How Could We Not Combine?

As I've written in this space before, sometimes it is all about the chords. As I recently noted about the beautifully convoluted bridge of Paul Simon's "Night Game," even non-musician listeners must know when they're hearing something odd and ear-catching—they may not be able to name it, but they're responding to a tangible property as elemental and physical as sound itself when they a hear sudden flat seventh chord or tritone substitution. It's the thing that makes everything from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to "Hey Ya," from "Creep"/"The Air That I Breathe" to a series of chorus lift-offs, pop out; one of the greatest compliments I've ever received was when someone said a song of mine that alternated major and minor sevenths in a flowing 6/8 pattern felt to her like a "mind massage."

When I got a request recently (from Jack Lechner, a producer and BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop colleague) to look under the hood of a minor standard I don't think I'd ever heard before, "I've Got Your Number," he specifically was hoping to "understand why it rewards basically endless relistening." I'm not sure I found the definitive answer but I think I hear what he's talking about.

The most famous song from the misbegotten Sid Caesar vehicle Little Me, it's got a sharp lyric by Carolyn Leigh and a wonderfully sneaky chart by Cy Coleman, a jazzman who happened to write for the musical theatre. They key to its success is in its marriage of those two elements; it's a song about essentially cornering someone, not with hostility or predation but with a certain teasing knowingness, as if to say, "Drop the act, I'm onto you, we belong together," and the song's harmonic structure keeps enacting a sort of unflustered, don't-change-the-subject move. That's because it keeps returning to its jazzy opening vamp, a V-ii progression (in the Peggy Lee version above it's C and G-minor), no matter how far afield the intervening chords go. It's a brilliant and subtle power move.

Cribbing a fake book chart I found online for the Peggy Lee chords (the melody's not exactly rendered here), the main vamp runs like this:

It then makes a totally logical leap to the same progression a fourth higher, on the song's ostensible home key of F (on "You ain't no Eagle Scout"). Then, in a progression that's adventurous but hardly rule-breaking, there's a modulation to D-flat, a major third down from the home key of F:

That second line has another major-third drop, from D-flat to A major, and all of this is lulling us along sweetly, with that insistent three-note pattern pivoting up and down in thirds and hitting the lyric "a lot" a lot, smoothing the way. That last turnaround, the E-flat-minor to the A-flat nine, is a seeming ii-V priming our ear for a glide path back to the I, in this case D-flat...but oh no. This is where the song wakes us up from that lull with a splash of cold water, reminding us who's callng the shots by swooshing back to the opening chords (C, G-minor, F, C-minor) as if the intervening middle eight didn't even happen!

Then the song does this rug pull again, taking a new path to the same result. Briefly, after another iteration of the C, G-minor, F, C-minor figure, the new middle eight looks like this:

That buildup at the end is an even more merciless fakeout than the one before. Our ear is ready after A-flat-minor and D-flat nine to go home to G-flat (or F-sharp). Going back to the opening chords instead, as it does here with puckish abandon, is essentially taking the song back to a home key of F natural—a disconcerting half step away from where the harmony was pointing us. This is what I think is now often called a baller move. Whatever you call it, it unmistakeably signals that the singer is in total control, and it's her world, we're just living in it. She has our number, in other words.