per minute, but yeah. just listened to the side by side, fun stuff, thanks for sharing

@Moderator: D-Mod I'm grateful for this forum! You raise an excellent point regarding the language or vocabulary we might use to talk about art. The underlying intrinsic of the song remains the same regardless of what we say about it, or our attempts to contextualize it. For example the guitar solo of Junkie Girl presents certain otherwise un-utterable "facts" of the song story; there is nothing to add to such content via commentary. When we listeners with our "ears" experience it, we know those facts are true; the art is coherent. The song's inner truth can only escape to us via the ear, both sensory and conceptual. That your ear was celebrated by our central figure merits elaboration, do tell! Part of the initially unilateral artistic connection is conversational though, that is to wonder, what would I have meant if I could have written and played that music that way, sung those words, made those specific artistic choices? WB wove his primitive together with his high nuance, leaving activity for we upturned faces down below of gentle analysis and wonder, and to compare notes with each other.

Thank you Matt for Just Another Story; great post. I'll pick up on one detail here that resonates with yours - yes I did go listen to Surf... which I will on the slightest provocation. This song is played over a G pedal in the bass as the thrilling harmony shifts around above it (reharmonizing the bass rather than the usual other way around). As a tone picture, the unmoving bass is the ground, earth, and the guitar is something moving above, the clouds, a glider. Toward the conclusion, somehow, the song texture deconstructs, Walt's groaning embellishments, the sole bass fill (the ground relents, opens), and the chanting is eventually left bare, continuing, and pulling up into a final unison, a... G#! Which is then the dominant of the the next song Book of Liars, in C#. Perfect, chilling. Not all details of high production relate to lush sensual comfort; hard poetry ("... 'chute never opens") requires a different approach as in this masterpiece.

Playing oblivious to the tension of the rhetoric, I would like to indeed comment on that which many have asked "HOW ABOUT?", to whit, 2:31 is heard Bb0 - the lowest pitch I know of in the WB/Dan catalog. Synth of course, in other words a half step below the low B of a 5-string bass. Counterexamples, anyone?

@Matthew Kerns interesting! I confess I'd skipped over AIA altogether. Here the verse is deprived of the final (extra) two beats, which to my ear kind of messes it up. Some raw speculation: maybe the vocal rephrasing is DF's compensation for the altered verse form (the "missing" beats), including (and this would be the raw part) that maybe he didn't like this arrangement! For whatever reason, I agree the result is iffy, at least on my first take. Formality aside, this lyric performance conveys to me the intent of "this story itself is not important anymore to me" which is fair. After all in this same era DF is bringing us vocals such as "On The Dunes" with an invested storyteller's passion.

@Moderator: D-Mod Ha! I was thinking as I wrote the previous, well someone will probably just hit me with Joni and make my points narrow - well there you go!  Right, I'd say she's transcendent. But in this context, we could say that her lyric phrasing is brush strokes short and long: All the people at this party, they've got a lot of s t y l e I'm like that black c  r  o  w  flying Of the darkness in men's minds w h a t can you say....  the blizzards come and g o My original response was to a misreading of Matt, that perhaps lyric construction was around harmony, and I wanted to say lyric synergizes with melody first, and in SD/WB very musically around rhythm. So not necessarily emphasizing complexity, but just effective and delightfully singable (think, arena crowds singing My Old School).  And Reelin' is a great example, the 12/8 grid affords very flexible phrasing to readily accommodate a cascade of verse words in their spoken rhythm without awkwardness, while equally supporting the solid shuffle chorus phrasing effortlessly.

@Matthew Kerns huh... just poking around various Beckeriana today... here's a detail with possibly a little backstory if anyone knows it. Noticing that Jack of Speed credits *Will Lee* on percussion. Maybe Will came in with his bass and by the end of the day(s) they went with Walter on the (amazingly tasty) bass part. Ha maybe Walter used Will's Sadowsky! Anyone know more about that session? Anyway it seems like it adds another angle to your point about doing whatever it takes in support of the song, even passing on like one of the top all time session guys to use yourself instead!

Phun aside, does anyone know what WB was playing on EMG?

May I add that Lunch With Gina presents a paradigm of perspicuous pocket-pushing pickwork, probably played on the Sadowsky, tone for days.

