Entertainment For Lively Minds
Big Sound, small subject
Posted by Mavis Diles on 8 October 2010 - 12:51pm.
I like it when a song has a sound that is slightly at odds with the subject matter. Chris Rea's Stainsby Girls is a good example; done in the style of Springsteen's Born in the USA, actually a little folk song about the girls from his local school when he was a kid. The big gated snare drum, honking sax solo, but a very small subject. It would mean nothing to someone from the USA, and precious little to people from most of the UK too (mind you, US songwriters do this all the time).
I think it's rather a lovely song:
Any other examples of sounds that are disproportionate to the song content?
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Deacon Blue: Dignity
There's a man I meet
Walks up our street
"He's a worker for the council
Has been twenty years
And he takes no lip off nobody
And litter off the gutter
Puts it in a bag
And never thinks to mutter
And he packs his lunch in a Sunblest bag
The children call him Bogie
He never lets on
But I know 'cause he once told me
He let me know a secret
About the money in his kitty
He's gonna buy a dinghy
Gonna call her Dignity"
All set to a riff that appears to come straight from The Whole Of The Moon (which couples a huge lyric to a huge sound). It's the lunch in a Sunblest bag that gets me, it's a tiny detail for such a huge sound.
Interesting connection
Same producer as Stainsby Girls. Chris Rea plays on that Deacon Blue album too.