Mainstream mix engineers often spend a great deal of time and effort trying to ensure the best possible lyric intelligibility for their lead vocal parts, but the unnecessarily poor diction of some artists really doesn’t make that job any easier – I’m thinking of songs like Bon Iver’s 'Calgary', Saint Jhn’s 'Roses (Imanbek Remix)', or Ariana Grande’s 'No Tears Left To Cry'. However, there are some situations where diction problems are caused by the nature of the melodic writing, as in this song.
The bit I’m referring to is the vocal’s title hook, which, let’s be honest, would be really difficult to decipher by ear if you didn’t already know what it was supposed to be. But it’s not because Roan’s diction in general is sloppy – I think it’s simply because the line moves into such a high register, and that makes it trickier to manage the physical mechanics of clear enunciation without cracking the notes. On the whole, notes pitched towards the upper extremes of a singer’s range involve a delicate balance of breath support and vocal control, and it’s therefore not easy to cleanly alternate such notes with the complex dynamic physiological changes and breath-stream interruptions of consonants.
In addition, high head-voice notes like these tend to be heavy on fundamental frequency and short on upper harmonics, which causes a second intelligibility problem. You see, we differentiate between vowel sounds on the basis of their characteristic patterns of upper-midrange vocal-tract resonances (the so-called ‘vocal formants’), but these resonances become less and less apparent the less frequency energy the vocal is generating in that spectral zone. So when high-register notes become mostly fundamental frequency, the vowel sounds start blurring together into various shades of ‘oo’ and ’er’.
But, while all this means that I don’t entirely blame Roan for the poor lyric intelligibility under the circumstances, I’d also say that she didn’t need to be defeatist about it either. She could, for example, have had one of the call-and-response backing vocals in a lower register to clarify the words – that would have been a fairly simple sticking plaster. Or she could have done what Sabrina Carpenter cannily did in her widely praised cover version, namely sing the first chorus down the octave, giving better intelligibility and also leaving more room for arrangement development.
Another thing that really caught my attention was the outro’s gradual tempo/pitch fall-off, which is another of those quirky production hooks that it looks like we’re increasingly going to need as humans to differentiate our work from the output of AI music generators, particularly with songs based around four-bar sections and unimaginative one-chord-per-bar chord patterns – such as the IV-V-I-vi that underlies two thirds of this song, for instance. On the face of it, the combined tempo reduction and pitch drop might sound like a simple ’tape slow-down’ effect, but what’s interesting about it is that the tempo and pitch changes aren’t actually linked in that way – by my reckoning, you’d get a pitch-drop of about a tritone if you tried to slow down the tempo that much on tape (or indeed on an old-style sampler), rather than the half-step pitch-drop on display here. So clearly the tempo and pitch changes were deliberately implemented separately, which, thinking about it, kind of makes sense, because a tritone drop in Roan’s vocal formants would have made her sound more like Cher with an epic hangover! Exhibit A: play_arrow | get_app
It’s rare enough for chart songs these days to change key at all, and the few songs that do tend to fall into one of two buckets:
- Songs with a Trucker’s Gear Shift (ie. a typically cheesy step-up modulation for the final choruses)
- Songs with some recurring section in different key – as in Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’, for instance, with its verses in C minor and choruses in Ab major.
With that in mind, this Sabrina Carpenter song is a genuine breath of fresh air, delivering a modulation stunt I’m not sure I’ve ever heard in the charts before: putting the first verse (at 0:18) and second verse (at 1:29) into different keys – the former in A major and the latter in C major. And, like all the greatest production decisions, its effectiveness seems somehow obvious with the benefit of hindsight, because the key change re-engages our attention for the arrival of a musical section that we’d normally have, to an extent, taken for granted. We’ve already heard the verse’s musical material first time round, after all, so hearing it again in the same key wouldn’t have been much of a shock, and anyone steeped in pop-structure convention (as most modern listeners are) would also understandably be expecting that material to recur pretty much unchanged after the first chorus. By changing the key of the second verse, the music rouses us listeners from our complacency with a jolt of novelty, but without any risk of rendering the verse’s underlying musical content less memorable. A poptastic win-win, in other words!
The success of any modulation, though, depends on how you get back and forth to the new key, and here too this song scores highly. Given that the modulation is meant to be an attention-grabbing feature, it makes sense that the songwriters have chosen to jump without warning into a comparatively remote key. Let me explain what I mean by this. Notice that the final chord of the first chorus is an E dominant chord, a chord which has thus far in the song always resolved traditionally in a perfect cadence back to the A tonic chord at the start of each new eight-bar section – ie. four times in total. So when the second verse’s initial C chord frustrates this well-prepared expectation, it naturally surprises the ear, because there’s been no kind of ‘warning’ preamble moving towards C major to get us ready for that chord, and neither does the C chord exist within the verse’s key of A major (the closest thing in A major would be a C# chord, which only shares one note with C major). In addition, there’s a three-sharp difference between the key signatures of the chorus (in A major, with three sharps) and the second verse (in C major, with none) – which is what I mean by the keys being ‘comparatively remote’ from each other.
For the return to the chorus, though, the idea of shocking the listener becomes a little less musically appropriate, in my opinion. The chorus is the musical ‘home plate’ of the song, so I think it stands to reason that you’d want there to be a little more harmonic logic underpinning our arrival there. Which is why it’s quite canny that the dominant G7 chord at the end of the second verse does actually resolve relatively smoothly into the opening A chord of the following chorus. Granted, it doesn’t resolve to a C chord to deliver the perfect cadence we’d most strongly expect, but the dissonant diminished-fifth interval between its leading-note B and seventh F does still resolve inwards (the B rising to C# and the F falling to E) in a similar manner that’s perfectly acceptable within the conventions of traditional harmonic theory, which gives the progression a certain harmonic logic.
Furthermore, it’s worth pointing out that this second-verse modulation doesn’t occur in a vacuum either, because the verse has a whiff of key change to it too, with the VI-ii motion in the second and third bars of the verse progression sounding an awful lot like a perfect cadence into B minor, albeit only briefly before the following D pivot chord takes us back into A major a few bars later.
All this good stuff notwithstanding, I do have a couple of harmonic niggles with the vocal arrangement during the outro section (from 2:23), because it feels like it’s working rather at odds with the song’s underlying chord progressions there. The first moment is at 2:31, where the lead vocal holds an A against the underlying chord of C#, which for me undermines the powerful harmonic momentum of this chromatically altered mediant chord. Either a G# or a B would have been a better choice there, I’d say. (Thankfully, she sings a much more appropriate E#-C#-B-E# figure when the chord returns at 2:39.) And my second quibble is with the clearly audible backing-vocal F# note that weakens the song’s closing IV-iv-I progression by clashing with the backing-track iv chord’s minor third. I’d have either melodyned that vocal F# down to an F, or I’d have removed any shadow of the F# from the backing track to make the ending a simple IV-I cadence – whereas currently it sounds like it’s falling between two stools to me.