Tuesday Tunes

Humans always build on what comes before: Apprentices surpass their Masters. New Cities are constructed upon old ruins, advances in technology allow us to more quickly advance technology. It happens in music too, without a doubt you could talk about the influence of one artist on another, you could talk inspiration or juxtaposition between two. More direct forms of building on what’s come before is Sampling and Remix. Today’s entries deal with interpolation…

The Song(s)
Song: ‘Out of My Head’ & ‘Bad Things’
Artist: ‘Fastball’ & ‘Machine Gun Kelly & Camila Cabello’
Album: ‘All the Pain Money Can Buy - 1999 - Hollywood’ & ‘Bloom - 2016 - EST 19XX * Bad Boy * Interscope’
Method of discovery: The radio I used to listen to when I was young and the girl I dated when i was older

Theory: Interpolation, also called Replay, is not sampling, but instead re-performance. To use an office example, sampling would cut out the words you want from one document and paste them onto another, Interpolation is reproducing those same words in your own document. In musical terms this may be taking the existing melody or lyric or both, and reproducing them for a different artwork. This is what links these songs together, the interpolation of the lyric and melody, and to a lesser extent, the Harmony.

Research: ‘Out of my head’ was concieved when Fastball’s Tony Scalzo was feeling like a a self described ‘struggling musician’. The chorus certainly speaks to the recurrent situations he describes in interviews, particularly because it repeats three times with only the Solo to interject between the first and second time round. ‘Bad Things’ takes the melody, and two lyrics from the chorus of Scalzo’s original. The new interpretation of the line ‘I never want to do bad things to you’, replacing ‘never’ with ‘only’ helps to both keep familiarity to the original and support the new subject of taboo desires. Where the original during this time hits a Major II, the new take sticks with a classic minor ii, again reinforcing familiarity. I particularly like that Scalzo is a fan of the Interpolation.

Personal thoughts: I think it’s fitting that a song that has been re-interpreted has lead to a remix of events in my life. I was sitting at work and I played Fastball’s song to break the silence, my colleague showed me the Camila and Kelly’s version in response, which lead to selecting the songs for inclusion as part of Tuesday Tunes. After all, I thought it sounded familiar. During proofing I asked my partner about the office analogy above, and described the songs. She reminded me of when I had played ‘Out of My Head’ for her once, and she had showed me ‘Bad Things’ in response. I suppose if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing twice.

Give it a go: If you enjoy how influence works, or like Deja Vu.

Give it a miss: If you’ve heard both, or don’t want to think of the theory behind it.

[links]
Spotify: Out of My Head, Bad Things, Tuesday Tunes
Artists: Fastball, Machine Gun Kelly, Camila Cabello
Wikipedia: Out of My Head, Bad Things, Interpolation
Other: SongFacts.com, Interpolation vs Sampling (YouTube), Billboard.com (Interview)