Sam Phillips's One-Note Wonder
Sam Phillips. Photo by Joshua Smelser. |
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.
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