This was going to be an item in my minutiae this month, but it became less minute.

"If You Go Away" is Rod McKuen's translation of the 1959 song "Ne Me Quitte Pas" by Jacques Brel. It has been covered by singers ranging from Frank Sinatra to Cyndi Lauper. Here are a couple of standard interpretations, which I do not particularly care for:

Julie Christmas is the vocalist for the bands Battle of Mice and Made Out of Babies, the latter of which is one of my favorite bands in the whole wide world. (They've made "Cooker," the first song off their 2008 album The Ruiner, available for free, so left-click here to listen to it in a pop-up or right-click here to download [it or listen to it in a tab.) Julie has a solo album due out [Update 2010: 2010.1109 is the big day. The song link I used to have here no longer works, so here's another one:]

This is the demo version of the first release from that album, which as you have probably guessed is "If You Go Away" and as you have probably also guessed I care for a whole heck of a lot.

Last month I wrote about someone who had ranked 185 Beatles songs using lyrics as the primary criterion, and noted that I generally don't care about lyrics; obviously, this is especially the case here, since everyone's singing the same words (though Julie does tweak a few lines here and there, such as changing "worship the wind" to "war with the wind"). The irony here is that I have extensive training in analyzing language, but am musically kind of retarded despite having written songs and played several instruments for fifteen years now. I've taken the occasional run at learning musical terminology, but it just doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense to me, nor can I translate what I hear into written form without a lot of trial and error. Part of the purpose of this article is to see whether I can communicate why I like one song better than another despite these handicaps and, with luck, become better at doing so in the future.

So. The first difference that jumped out at me between Julie's version and the others was vocal phrasing. The original French version doesn't even sound like singing to me — the rhythms are so close to those of speech that if not for the pitch differences I would have assumed it was one of those spoken-word pieces William Shatner did. The two clips above are pretty typical of how singers tend to approach the English version: in bursts. Bassey delivers each line as a machine-gun blast. Springfield's a little slower but there's still that gap between lines like she's reading each one off a separate cue card. Sinatra does this weird thing where he croons each line more slowly than the last, like the HAL 9000 singing "Daisy." Julie can't get away with that. She has a drum beat to keep up with.

Now, the instrumentation in the clips above consists primarily of syrupy strings, but there have been other versions of this song with drums. Here are a couple, which I do not particular care for:

In these songs, the drums just tap out a 4/4, sort of as an afterthought. Actually, I should qualify that assertion. I don't really get time signatures. The way I understand timekeeping in music is this: when I'm playing the drums, I hit the hi-hat to establish the tempo and the snare to establish the beat. I've been told that if it goes SNARE-hat-hat, SNARE-hat-hat, that's 3/4, and if it goes SNARE-hat-hat-hat, SNARE-hat-hat-hat, that's 4/4. It's also 4/4 if the snare falls elsewhere in that group: hat-hat-SNARE-hat is 4/4. As is SNARE-hat-kick-hat. In all of these cases, the snare still establishes that you've got a group of 4. That's easy enough. My question is, what's with the 4 on the bottom? Okay, it establishes that the elements of the sequence are "quarter notes," but a quarter of what? Don't say "a quarter of a whole note," because that's a tautology. How come if it goes SNARE-hat-hat-hat-hat-hat everyone tells me it's 6/8? Where did the 8 come from? I'm not playing any faster. This is relevant because the drum beat on Julie's verses goes (simplified) roll-hat-hat-SNARE-hat-hat. It's clearly a group of 6, but if I put it into my MOD tracker, that sequence comes out as 24 lines, not 12. So my inclination would be to call that 6/4. Why am I wrong?

Initially I thought the reason I found the drums one of the key things distinguishing Julie's version of the song from the others was just that I play the drums and always listen for them, but when I went back and listened to the song with a more analytical ear I found that, no, the drums really are the dominant element in the instrumentation. I mean, what else have you got? There are strings that create a simple pulse, some barely audible white noise squall to create tension that occasionally crests into a pretty electronic flourish (most notably in the gorgeous feedback line that introduces the choruses), and a few decorative piano notes here and there. But mostly it's a duet between Julie's voice and the drum kit. And with that realization came the understanding of why I so love the main change Julie made to the vocal phrasing of the song, which is found in the choruses:

Everyone else: Butifyou - STAY / I'llmakeyoua - DAY Julie: BUT - if you - STAY / (I'll) MAKE - you a - DAY

Julie's vocal is much more percussive than that of any of the other singers. This is true on the verses as well: when she sings "if you GO away" the "GO" functions much as the snare does in the drum beat. But it does not fall on the snare hit! The syllable that Julie emphasizes coincides with the snare roll — they're out of phase. This is all the more apparent when you get to the chorus. The main drum beat there is a crash cymbal or tom (it varies) that lasts for four tracker lines, then four toms of two lines each and a snare that lasts twelve, and once again, it's out of phase with the vocals:

I love this braiding between the vocals and drums. Of course, it certainly helps that the vocal can stand on its own! I sent this song to Elizabeth and asked her to guess who was singing it, and she guessed Shirley Manson — a good guess, I'd submit, on the basis that if you asked me to name the best voice actors of my favorite musicians, Shirley Manson and Julie Christmas would probably finish 1–2. I mean, the musicians in the Youtube clips up there are all trying to sound so emotional, but to me it's like old-time Hollywood acting... I don't really buy it. (When the army guy came home from the war in The Best Years of Our Lives, for instance, what I saw in the following sequence was an actress acting surprised rather than his daughter being surprised.) But I buy Julie Christmas. She puts so much into her music that I have yet to read an interview with her in which the interviewer did not express concern for her welfare. This isn't "if you go away, I will look out the window sadly, taking occasional melancholy drags on a cigarette" — this is more like "if you go away, I'm going to pound my head against the bathroom floor weeping until I pass out." Winner.

So in conclusion, I will say to Julie the same thing I say to every musician I love: please do not shoot yourself in the head. Thank you.

Return to the Calendar page!