MK.gee – Alesis: Why These Melodies Hit So Hard

Friedemann: Today I want to talk about a track that I've been obsessing about for about a month or two. ever since it was recommended to me by one of my subscribers here, D Patrick Baker1096, requested I do a McGee song. And love to. I think he's a fantastic artist. and I subsequently bought the record and have been listening to it for over a month now. I the record is good. This song here is fantastic. This is just one of the great, great tracks. love the vibe in this, love the performances. His guitar playing is absolutely astounding. let's talk about it. There's actually a lot to learn from it. So let's just jump in and we'll see where it takes us. So I've used a live video here because there isn't an official music video for the song. so it's not completely lip-synced. I didn't go through all that work, but just so you have something to watch, So let's talk about the lyrics first. They are very poetic, meaning I don't understand them. I always wish I can emotionally connect with you. Here, I think the music has to do a lot of heavy lifting for me and kind of get me into that mood. And it does. It does that perfectly well. and I think the words that were chosen here are really interesting. I like both of the headless and heartless. First of all, we have a beautiful alliteration and You know, less, less, and it's and it sounds really good. I just have no idea what it means. And I wish I was a little bit more on the artist's side in this. I just I want to get what you're talking about. You're not a poet, you're a liar, I'm not a liar, I'm just high. Those are some really cool lines. I I feel like it's about being torn, I think, but I'm not quite sure. Then the chorus kind of takes it in a different direction. I'm like, maybe it's about this, or is it about this? You know, there wasn't never a point where I was like, completely confident in understanding what this is about. And sometimes that's okay. you know, it is a very abstract song, but it makes analyzing it and giving you tips for how to use principles from this a little bit harder. It is just basically lines that sound interesting that revolve around a theme, but there's not really a strong structure to it. The verse could be interchanged with the chorus as far as the lyrics go. So I'm gonna have to leave it at that, unfortunately. let's talk about one of my favorite moments in this, which is this line at the end of the first stanza. Both of the headless and heartless dancing with themselves. I think this is a fantastic melody for a couple of reasons. I love the the skips, the jumps in this from A to E, and then later from F sharp to A. think those are pretty cool. I think my favorite thing about this though is that run at the end. Which moves from the one of the chord to its fifth. And it's a type of run we don't really hear that often. Most often when we hear runs, they revolve around, you know, the one to five. Like that seems to be a much more comfortable. range where people like to do runs a lot, you know, running from five to one or something like that, or from three to seven back to one. That's like the typical thing. We don't hear one to five all that much because we have to skip past the seven and the six, neither of which have a really str I mean this the the flat six here I d I guess does have a pull downwards. But I it's it's I'm not sure it is. But I really like it. It's just so odd. The first time I heard it, immediately my ears were drawn to it and was like, okay, that's cool. Like what's happening here? It is basically just one to five, but I don't know. It it felt fresh and it felt like something I hadn't heard before. Chords wise, here's what's going on. We're essentially in D major or G Lydidian, however you want to look at it, G to A to D to B minor. Very simple chord progression, four, five, one, six. My favorite thing about this section is just the way McGee performs this line. There's actually more lyrics to to it than what we see here, but what we hear, like he swallows a lot of the words, we don't hear those words. What we hear is why we coside to people I don't even like. And I love that juxtaposition of very staccato, very short, with a more legato line. I think it's I love that first line. I mean it's so funky, so groovy. I love the rhythmicality of it as well, like landing on the one end. And then the three and four. I love the sort of cross-rhythmic thing that's going on with that, you know, moving in threes for a short moment. then we have another one of those runs going from C sharp to A, so the third to the one of the chord. And then later on from the third of the one again, where we have to people I don't even like. So again, minor third to one of B minor. There's a thing in indie pop or indie folk where artists will swallow a lot of the words and it's hard to make out what they're saying with a kind of thing like this. And Mickey definitely does that as well. I really like that. I really like that vibe. So it definitely gets me when I'm when I'm listening to it. It's like I immediately am fully in. It feels like somebody who's singing more to themselves and they're singing to us or for us. It feels like they're just doing it for themselves and it's a more introverted thing. that's what I love about this. It's kind of teetering between fully introverted to these really funky, performative almost rhythms, you know? And I think it works. I think it finds just the sweet spot between the two. So here's the chorus. why me, or better why you, where we can fake it like any way we want to. Why bleed when we don't have to? Yeah, just shut your mouth. I only really want you. There's a lot of nonsense in this, as far as I'm concerned. Like, I mean, maybe Meki had a perfect idea of what he was saying with every line. For me, It almost feels like this was more about the rhythm of the words and the sound of it than it was