I’ll confess right upfront that I always disliked this tooth-rottingly syrupy song, with its relentless D-Bm-Em-A harmonic loop, plodding groove, and plasticky ’80s synth textures. Given its extraordinary longevity, though, I recently felt duty-bound to have a closer analytical look at it, and I have to say that I now hold it in a lot higher esteem. Many musicians worry that analysis will ‘kill the magic’ of their favourite music, but personally I think it’s the other way round – not only does analysing songs I already love deepen my appreciation of them, but I also find that analysis of music that doesn’t immediately appeal to me often uncovers qualities that I initially overlooked.

So what was it that I found in this case? Well, one of the first things I noticed was the unusual distribution of the programmed drum fills, where the same pattern of fills almost never appears in any similar song section. On further investigation, it seems as if George Michael (who not only wrote this song, but also apparently created and performed the entire arrangement himself) built this production around a 20-bar LinnDrum sequence constructed out of eight different two-bar programmed patterns chained in the following order: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-7-1-8. If I now superimpose the song structure over this repeating chain of drum patterns, you’ll see that the song’s eight-bar musical sections don’t fit neatly into the 20-bar loop length…

…and if I now rearrange that picture to line up all the similar song sections vertically, it’s clear to see that this almost completely avoids any similar song section from having an identical pattern of fills.

The sharper-eyed amongst you may, however, have spotted that my song structure here is actually missing a couple of sections, namely the Solo after Chorus 1b and the repetition of Chorus 2. Well, it turns out that both of these sections just repeat the drum patterns of the section before them, like this…

…which leads me to suspect that they were probably added midway through the production process after the LinnDrum had been committed to tape, by editing the multitrack. And I can see the reasoning too, because those copied additions give the main body of the song a more regular structure, comprising two iterations of Solo-Verse-Prechorus-Chorus-Chorus.

But it’s not just the drums that vary between song sections, because the bass part is similarly nuanced. Despite the repeating chord progression, every single eight-bar section of the song delivers a slightly different bass line, with just one notable exception: Chorus 2b, where the bass appears to have been copied from Chorus 2a alongside the drums, suggesting to me that this tape edit was done later in the production process than the edit that created Solo 1. The fact that George Michael put such effort into adding musical variety to this arrangement, a pale imitation of which could easily have been thrown together in a fraction of the time via lazy copy/paste repetition, speaks volumes to me about his work ethic. Plus, assuming my hunches about the tape editing are correct, I think it’s also fascinating to get a glimpse into the creative process from which this song’s final structure developed.

The arrangement overall is very smartly managed too, building up progressively from each of the two verse sections by virtue of progressively richer/brighter synth layers and vocal doubletracks/harmonies. But my favourite aspect of the arrangement is (to formulate a sentence that I never, ever thought I’d find myself writing) the sleighbells! You see, they don’t just jingle all the way, whatever you think you may remember about this song – they actually only appear during the Solo sections. This is genius, because if there had been sleighbells constantly battling against the lead vocal in the upper spectrum, there’s no way the mix engineer would have been able to bring out the characteristic breathiness of George Michael’s voice as effectively. In fact, I might even hazard a guess that one reason for editing in the extra Solo section near the start of the song might have been to provide the sleighbells an earlier opportunity to signpost the song’s seasonal nature without conflicting with the voice.

All these fun things notwithstanding, there is one aspect of this song that does leave me scratching my head. When I lined up the single version against the longer ‘Pudding Mix’ version on Wham’s contemporaneous Music From The Edge Of Heaven album, it immediately became apparent that they were drifting out of sync with each other. Tempo-mapping them both revealed that the album version remains at a pretty regular tempo throughout the song, whereas the single version speeds up by around 1bpm during Solo 1 (0:55-1:11), and then very gradually slows down (by roughly 0.5bpm) over the next 32 bars before stabilising from Solo 2 onwards. Given that the LinnDrum was one of the earliest commercially available drum machines, without the benefit of today’s sophisticated tempo-mapping facilities, the simplest method of implementing such tempo changes would have been to tweak the final tape’s varispeed control in real time during the mastering process – a speculation that’s corroborated by the overall pitch rise (of roughly 15 cents) you can hear if you compare the first and second choruses side by side. Chorus 1: play_arrow | get_app Chorus 2: play_arrow | get_app

Regardless of how the single’s tempo profile was created, though, it does seem rather odd to me. If the idea was to subliminally give the verse a bit more pep, then why not do a similar move during Solo 2 as well? Or if you’re not going to do that, then why slowly reduce the tempo after Solo 1 at all? After all, if the extra pace helped the first verse, shouldn’t it help the rest of the song too? I can’t imagine that any concerns about the single’s overall duration are pertinent here either, because comparing the single with the album shows that the tempo changes make less than two seconds’ difference to the song’s running time. In fact, even if the higher tempo at the end of Solo 1 had been maintained for the rest of the song, that still wouldn’t have shortened the overall duration by more than about three seconds.

It’s a Christmas mystery…

As the decades-long Loudness War begins to abate, there are many reasons to applaud artists who decide to master their songs at lower integrated loudness levels in order bring greater dynamic range to their music. This Gigi Perez song, for instance, boasts a loudness range of more than 12dB, well over twice that exhibited by many recent high-profile chart releases – for comparison, none of Beyoncé’s ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’, Sabrina Carpenter’s 'Please Please Please', Boy Genius’s 'Not Strong Enough', or The Beatles’s 'Now And Then' manage a loudness range of even 6dB.

What people don’t often talk about, however, is that by preventing producers from cheaply conjuring musical momentum/energy out of thin air via simple volume increases, the Loudness Wars effectively put more emphasis on delivering a sense of build-up and intensity via other means – more compelling performances, say, or more creative songwriting and arrangement. And this is where ‘Sailor Song’ falls down for me, because it feels like it’s using its dynamic range as a sticking plaster, lending a superficial veneer of excitement to a production that otherwise generates precious little of its own. The harmony certainly provides no musical impetus, ploughing the same three-chord E-G_#m-B furrow for basically the whole song. The acoustic guitars grimly beat their 3/8-3/8-2/8 strumming pattern into submission throughout too, a monotony that’s hardly alleviated by the all-but-featureless sustained synth-bass line and (from 2:26) scarcely more interesting solo electric guitar.

All of which shortcomings might have been more forgiveable had the vocals been genuinely arresting, but once the surface appeal of their Bon Iver-esque indie sonics wears off, there seems to be so much working against their long-term effectiveness here. The melody is tediously repetitive, for a start: not only are the first and second halves of each verse pretty much identical, but the choruses continuously grind out the same four-note melodic contour in every. Single. Bar. The unrelenting vocal layering is also a poor production choice, in my opinion, not only because it makes the melody feel even more pedestrian (by virtue of the fact that several parts are having to conform to each other rhythmically), but also because it emotionally homogenises and distances the lead singer from us as listeners. The homophonic parallel-third backing-vocal harmonies in the second verse feel utterly unimaginative as well – and haven’t we all honestly had enough of rhyming “knees” with “begging…please”?!

This might be good enough for a few seconds on a TikTok video, but I can’t believe I’m the only person who expects more from a full-song listening experience.