Sam Phillips's One-Note Wonder

Sam Phillips. Photo by Joshua Smelser.

Sometimes one note makes all the difference. Often it is a song's literal high note, as in Roy Orbison's "Running Scared" or Candide's "Glitter and Be Gay." More often for me, though, it's an appoggiatura or suspension, as I've written before, noting the way suspended chords power the yearning energy of a few key songs in Once and put the sunshine in "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" (the big notes there being on "morn-in' " and "feel-in' ").

Sam Phillips (who I've appraised in this space before) is a master songwriter, and among her many gifts is a knack for dropping these killer intervals into her melodies—I previously noted one, the final turn in the vocal line of her song "Lying":

In the chorus of "I Can't Stop Crying," she makes the hurt linger with an F# over an E-minor chord, which then unresolves to a E note over a D chord:

This taste for the add2 interval leads me to my favorite of all her one-note wonders. It looks simple—she just sings an F# over an E chord (on "lives"):

But oh, that small dissonance—resolved not down to the nearby E but leaping up in an arpeggio to B and E, then curling down to the D#, anticipating the change back to the B chord—is so potent that it's repeated in the song more often than the chorus; it even comprises the song's gritty guitar lead.

Phillips is no slouch with chords, either, and the whole song is built on a simple reshuffling of three bright majors that jostle each other in productive tension: B, E, and C#. Their rising and falling progression supports a lyric of deep ambivalence, of paradoxically tough vulnerability: "I climb so high to see/But the ground just teases me." It's a confession of sin, essentially, and a trust in forgiveness that may ultimately be a comfort but doesn't seem to make the pain hurt any less. It's a brand of tragic Christianity I have learned to embrace, and that gorgeous dissonance—musically and lyrically—is why I played this song at my Zoom church service today.