The Song Fight Bulletin Board

The band Duran Duran turns 40 this year. As a kid I saw their videos a lot on MTV but I hated their music. I think it wasn't till like 15-20 years ago that I opened my mind up to their music more. They wrote a lot of really great pop hits. The bass playing is so amazing to me in particularly but they're just a really good tight band. Pandora has a great hosted career retrospective that's like a "behind the music" type thing (or like a podcast episode, to try to make a more recent reference) with interviews with the band members and associated contemporaries, going through their career song by song. It sounds like they had that magic going where everything just came together. "Oh, I was playing around with a new delay effect and then the guitarist showed up and wrote chords and then the bass player and drummer showed up and put an amazing rhythm to it then the singer showed up and immediately started singing this catchy melody." Anyway, I thought this was cool, and it's free to listen to if you have an account. (Oh, US only though, sadly.)

https://www.pandora.com/playlist/PL:562 ... 1756780791

We saw them in concert in Atlanta, on their reunion tour a few years ago. They were good but I never realized before how much scat singing they put into their songs.

Ha. I was paying more attention to that, listening to this playlist. There's definitely a lot of non-verbal vocal hooks. I'm a fan of such things when done well and not overused. So far listening to the first 1/4 of the playlist it hasn't seemed like too much.

Yeah it wasn’t too much, but it was like “oh, he’s doing it in this song too! I never realized!”

I'm also noticing they love key changes. They have them in a lot of their songs and most of the time I think they manage to put them in relatively subtly, like it's not some awful railroad ratcheting up, it's more like the verses are in different keys from the choruses.

But who doesn’t love a good ol’ trucker’s gear change now and again...

Oh man, I hate that!

I think I may have spoken too soon about this playlist. The band really lost the plot after their third album and kinda never found it again till their 2015 Mark Ronson produced album where it sounds like Mark Ronson was like "We're going to make a song like one of yout hits from your first three albums" "Now we're going to make another song like one of your other hits from your first three albums" etc. Also the "insights" start to trail off in interest level.