Where's That Confounded Bridge?

Bridges—also known as releases, breaks, or middle eights—are an unmistakeable marker of post-Beatles pop/rock songwriting. I am sure you can find stray examples of similar gestures in classical and popular music before the mid-1960s, but this songwriting convention really does seem to have proliferated in popular music directly from the template provided by the likes of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" ("and when I touch you"), "It Won't Be Long" ("Since you left me, I'm so alone"), et al. You can hear these unmistakeable musical change-ups everywhere from Dylan ("All my fathers, they've gone down" in "I Want You," or "It was raining from the first" in "Just Like a Woman") to Gnarls Barkley ("And I hope that you are having the time of your life" from "Crazy") and Rihanna ("There's no one to call" from "What Now"). Before the Beatles, most Tin Pan Alley and even Brill Building songs followed either a long-line AABA form or a verse/chorus structure; after the Fabs, you are as likely to hear a bridge in a pop song as not. (Many of today's pop songs fill this spot with a guest rap verse.) (More thoughts on this topic here.)

A typical bridge provides contrast in key, phrasing, or arrangement but still usually sounds like it's cut from the same musical cloth as the rest of the song. Three of my favorites, though, are ones that often pop into my mind seemingly independently of their main tune, I think precisely because they stand out so sharply from the rest. Indeed all three even sound a bit alike to me, and none are simply odd for their own sake but stand out sorely in service of the song.

The one that triggered this post is the pointedly sinister break of Blondie's "One Way or Another" (seen above in a rendition I cherish), in which the playful eighth-note bop of the chorus ("get ya get ya get ya") gives way to a stalker's sneer, doled out in searing whole notes:

Technically, I'm not sure that could be called a classic middle eight, since the song doesn't have a verse/chorus form from which this bridge provides a release. It's kind of just chorus and whatever-you-call-this-part, plus a tetchy instrumental break and a final manic bit of riffing over the chorus chords.

The bridge that Blondie song reminds me of might similarly not be a bridge at all. But it is the most sharply contrasting of the three-or-so sections of Cheap Trick's "Dream Police," and like the "One Way" bridge it has a creepy-crawly vibe appropriate to the song's Orwellian theme:

Actually, the song's true bridge (if you consider, as I do, "The Dream Police, they live inside of my head" to be the chorus, and "'Cause they're waiting for me, they're looking for me" to be the verse) is probably the break that comes later, in a section resembling the "talk is cheap" break in feel and harmony:

All of which leads me to the weirdest and greatest example evoked by these other two odd-man-out bridges: the unsettling, out-of-left-field break at the heart of Tony Romeo's brilliant Partridge Family classic, "I Think I Love You." This song is worthy of its own lengthy dissection, a baroque-pop masterpiece worthy of Brian Wilson or Left Banke, with its harpsichord curlicues and queasy major-minor alternation giving full value not only to the joyful title effusion but to its second-guessing follow-up line, "So what am I so afraid of?" While I'm gushing about it, I have to bow to the nagging doubt conveyed neatly by this little falsetto flourish:

But the song's voice of doubt soon takes on a darker register. After an almost distractingly jazzy instrumental break at the song's middle, a trap door opens and there's a whiff of sulfur, as we hear David Cassidy reach from his gut for a three chordless, searching measures:

If self-interrogation has a sound, this is it. It is as deeply strange to hear it in a sunny pop confection as it would be to see a barrel cactus in a rose garden. Though the moment quickly passes, the shadow it casts over the whole song—like the weird bridges of "One Way or Another" and "Dream Police"—is indelible, haunting. I don't know what it's all about either, but I've seldom been as content to not know.