"Some Velvet Morning"� (1967) Written by Lee Hazlewood, Performed by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra

[Rieux]

Strange, amazing. I love how they play with 3/4 and 4/4 time.

"Some Velvet Morning" by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra

[DonRocks]

Strange, amazing. I love how they play with 3/4 and 4/4 time.

It helps to have been born with absolute pitch in situations such as this.

It's not just the 4/4 to 3/4, but also the key signatures that make it "strange."

Hazleton starts out singing in a G-minor-y G-major, although he resolves his section in a very clear G-major.

Sinatra replies in the *very* distant key of F-major which she somehow modulates into G-major (these G-major modulations are why the transitions "match up" when Sinatra hands back to Hazleton, and the openings of each section also explain why the final exchanges (and also the Hazleton-to-Sinatra hand-offs) sound so musically unrelated.)

If you listen to Emil Gilels play the March from Prokofiev's "Love of Three Oranges" (which he starts at 1:20 in this video), you can hear him begin in A-flat major and after all the bizarre modulations, s-t-r-e-t-c-h the ending to a very, very weird C major, the ending chord being the very first time C major is even referred to in the entire piece. This is a disquieting march to listen to for the exact same reasons as "Some Velvet Morning" - the two are more closely linked than you might think.

God I'm smart.

"Why I Care About Some Velvet Morning" by Gilligan Newton-John on my-retrospace.blogspot.com.

[Rieux]

Don, this is fascinating.

[DonRocks]

A 1969 cover by Vanilla Fudge - who knew?

Strange, amazing. I love how they play with 3/4 and 4/4 time.

BTW, "The Star Spangled Banner" is traditionally written in 3/4 time, and played rather quickly, something like a waltz, with cymbal crashes on the 5th beat of each 6-beat measure, and the song moves quite briskly:

"Oh-oh SAY can you SEE <crash> by the DAWNS ear-ly LIGHT <crash> what so PROUD-ly we HAILED <crash>, etc." You can substitute this with:

"Oh-oh 1-2-3 1 <crash> by the 1-2-3- 1 <crash> what so 1-2-3 1 <crash>, etc."

But in Whitney Houston's famed version, she slowed it down by changing it to something closer to 4/4 time.

Feb 16, 2012 - "Whitney Houston's Star-Spangled Secret" by Chris Cuomo and Andrew Paparella on abenews.go.com

You can hear her slowing it down, even in the very first line (she gives SAY-AY 2 beats, for example), and it works really well - so well, in fact, that she most likely changed it forever for solo vocalists: