CBC interviewed REM band member Mike Mills on the weekend. The hit End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) came out in 1987 and became a satiric and defiant anthem. So 30 years on, it has come back into the social consciousness and is being played again.
What did I find most compelling in the interview? He and Michael Stipe wrote the music first, then gave it to Peter Buck to write the lyrics, and this is what he came up with. They had no idea this music was going to say this much.
So while this song is about the 'ending', I started to wonder about how songs conclude. What kind of endings are there?
Some of the songs we were singing in the choir have a little 'hmm', 'ooh' or 'ahh' to signal the end, a sort of fade out. And some come to a leaping big chord and just stop. These are pretty fun to sing. We're singing a sort of Celtic orientation/religious/inspirational set of songs. What comes to my mind on the thumping last chord songs? Oscar Peterson and his big endings. I found this description of his version of West Side Story's Tonight (1962):
"Tonight swings mightily right from the downbeat. Peterson twists the melody and trades lines with bassist Ray Brown as drummer Ed Thigpen lightly stabs and jostles the duo with his sympathetic brush work. And then there’s the big pay-off — chorus after chorus of burning swing, round after round of exuberantly shouted choruses, and finally, a stop-time ending."
What are the most famous and enduring song endings? In our time, it is an easy answer: the Beatles ending for A Day in the Life. "Following the second crescendo, the song ends with a sustained chord, played on several keyboards, that rings for over forty seconds. " This ending is considered to have made history and is the #1 popular song endings.
For classical songs, the #1 ending is Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 – IV.
I haven't looked at the most interesting song ending lyrics, or the songs with long endings. There likely are more variants on endings - that's for another day. We likely have lots ahead.
Yesterday's weather was too cold for me to garden, so I created spring with some spring flower photo processing.
