Woke up feeling lousy. It's grey and rainy out. Not really up for hitting the gym today, I instead grab my laptop, and head downtown to the coffee shop. Coffee shops are wonderful. Not only do they give you live-sustaining coffee, many of them offer free WIFI.
This coffee shop (locally owned, BTW) is very music-positive. Promoting the local music scene is part of their operation. This includes piped in music, and as I was browsing around my usual Interweb-haunts, over the speakers come a cover version of the English band Electric Light Orchestra's Mr. Blue Sky. Instant smile! I'm not sure what the band was that was covering the tune, but the original song was released in 1978 on ELO's seventh studio album, Out of the Blue. The song was written by ELO's frontman Jeff Lynne, and according to him, it was directly inspired by a glorious brightening of the weather while he was holed up in a Swiss chalet trying to write the follow up album to A New World Record.
What makes this song so interesting is all of the stuff that's going on. In addition to the traditional form of a pop song, with mostly traditional instrumentation, there is the famous "talking piano" part. Actually, it's a vocoder that we hear "singing" the lyric Mr. Blue Sky. A vocoder is an analysis and synthesis system that is used to record, manipulate, and reproduce the human voice. It is a technology that is used mostly for voice scrambling, encryption, and voice pagers, among other things.
Throughout the song, usually just at the end of a verse, you can also hear what sounds like a brake drum: four beats, signalling in the next verse. Clang, clang, clang, clang! As much fun as the song is, the really cool part comes at the end, when the mood changes, and the orchestration takes over. An orchestra and real or synthesized choir (Can't tell which. Could be sampled, I suppose. Anyone out there know?) brings the song to new high. It really sounds like the clouds parting and sunlight pouring in. I guess if that kind of thing had a sound, that is. Brilliant composition, nevertheless, and one of a few truly uplifting rock songs! Also, if you listen to the very end, you can hear the vocoder again, saying what sounds like "Mr. Blue Sky-ee", but is actually saying "Please turn me over." When the song was released, it was on vinyl records, which had to be turned over to hear the rest of the album.
Other musicians have noticed the usefulness of the vocoder. For example: Styx used it in Mr. Roboto to create the sound of a robot talking, and Pink Floyd used it with the sound of a barking dog in their Animals album.
Now, if only the weather would take the hint and get less gloomy. Monday's are rough enough.
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