Monday, April 25, 2005

"I Wish I Could Go Back to College" from avenue Q

"I Wish I Could Go Back To College" from Avenue Q

I love this song because of the harmonies, and there are some great chord progressions and neat things musically.
It starts out with arpeggiated chords on the keyboard, and then the first vocalist comes in. She starts out with the melody of the song right away. It's a really catchy tune; it's pretty simple and mostly stepwise, but it appears a lot throughout the song, and is very memorable. It starts out very soft, only keyboard and voice. Every character sings the melody solo, singing about what they miss about college, and then they come in and sing it together. When they sing it together drums, guitar, and I think a few brass instruments join in. The tempo speeds up, and the dynamic is much louder. The harmonies are just great... I think that's the reason I love it so much. They aren't even hard harmonies, they are just catchy.
Next comes THE BEST PART. I play it over and over again. All the sudden all of the instruments drop out, and they sing accapella with all the harmonies. I love it. The instruments pop in every once in a while when they are switching to a new chord. I'm not sure what the chord progression is, but it's amazing. I love that it is accapella.To me, there is nothing better than voices harmonizing accapella. Also, the melody never appears in this part. It is all new material.
After this section, the song modulates to a new key. The melody comes back in, and it is sung very loudly, and there is a little bit of a descant part going on over top of it. Then, suddenly, we return to the very soft dynamic and slower tempo with nothing but voices and arpeggiated chords on the keyboard. The song ends with everybody harmonizing on a 1 chord.
I guess this could be considered rounded binary form. The beginning is the A section, the cool accapella section is the B section, and then when the melody returns through the end of the song is the return of the B section.
Guess that's it! As always here are some lyrics. These go with the cool B section:
'We could be sitting in the computer lab
4 am before the final paper is due
cursing the world cause I didn't start sooner, and seeing the rest of the class there too.
I wish I could go back to college, how do I go back to college?"

It's funny, because right now all I can think about is getting out of college :-)

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