Then say, "Your hair's on fire, آپ must have lost your wits, yeah" Yeah, the sleight of my hand is now a quick pull trigger 'Cause dinner's in the kitchen, and it's packed in ice He be coming ہوم late, yeah, he's coming ہوم late آپ better run, better run faster than my bullet In his dad's closet, and with a box of fun thingsīut he's coming for you, yeah, he's coming for youĪll the other kids with the pumped up kicks He'll look around the room, but won't tell آپ his plan In realty Pumped Up Kicks was a dark song about a troubled and bullied young man deciding to shoot his classmates for wearing. Yeah, well so was Brown Sugar and boy were we wrong on that one too! It was happy, catchy even the video was fun! No one quite knew the lyrics but hey, it was cool! The song, in short, is a model for a basic songwriting principle that composers need to remember: In the balance between complexity and simplicity, the latter almost always wins out.Back in 2010 a song سے طرف کی three young men called 'Foster The People' was constantly playing on the radio (yes, we still had radio) called Pumped Up Kicks. The starkness of the vocal production in the verse helps give a sense of isolation and aloneness. It can be very effective to almost belie the profundity of a lyric by setting it to a cheerful, bouncy chorus. The lyrics are spellbinding, around the issue of gun violence and absent parents. “Pumped Up Kicks” succeeds because of simplicity. Songs that exhibit almost no change in tempo, instrumentation or harmony are risky, and demand a chorus that uses a strong hook, where the melody, and especially the song title, are fun to sing.
There are small elements introduced later in the tune, elements that help provide a small touch of variation: the whistling chorus (2’48”) and the chorus with reduced instrumentation at 3’03”. So the song succeeds with nothing but a simple 4-chord progression and a simple essentially-no-bridge formal design. These kind of “ear-worm” songs that you just can’t get out of your head need very little else to keep listeners entertained. This constant moving toward and away from the key note in quick succession makes the chorus very singable, very memorable, and extremely catchy. The chorus melody is constructed of short phrases, all of which either start on the tonic, or move quickly to the tonic. The chorus gives us that tonic pitch over and over again. For what? The natural resolution of a dominant pitch: the tonic note. In other words, melodies that sit in and around the dominant note tend to keep listener listening. The dominant note, more than any other note, injects a strong feeling of anticipation into a melodic design.
The verse focuses on the dominant (5th) note of the key (Eb major), acting almost as a plateau pitch. Even though it comes across as being quite different from the verse in both melodic structure and vocal production, listeners (probably subconsciously) hear it as a logical endpoint for the verse structure. Even in the instrumental break that happens after the second chorus, the chord progression stays the same: Fm Ab Eb Bb.Īnd there’s something very hooky about the chorus itself. The song is very catchy, and the simplicity of its form is key. Here’s a map of the formal design for “Pumped Up Kicks”: Our instincts usually tell us that using the same progression for a verse, chorus and bridge can be problematic: how do you create enough diversity and contrast to keep listeners hooked? “Pumped Up Kicks” does this by creating a chorus melody with a strong hook, and a melody that constantly reiterates the tonic note.
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Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 E-book Bundle, and become a top-level songwriter!įoster The People’s current hit song, “ Pumped Up Kicks” is a good model for a song that uses one set of chord changes that serves as the progression for the entirety of the song.
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