Seven Song Spin: The Rule of Three

I've written before about the default status of four in music, from band sizes to symphonic forms to meters. Maybe that's what makes four's main rival, the three, so alluring. From gymnopedies to country waltzes, from boleros to doo-wop, triple meters don't just hold their own against the foursquare; they are in a lilting, sinuous realm of their own. I've written about a number of favorites that fit this bill, from "Zebra" to the catalogue of Fiona Apple. Here's a playlist tailored specifically to pieces that count it off in 3 and 6.

To the tyrant, na-na: Los Lobos's 1988 "mariachi" record La Pistola y El Corazón is a must listen but the keeper track is the restless huapango "Las Amarillas," with its unique 2,3 accents.

The daylight at her command: I was never much of a Soundgarden or Audioslave fan, but Chris Cornell's 1999 hit "Can't Change Me" is as perfect a pop/rock song as I can think of, its production and performance ideally framing its self-dramatizing broodiness, and all of it churning over a roiling 6/8.

I killed a spider on the wall: Sondheim is no slouch in the threepartment, not only building a whole score around tripartite meters (A Little Night Music) but turning often to twitchy triplets in his accompaniment figures ("The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," "Getting Married Today"). One of my favorites, amid a score I especially cherish, is Pacific Overtures's wistful but unsentimental montage of colonialist assimilation and adaptation, "A Bowler Hat."

The old days of Liverpool and Rotherhithe: Elvis Costello doesn't venture into this territory very often, but the exceptions are memorable: "Sunday's Best," "The Scarlet Tide," "15 Petals," "The Delivery Man," a number of tracks on the Bacharach collab Painted From Memory, and the swirling, cryptic "New Amsterdam" from Get Happy.

Assez vif: Ravel's great "La Valse" and ubiquitous "Bolero" vie strongly for attention here, but I'm going to go with a piece I've written about in this space before: the plucky second movement of his masterful string quartet in F.

Take morphine and die: This playlist would not be complete without a folk waltz, and I'd say "Goodnight Irene" rivals "The Tennessee Waltz" as the granddaddy of this genre. I first heard it in Lead Belly's indelibly bleak rendition, which I almost hear as the plaintive flipside of his other great country waltz, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

We lie about each other's drinks: A colleague once told me that the difference between French and Viennese waltzes was in their melodic profile: The Austrians wrote chordal melodies, the Gauls wrote scales. I think there's some truth to that, though one of my favorites, Satie's "Je Te Veux," does a fair amount of both. Here I paired it with a song that whose grown-up melancholy has always haunted me, and which works beautifully in 3/4, the Motels' "Only the Lonely." I'm joined here by drummer Matt North, guitarist David Ellis, bassist Clint Davidson, violinist J'Anna Jacoby, and vocalist Abby Travis.