about the meaning. I might be wrong, and I know you know fans of this artist will, you know, jump to his side immediately be like, no, of course, how could you say that? But you know, I know what the writing process feels like. And quite often we're like, yeah, I mean, that could mean this. And we kind of do that posthumously. We've written the line and we're like, it sounds so good. I guess it could mean this, you know. And so sometimes it can be both, but really where it comes from is just the sound of the line. I feel like that's what's happening here. And I don't mind it. I think it just sounds fantastic. But there are lines like escapism so easily. What the hell does that mean? Is that that's not proper English, is it? I'm not a native speaker, but that does not sound like proper English to me. That being said, it still works. And that's because, well, the music is really that good, and the words do lend themselves to be sung in that way. And I love the way he very loosely phrases that. It almost feels like he's just speaking. It doesn't even feel like rhythm anymore. It is actually very tightly phrased, like all the rhythms are sound. Like there's no moving between lines or something like that. There's no in between, but his timing is a little bit loose and it feels very natural as he sings it. So let's take a look at that chorus melody, which is another one of those highlights for me, where we start off this really massive melody. Why me? A better why you. moving all the way from G to A, spanning almost an octave. And using those beautiful slides that just add a lot of character to the melody. Again, they're very similar to the runs that we heard before. This time moving from the one to the six of the chord, is already a little bit weird. The six then resolves into a five over the A major chord. And then we have B resolving to A over the A major chord. So that's the two to the one. And again, the A becomes the fifth of the D major chord. So we have a pattern here where we move into the fifth of the next chord that's about to come up. So that's the opener of the chorus, which is later repeated with why bleed when we don't have to. in one of my favorite turns of that melody where we go up, you know, to the to the falsetto here, hitting an A. I think that's just a beautiful move. I it's such a shame that he doesn't do that live and just kind of plays it like the first half. But I absolutely love that note. For me is one of the the great standouts about this melody. then we have the B phrases, which are those very natural lines that we've talked about that feel like they're using words more as a rhythmic device. Well we can fake it like any way we want to. Yeah, just shut your mouth. I only really want you. Rhythmically, these lines are similar, but not quite the same. So we have fake it like and shut your mouth are the same. And then we have different pickup phrases leading into that when we can versus yeah, just. and then the second half of it is any way we want to. I only really want you. So those are again similar, but not quite the same. We have that ba-da-da-da, coupled with the lyrics, of course, as well, but they're rhythmically a little displaced against one another. And we do have a pickup phrase of three more notes on the second time when we hear that phrase. Let's move on. Let's talk about that drum groove as well. What a weird drum groove that is. Where basically it's a common thing, like doom, ga doom doom ga. The weird thing is just the hi-hat that it's not playing t t, but it's playing t t t t t t so it's very stop and go. It's quite awkward and weird. But I really like it. Again, I don't have much to say about it other than a little weird. I mean the whole thing does have a flow. There's no note that doesn't have an eighth note on it. It's just the kick drum taking over for the hi-hat on the two end and four end, but it is definitely a bit of a weird groove. Next we're going to talk about that backing vocal that plays throughout much of the track. Listen to that. Here's what that line looks like. Rhythmically quite interesting, I think. Typically, what we would expect for a backing line like this is to start on the one and to be as simple as possible. But here we have a melody that starts on the two, and we have some syncopation, right? You see that A landing on the four instead of the one, and then quite a bit of melodic stuff happening in bars three and four. So Quite interesting, also quite high, nicely staying outs out of the way of the vocals. Another thing I want to bring your attention to is the arrangement of this track. And I think this section here is such a such a weird one in the second half of the second verse. So let's take a look at the entire thing. We start the track with just drums, and very quickly the verse starts with the vocals coming in. We also have those backing vocals that we just looked at that like that really high line. We got guitars coming in and bass, basically playing the same thing. The guitar is doing some other stuff as well. That I can't quite place. It's really quite hard to hear. They're quite low, mostly just adding a little bit of crunch to the bass. But mostly this track is just the bass track. Mostly we just hear one monophonic line throughout this. Then we move to the verse continued, and weirdly enough, it is lower energy than the first verse. So it's the opposite of what we would expect. We take out the guitar and the vocals are a little bit higher now. So that's kind of I think what balances it out, and that's why that still works. But it's interesting that the guitars move out. And why did they do that? Well, very clearly, because the chorus then will open up, right, when the guitars come back in. so how do we move into the chorus? How is it signaled that we've moved to the chorus? Because as you saw when we looked at the melody, his melody doesn't start until later in the bar. So we