What a gorgeous-sounding record this is! The drums and guitars are so understated and rootsy, allowing the three vocalists all the room in the world to float deliciously over the top amidst a halo of high-frequency ‘air’, but without the slightest smidgen of harshness or excessive sibilance. This production goes straight onto my own reference-track shortlist for breathy female vocal timbres – although I’ll doubtless curse myself as soon as I try to get any mix of mine to compete with it…
Musically, though, the highlight of the song for me is the final chorus, where the chord progression is changed at a couple of crucial moments to great effect. Firstly, the section opens at 2:36 on a wonderfully sonorous Eb chord (the chorus’s tonic), whereas the previous chorus began with an interrupted cadence onto a distinctly unstable C7sus4 at 1:41. For me, this gives the arrival of the latter section a much greater sense of arrival and release, which doesn’t seem like a bad move structurally. And the second cool chord change is the insertion of a genuinely surprising Gb chord midway through the second chorus’s fourth bar at 2:47, over which one of the backing vocals launches itself to a new high harmony D, sustaining it juicily as a ninth over the following C7sus4.
Ah, it’s the kind of thing we musos live for…