@Moderator: D-Mod Skating Backward: I think what we have here is not harmonic but rather rhythmic lyric synergy of which the Two were masters.  Let's look at some examples of what this could mean. As a baseline consider I Think I Love You (Partridge Family).  While admittedly a huge hit, the clownish lyric phrasing of the chorus made us snicker even in its day. Move up from near zero to the effective heights of Satisfaction (Rolling Stones); the guitar intro is the signature riff but the actual hook is the contrasting lyric phrasing of the main line, in the verse the emphasis is on "can't" and "no" while the chorus is "I" and "get". Higher still, run some of Got To Get You Into My Life (Beatles); the lyric rhythm of verse, pre-chorus and chorus shout all dazzle. In this rare air we find for example Black Cow (Steely Dan).  Run any of this in your mind, verse or chorus, and you can't without knitting it onto those rhythmic bones, climaxing in Big Black Cow!  To the reference, Jack of Speed...   the first half of a verse sits on but one harmonic center, but oh boy that phrasing... now there's a Case In Point! (I'm probably not tracking the discussion very well here, but wanted anyway to express this idea to a sympathetic crowd)

Perfect day for a WB update. In morning traffic, listening to one of the Philosophize This podcasts it popped into my head that today I should finally determine if "susponed" is a word (well of course it is a "word"). Later in the day, focus squirming away from compensated tasks, I think, boy, Greg (tonefreak guitarist friend) really should be made aware of Adam Rogers' sound on Surf... Better listen to it right now to make sure... then I remember the morning's dictionary question, and that I'm in around the same song for entirely independent reasons. Then the Demo from '97 email drops in, and as I write this the bass clarinet flourish from Girlfriend is going by (uncredited? Sheppard? anyway a gem). My new Bose 'phones are aural telescopes in to galaxies of sound and tone, can I just say that Perowsky/Ephron on Surf are the absolute, er, _stuff_?! Anyway, somewhere during all this just needed to hear the Down in the Bottom solo and the spoken vocal cue-out, and it's safe to say I'm feeling pretty Walterish today. Now I'll listen to the demos; thanks for that.

yes. as Lutz puts it, the "vibe", and the comments above about the piano figure over the first three beats of the bar being a close match. I'd add to that - the bass figure plays the V on the next to last beat of the bar making the feel the same there and putting the "differ by one beat per" on beat 4. Also the lyric phrasing sits on the form the same way Desmond's sax melody does. Also there is a comparable element of juxtaposing major and minor, first in the ordinary way of longer formal sections (Take Five's famous bridge melody, and Only One Season's synth lead instrumental section) but here also we have the fascinating mingling of major and minor baked into the very texture (a la Black Cow) - this would to me be part of Lutz' "very Walter". More peripherally, the synth vibraphone break reminds of MJQ (which in my mind is sort of lumped in there with DBQ), and Brubeck is medium sized in the Dan word cloud (New Frontier).

Quick takes, first impression (not thinking what it might actually be modeled after). Seeing the song title in the announcement immediately thought for some reason: that's Lennon-ish. After first listen: Norwegian Wood had an expanding, attenuating ripple of its own genre, this is somewhere in the reflection space. Second listen: Feels like the handclaps would have eventually been arranged out or to the side, a sketch placeholder for something else. Third listen: read along with the printed lyrics. Noticing "Good!" am reminded of Ben Folds one-word "hook" "Kate!" - pretty tight right there, nice tight corner around that lyric and changes. All listens: mostly am feeling the half spoken-word minor 3rd toggling vocal melody - a deliberately paced catharsis.

well Peg is a solidly tonal work with a central 12 bar blues verse, yes a "chorus" and other nifty formal elements; indeed Graydon's classic solo is over the 12 bars, so if Phalen's notes were accurate, Walt and Don were just being sarcastic (probably of the music journalism apparatus generally). Here we have a 16 bar form plus 2 bar tag. Delicious. Yes pentatonic scales are one standard framework of bassline construction, so that's a likely context. In this case the main pedal is around a persistent flat seven pentatonic based figure, so in the final phrase (under the word "season") when the bass plays once the 6 (here an "A" note) as the passing tone, that creates momentary sunshine that sets off the main darker color of the piece, as a painter would.

"pantonal" was tongue half-in-cheek, half Aja liner notes (for "Peg"), e.g., http://www.broberg.pp.se/sd_aja.htm half just sounding about right :-)

perhaps "opticode" should be "opcode" (unless there's some additional obscure meaning). I didn't know opticode, but did see this https://www.soundonsound.com/people/walter-becker

a new favorite - this one has the goods, a few strong muscles sprung into lyric endoskeleton. the hook for me is from the high tradition of pantonal blues - at the IV of the verse the bass goes V, so the 2 of the chord and WB magic is made. Walking back down through the strange mode, back to one, pedal under a sweet melody and shimmering lyric "...only one season...". Is it major? minor? both? neither? exquisite!