“There’s no love song fin­er, but how strange the change from major to minor, every­time we say good­bye.”

In the line above from Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Good­bye,” we’re moved from the hap­pi­ness of love to the sad­ness of part­ing, and so too do the chords change, from major to minor, thus sub­tly chang­ing the mood of the song. The tech­nique is a clever exam­ple of a song­writ­ing method called “word paint­ing,” or prosody, when lyrics are accom­pa­nied by a rhyth­mic, melod­ic, or har­mon­ic shift that com­ple­ments their mean­ing. We hear it in pop music all the time, draw­ing our atten­tion to sig­nif­i­cant moments, and shap­ing the emo­tion­al impact of words and phras­es.

The word “Stop,” for exam­ple, appears over and over in pop music, as the video above from David Ben­nett shows, accom­pa­nied by a full stop from the band. Span­ish-lan­guage hit “Despaci­to” (which means “slow­ly”) slows the tem­po while the tit­u­lar word is sung. There are innu­mer­able exam­ples of melodies ris­ing and falling to lyrics like “high, up, down” and “low.” A more sophis­ti­cat­ed exam­ple of word pain­ing comes from Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah,” which tells us exact­ly what the music’s doing — “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.”

As inge­nious as these moves are, Ben­nett goes on to show us how word paint­ing can be “even more nuanced” in clas­sics like The Doors’ “Rid­ers on the Storm.” As Ray Man­zarek him­self explains in an inter­view clip, his key­board part led to an ono­matopoeia effect: lyrics, melody, and sound effects all com­ing togeth­er to express the entire theme. Ben­nett shows in his sec­ond word paint­ing video, above, how stu­dio effects can also be used to sync music and lyrics, such as the murky eq effect applied to Bil­lie Eilish’s voice on the word “under­wa­ter” in her song “Every­thing I Want­ed.”

Exam­ples of effects like this date back at least to Jimi Hen­drix, who pio­neered the stu­dio as a song­writ­ing tool, but word paint­ing as a song­writ­ing method requires no spe­cial tech­nol­o­gy. The Jack­son Five’s “ABC,” for instance, lands on E♭ and C dur­ing the line “I before E except after C,” and the famous cho­rus is sung to the notes A♭, B♭m7, and C. Here, the notes them­selves tell the sto­ry, sim­ple but undoubt­ed­ly effec­tive. All of the exam­ples Ben­nett adduces may come from pop­u­lar music, but word paint­ing is as old as poet­ry, which was once insep­a­ra­ble from song. For as long as humans have com­mu­ni­cat­ed with lit­er­ary epics, funer­al rites, tragedies, come­dies, and love songs, we have used prosody to shape words with music, and music accord­ing to the mean­ing of our words.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music Pod­cast Explores Song­writ­ing with Crack­er, King Crim­son, Cut­ting Crew, Jill Sob­ule & More

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bri­an Eno kept busy dur­ing last year’s pan­dem­ic, telling the L.A. Times this past Jan­u­ary about one of his lat­est ideas, an open source Zoom alter­na­tive, just one of any num­ber of projects he’s kick­ing around at any giv­en time. One of the most pro­lif­ic and influ­en­tial artists, musi­cians, pro­duc­ers, and thinkers of the past sev­er­al decades, Eno is such a cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion, he war­rants his own appre­ci­a­tion day. That’s just what he got on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1988 when KPFA (a radio sta­tion in Berke­ley, CA) turned over an entire day to host­ing Eno for wide-rang­ing inter­views, sto­ries about his col­lab­o­ra­tions, and con­ver­sa­tions about the musi­cal gen­res he invent­ed. He even takes ques­tions, and his replies are illu­mi­nat­ing and urbane.

Eno’s always been a gen­er­ous and wit­ty con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist. The Bri­an Eno Day broad­cast hits on near­ly all of the major high­lights of his career up to that point, with a com­pre­hen­sive overview of his work, ear­li­er inter­view record­ings, and loads of songs and excerpts from his exten­sive record­ed cor­pus. Much of this work is obscure and much of it is as well-known as the man him­self. One can­not tell the sto­ries of artists like U2, Talk­ing Heads, and David Bowie, for exam­ple, with­out talk­ing about Eno’s guid­ing hand as a pro­duc­er. Eno’s renowned for found­ing glam rock pio­neers Roxy Music, invent­ing ambi­ent music, and for his gen­er­a­tive approach­es to mak­ing art, whether on small paper cards or in soft­ware and apps.

Eno once said his first musi­cal instru­ment was a tape recorder, and he’s been obsessed with record­ing tech­nol­o­gy ever since, deliv­er­ing his influ­en­tial lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” in 1979 and demon­strat­ing its prin­ci­ples in all of the music he’s made. In these inter­views, Eno not only dis­cuss­es the major plot points, but also “reveals such tasty tid­bits as his dis­like for com­put­er key­boards; an admis­sion that even he does not know what his lyrics mean; a pref­er­ence for the music of Stock­hausen’s stu­dents rather than that of Stock­hausen him­self; and the dif­fer­ences between New Age, Min­i­mal, and Ambi­ent Music,” notes the descrip­tion on Inter­net Archive.

In the 33 years since this broad­cast, Eno has pro­duced enough music and visu­al art to fill anoth­er 10-hour day of inter­views and overviews. But his meth­ods have not changed: he has pur­sued his lat­er work with the same open­ness, curios­i­ty, and col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it he devel­oped in his first few decades. Hear him in his ele­ment, rang­ing far afield in con­ver­sa­tions about archi­tec­ture, genet­ic evo­lu­tion, and his own video instal­la­tion pieces. Eno rarely gets per­son­al, pre­fer­ring to talk about his work, but it’s humil­i­ty, not secre­cy, that keeps him off the top­ic of him­self. As he recent­ly told a Guardian inter­view­er, “I’m not f*cking inter­est­ed at all in me. I want to talk about ideas.” Hear Eno do exact­ly that in 10 hours of record­ings just above.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Presents a Crash Course on How the Record­ing Stu­dio Rad­i­cal­ly Changed Music: Hear His Influ­en­tial Lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” (1979)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Ori­gins of Ambi­ent Music

Hear Bri­an Eno Rein­vent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness