I was particulary struck by the warmth and fullness of the bass part that enters with the line “don’t you want me like I want you” at 0:31. Part of this is just a product of the underlying bass-synth programming, which delivers not just a strong fundamental frequency, but also at least five harmonics above it that are healthy enough in level to be clearly visible on a spectrum analyser. But the other important component, to my ears, is the brassy layer that doubles the main bass synth. (Whether it’s real brass or synth brass I couldn’t vouch for, but it sounds real enough to remind me of one of the stock-in-trade classical arrangement-enhancement tricks I’ve been relying on for years: using tubas and trombones to add a strong open-12th component under any kind of grand orchestral texture.) The first secret to its effectiveness here is that the sound’s opening ‘rasp’ gives a sense of power, almost like distortion, but that this then decays quite rapidly so as not to mask other more important elements of the production – most notably the vocals. But there’s also the fact that this brass layer has a wide stereo image that makes the bass line feel like it wraps right across the stereo image, yet without compromising the mono-compatibility of the main bass synth’s lower frequencies.

From a musical perspective, though, it’s the middle section’s harmonic pattern that most intrigues me. You see, the main chorus chord progression is basically a four-bar pattern of Ab-B_b-Cm-E_b, but the middle section then changes to Cm-B_b-E_b-C. However, there’s something that seems very familiar about this new pattern in this particular context, which makes me wonder whether the two progressions exhibit any kind of structural similarity that my subconscious might be picking up on. For example, I notice the way that the rising A_b-B_b root progression in the first two chords of the chorus becomes a falling C-B_b root-progression in the middle section; and that the rising C-E_b root progression in the third and fourth chords of the chorus becomes a falling E_b-C root progression in the middle section. Could I be hearing those connections in some way?

It feels little tenuous, I agree. But this is what analysis is all about, as far as I’m concerned. Of course I can’t be certain that any of my feelings about the middle-section chord progression of this song stem from the root-progression transformations I’ve highlighted – it’s just a suspicion, really. But I have alerted myself to a new creative possibility, a new potential tool for tackling that perennial puzzle of trying to find a new chord progression to plug some gap or other in an otherwise completed song structure. And I’d say that even a questionable ideas-generator beats staring at a blank page. (Exhibit A: Oblique Strategies…)

What’s less in question for me, though, is the effectiveness of the major/minor mode switch between the middle-section pattern’s fourth chord of C major and its first chord of C minor, a tactic which avoids the typically structure-weakening effect of repeating the exact same chord from the end of one four-bar section to the beginning of the next.