have a very real issue of how do we signal to the audience that a new section has started? And this song does it by literally placing a bang sound effect on the one. It's like a that happens on the downbeat, and that signals to us, like, hey, something, something is happening. You better pay attention. Also, the guitars come back in. It is very subtle, but it is definitely a thing, and it helps with the stereo spectrum of it as well. The vocals are even higher. This is the highest part of the melody. and then in the last quarter of the chorus, a pad is added and we have an declining bass line. So that's new. That's also really cool. Then we move into verse two. We've already heard that, where we just have drum, bass, and vocals. We don't get that backing vocal line, we don't get the guitar. And then in the second half of that, the pad and backing vocals are added in, like another pad is being added in. Then we move to the verse continued. That's the section we just heard, where the pad moves higher. So we we're losing a lot of the warmth of the pad, so it feels more removed from reality. The backing vocals are more blurred, they're harder to hear. It feels like there's some effects on there. I'm not quite sure what that is. And in the second half of that, we add a more full pad so it sounds fuller. Then we move into the second chorus and also. This is the last chorus, which works exactly the same as chorus one, but we have some more vocal doubles to make it sound a little bit bigger. That's really all that's different from chorus one to chorus two. We end the song on a sort of vamp. It kind of ends on a, I would almost call it an improvisation. You know, it feels like very open-ended, the drums get a lot softer. We have a dick crescendo, the trump track just kind of slowly fades out. Let's talk about the chords here, because they're different than the verse. Almost the same. We still have that four, five, one, but instead of a six, we now get this really weird chord, which I would call a flat five half diminished chord. it's a little hard to say, really, because we mostly just hear the bass note of it. We don't really get the full chord. but coupled with that backing line that's still kind of singing a diatonic melody. you might also look at this as it just being, this is what the notation here refers to, as the sixth chord with its major six in the bass. So we hear B minor, but now with a G sharp in the bass. Now we don't really hear B minor because we don't really hear full chords. Again, it is just the bass, but I think that's the harmony that might be implied here. That's how he's using it. He f it feels like he might as well have played B minor here. And it feels like all of his melodies are essentially based on B minor. It's just that we have that really odd note, G sharp in the bass, to kind of add a little bit of tension. And it is honestly one of my favorite things in the entire track. I mean, this might be a musician's music type of thing, but I really, really love it when artists go for the really awkward and weird and and this throws you that line, when that chord hits, it's like, Whoa, that's I mean, first time I heard it, it was like What's going on? I love this. This is crazy. and how does it work? I mean, first of all, again, it it could be seen as just an extension to a B minor chord, right? So it's like, you know, half diminished B minor with this with its major six and the bass. It's one of the two. or you could take a look at it from a perspective of, well, it's G sharp. later resolving back down to G, right? Because remember we're going to the four chord, which is G major. So it's G sharp resolving back down to G. So the last chord just creates some kind of tension that then leads back into the first chord of the chord progression. And maybe that's a better way to look at it. What this has made me think about is that maybe I'm being too traditional with my tension in my songs. When really tension is just adjacent notes moving, resolving into a consonants. So why do I have to always only think about dominance and things like that when it really as in this case, right? We have a minor chord, basically with a, you know, major six in the bass. resolving, right? And it still kind of works. I actually quite like it. especially because we heard the sixth chord before, and now we're just hearing sort of a reinterpretation of it. It just turns it into a tense chord. I it's also half diminished chord, which creates tension by itself. It just doesn't resolve what we expect it to resolve, right? This is a chord that would typically resolve up to A, and instead it's moving now down to G. but it does what it's supposed to do, which is create tension that then gets resolved. It doesn't get quite resolved in the right way, in the proper way. But we have that G sharp moving down to G, so there's definitely that. don't know, it's a super weird one. And when you hear it the first time, it's definitely a what's going on moment. But it is genuinely one of my favorite things about the song. It's if it all had just been that same chord progression, if you would have stuck with the six there, I don't think it would have stand out to me as much as it does. We're going talk about this next week when we talk about memorability. But one of the things I want to talk about there is sufficient complexity. I think you want your songs to be sufficiently complex for for the brain of your listeners to want to keep working on it. Right? If your songs are too simple, this is what everybody always says, right? Keep it simple, make your songs as simple as you possibly can. I think there is always a risk in your songs not sticking because. they just go in one ear, one and out the other. This is a moment for me that does the opposite of that. This is a moment that gets stuck in my brain. I'm like, why did he do that? That's such a that's such a weird move. I've never