 Jul 2007, "Jim Carr" <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
alt.guitar.bass:

Can you folks think of some others? Actually, any other odd time
signatures would go towards making an interesting list.

The intro to "Whipping Post" is in 11/8. The outro to "Barracuda"
is in 7/4. "All You Need Is Love" is 7/4.

Yeah, there are odd times or changing times in several of Lennon's
Beatles songs. "Happiness is a Warm Gun" has some interesting time
changes. Lennon used odd times without realizing it.

"Rubylove" by Cat Stevens, I was amazed to discover, is in 7/4.

I think John Lennon knew *exactly* what he was doing.

I don't. Not when it came to odd times and the like. This is a guy
who demanded that George Martin smother his voice in "tomato
ketchup" (meaning reverb). JL said that the term aeolian cadence
called to his mind an "exotic bird." He was extremely nontechnical,
and I don't mean that as an insult to him.

Generally speaking, you're right, he'd often describe what he was looking
for in non-technical terms. However, he had a great intuitive sense about
music. I think he knew he was using odd time signatures, although he may
not have known the proper terminology.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Here are a couple of bits which, though they don't absolutely resolve
the question (did Lennon recognize, in any way, that the number of
beats per bar in his songs sometimes alternated within the same
song?), maybe shed some light on it.

There's this quotation from a 1969 interview George Harrison gave
Rolling Stone: "John has an amazing thing with his timing. He always
comes across with different timing things, for example 'All You Need
Is Love,' which sort of skips beats out and changes from 3/4 to 4/4
all the time, in and out of each other. Yet, when you question him
about it, he doesn't know. He just does it naturally and you can't
pin him down."

Next, and this one's a bit comical: There's an old Rolling Stone
article called "Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice." It's one of
the old John and Yoko interviews. In it, Yoko goes on and on about
how she had tried to get Lennon to use "different rhythms instead of
just going ba-ba-ba-ba." She says Lennon's music was "simple music"
-- in contrast to her own and that of unspecified "modern classical
composers" who, she says, "went from 4/4 to 4/3." (No, that is not a
typo.) And while she's going on like this, Lennon doesn't dispute a
word of how his music is being incorrectly pigeonholed.

All things considered, I think it's most likely Lennon had no idea,
when writing his stuff, that his time signatures sometimes changed.




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