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Monthly Archives: June 2014

“Once in a Lifetime” and the case of the mysterious shifting downbeat

For over thirty years I’ve been disturbed by the location of the downbeat in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”. I listened to it dozens of times without paying a ton of attention to the meter, and naturally heard the verses like this: (vocal rhythms extremely approximate) and the choruses like this: Once […]

Bond songs

I recently went on a James Bond binge and watched all the canonical movies, ranking the theme songs as I went. Ethan Iverson graciously offered to host the resulting piece on his super usually-jazz-but-always-interesting blog Do The Math. It begins: One of the more entertaining categories of popular music of the last 50 years is […]