heard that before. What's going on here? Like in my brain is trying to puzzle out like how does this make sense? Just hearing it over and over again. And it's one of the reasons I think why I keep singing the song. because it's not a very memorable song. There's not a lot of repetition on in it, right? The rhythms are quite loose. There's The lo the lyrics are all different. There's very little repetition there. I think the reason why it works is precisely because it is just complicated enough in this case. Also, while we're on the course, I should say that the chord progression does change a little bit at the end. So we hear what we just talked about: G to A to D to. Let's call it A flat diminished, because the A flat is a note that wants to resolve to G. G sharp technically, you know, it's just a music theory thing. Don't worry about it too much. We hear that chord progression three times, and then the fourth time we actually hear G to A to D, same as before. But then we go D to F sharp minor over C sharp. That's bar three. So there's two chords in bar three. And then bar four is B minor to B minor over A. And here I can say that those are probably the chords, and not just D to D over C sharp to B minor to B minor over A, because we have that pad coming in. And for the first time in the song, we really get like a more full sounding harmony where we can actually hear the chords. Why did Mackie do that at the end of the chorus? First of all, it's a beautiful descending baseline from D to C sharp to B to A That creates a sense of ending things. And it kind of moves us very gently back down to G, right? Because after A comes G. And then also it's the most resolved we've ever heard the chorus. We don't get that A flat diminished sound we had before. Now we get a very pleasing B minor there at the end. where we finally get to breathe a little bit. So there's a tension and release going on like that as well, where the first three times we had tension and the fourth time the line kind of breathes and ends on the court that we would expect. And here we come to another one of my favorite parts in this song. This is definitely another one of those that stood out to me first time I listened to it. It's the line that plays over the last part of the chorus we just talked about with the ascending bass line, and then the the the line that he riffs on over the last section of the song, which is the don't you wanna get a move on? Which is so wonderful, both in terms of the pitches of that that he's actually singing and especially the rhythms that he uses here. I love that he stays on C sharp for a little bit longer. Because he could have just done, don't you wanna get a move on? Which would have been fine, but I think the suspension is so much more interesting. I love that slide. Move on. That's beautiful. And I love the triplets in this. I think they are so powerful. And again, because he's switching so much from 16th notes to triplets, it feels very conversational. The whole thing feels extremely loose, almost like he doesn't even care about the rhythm. He he doesn't care how it aligns, right? It feels so Just as if he's speaking to us. And I love that. We talked about that when we talked about Messi by Lola Young. Does exactly the same thing. Very, very powerful. So, what is going to be my stealable technique for this episode? There's a bunch of things. I mean, I love the the backing melody that's kind of playing throughout the entire thing. I think that's really great. I love the drums with the hiat that just kind of starts and stops to create some suspense throughout the track. But it's gotta be the thing that I'm most excited about is that B minor turned into a diminished chord thing at the end of the chorus. I think that is just really exciting. where a chord is reinterpreted to create more tension. Like how interesting is that? And just kind of doing that without even worrying too much about what the music theory says. Again, there is a case we could make that it is, you know, tension and the G sharp resolves down to G, whatever it might be, right? But it is a nonsensical chord in standard music theory terms at least. But it just kind of is making me rethink of like, how far can I actually push the boundaries? of what tension and release actually means. And maybe it is really just about putting a note in a chord that is weird and awkward and then resolving it for the next chord. And not so much thinking in classical terms of, you know, it's gotta be a secondary dominant of some sort or whatever it might be. That to me is the clear standard about this, and it's what I love about this song. Apart from all those melodies we've talked about, because they are just fantastic. All right. If you have ideas, questions, suggestions for future episodes, fear not. You can send us an email at steal the song at holistic dash songwriting.com. That's steal the song at holistic dash songwriting.com. If you want to check out our wonderful courses and programs that we have to help you become a better songwriter and understand how to do all of this in your own music, we have a bunch of awesome courses at holistic dash songwriting dot com. Please do check those out. If you're just starting out with holistic songwriting and you've never taken one of our courses before, I recommend you start with next level songwriter, which we start every three months. It's a 12-week program that teaches you basically our best off in like a shortened, highly practical form where every day you get a video with instructions. that's my favorite course. I think it it turned out really accessible for all skill levels, but there's a ton of it in there, even if you are a professional musician, you're gonna find a ton of stuff here that you haven't seen anywhere else before. So that's it. I'll see you next week when we talk about memorability in songs. Until then, I'm Friedman Finteisen. Stay gefährlich.