There There - The Analysis Will Be Over Shortly I Promise!
Radiohead's 'There There' is one of my favourite songs of all time. I thought I'd take a bit of time to try to unpack what makes this song just so fantastic. Of course there is always the danger that analysis can destroy the beauty of that which is previously unexamined. I'm hoping that the following thoughts will actually help you appreciate the song even more, but I'm sorry if that doesn't work out! I'm going to filter my thoughts through the following question:
What makes this song so good?
If you haven't listened to it, here's a (slightly abridged) version with a typically creepy and iconoclastic Thom Yorke film clip.
Macrosongenomics
One way to examine this song is to look at it from a macro level, asking: What are the large-scale devices that make this song sound so good? I'm going to keep it to just one.
Tension
I would argue that perhaps the greatest musical concept Radiohead excel at exploring is tension. Many of their songs feature a lot of harmonic tension (take the lack of major or minor tonality in 'The Numbers' for example, or the dissonant synths in 'Bodysnatchers'), but their use of textural tension is even more pronounced. Long before EDM made the "drop" a ubiquitous pop culture word, Radiohead have been exploiting the build up of tension that results from, quite simply, not getting bigger when you would expect, and then getting bigger much later. (Of course, long before Radiohead were using this device, countless composers and artists were using suprisingly-late-bigness for their own music.)
If you're looking for a classic example of this, 'All I Need' from their 2007 album In Rainbows is painfully good. After almost 3 minutes of the texture (and dissonant harmony) remaining almost completely static, suddenly the drums go to a really wide ride cymbal, a piano and synth come in, the other instrumental parts become much thicker, and Thom Yorke's vocals soar over the top. This tension and release is so renowned that even jazz musicians like Robert Glasper want to cover 'All I Need' just so they can bring their audiences towards the climax as well.
In 'There There', the static airy drum groove, rhythm electric chords and gentle bass occupy around 2/3 of the song. In fact, if we map the texture over time, you can see a distinct change at the Bridge (around 2:50 in the video above).
In the texture grid I've created, I've given instruments more pale colours to show the lack of intensity of their part, and darker colours to show more intensity. As you can see, from Verse 1 to the Interlude, things remain pretty static, both in terms of the actual instruments playing and the intensity of their parts. Normally songs will have more ebbs and flows, with a typical chorus occupying the more intense, and thus often texturally thick, parts. The tension that Radiohead exploit is to wait. Rather than building into the first or even second chorus, they play them pretty much the same as the intro.
You can then see that from the first Bridge, a lead electric part is introduced, which begins to thicken the texture, but then the real 'drop' happens at Bridge 2, where the drums go to a full beat on the ride cymbal, the bass becomes much heavier, and the lead electric part thickens as well. The difference between Verse 1 and Bridge 2 is stark, but it's also quite sudden because the higher levels of intensity haven't been explored in the song yet.
Too much information? We'll move on.
Under the Microsongescope
Radiohead's use of tension is powerful, both in this song and many of their others. But if we zoom in a little more, there are a number of more detailed techniques that make the song unique and most importantly good. Tension continues to be a recurring theme though.
Static Drum Groove
I mentioned this briefly already, but the drum groove in this song stays completely static from the beginning until the drop at 3:33. It is so static, in fact, that live the band will often have Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien (the two guitarists) playing the groove along with Phil Selway the drummer.
The other really important thing about this groove, apart from the fact that it is so static, is that there is tension in the fact that the drum groove doesn't use the kick or snare drum, the most common sounds associated with a groove sounding 'finished' or 'settled'. By playing only on various toms and their rims for three and a half minutes, this static groove has a feeling of wanting to resolve, which is only brought about by Phil Selway's drum groove drop into the ride cymbal pattern late in the song.
The Riff
One of the really interesting things about this song is the opening riff that begins at around 0:06 in the video above. Riffs are meant to be catchy, but they can feature any number of notes, little licks or phrases, and usually are meant to be singable. The interesting thing about this riff is that it basically sounds like Thom Yorke is noodling on a Bmin7 chord. It's like he played the chord and then worked out all the ways he could hammer on and pull off notes around the chord on his guitar. And there you have it, it's a riff.
Somehow, despite the riff basically just being a chord plus a few friends on the side, it really works well as an introductory sound. And it becomes particularly useful because this riff sits underneath the first half of the chord progression in the verse, allowing the riff to carry into multiple sections. But more on that below.
Chord Progressions
Radiohead's songs often feature a really interesting array of chord progressions, which are often quite chromatic. This song has three different chord progressions, which are as follows:
Verse: || Bm | | | | G | D/F# Em | G | D/F# Em ||
Chorus: || A | | D/F# | | G | D/F# Em | G | D/F# Em ||
Bridge: || Bm | | | | Dm | | Am | |
|Em | | | ||
When you lay the chord progressions out on top of each other, a few really interesting things come out:
1. The first two chord progressions are totally diatonic. Even though Radiohead love their tension, all the notes in the first two chords come from the D major scale, and there are only 5 chords across the two progressions. Which brings me to point 2:
2. The second half of the verse and chorus progressions are the same. But you wouldn't necessarily notice it as a boring repetition, because the difference between the Bm chord (which is played as a riff i.e. broken up) and the | A |D/F# | is significant enough to make you forget about it.
3. The bridge chords are all minor. Here comes that famous Radiohead tension. If we were to get a bit technical about it, you could say that the chords move from Bm (the relative major of D, the home key of this song), up to Dm (the tonic minor chord), and then twice along the circle of 5ths, through Am and Em. The cool thing is that Am is just the V chord of D major in minor form, and Em is the II chord of D major, so they aren't actually very weird. But the concept of using all minor chords for a progression definitely adds to the goodness of this song.
4. The bridge chord progression is longer than the verse or chorus progressions, but not quite long enough. I say that because a 12 bar progression, however ubiquitous it may be in other forms of music, catches you off guard when you have been hearing 8 bar progressions for the whole song. It's just another way that Radiohead build tension into their music. The progression is actually four bars shorter than you would expect (because your ear will naturally tune itself towards 2,4,8,16, and 32 bar progressions) , and so it almost seems to skip its way round to the next bridge. This is actually really handy, as the bridge progression is played 6 times in a row, which normally would bore you out of your brains.
So There You Have It...
After you've read this, you should all be able to go away and compose like Radiohead and make a million dollars and be famous etc. It certainly would be interesting to try and compose using this model! But maybe I'll save that for another post.