TATAR #15 Lose My Sh**

 

By Keir Nuttal and Kate Miller-Heidke (2014)

This is from Aussie hubby-and-wife songwriting team. Non-antipodeians may know them best for supporting Ben Folds on tour or when Kate Miller-Heidke took on Eurovision whilst balancing on a giant pogo stick. But, for me, it's their songwriting that is special.

Now, this is one of their funny songs, but not funny in a traditional comedy song kind of a way. By that, I mean bouncy and upbeat and crammed with jokes and natty rhymes. Traditional comedy songs can be witty, like a Gilbert and Sullivan or a Noel Coward, or broad and bawdy like a classic Broadway musical comedy. But they do tend towards the joke-joke-joke and rhyme-rhyme-rhyme model.

This, however, is a bit different.

There are few rhymes. It's dry and downbeat. And, I think, it points to a different way of doing comedy songs for musical theatre.

On one level, the joke is just the contrast between music and lyric. Musically, it's a sweet love song but, lyrically, it's about a young girl cracking up over a boy. The unexpectedly sweary title is kind of funny in itself. But the real fun is the way the song develops and the little songwriting details it uses to do so. 

If you exclude the bridge, there are basically three sections and each sits in a slightly different vocal register. So, we start at the lower end:

"You look so good tonight

Goddamn it all, you look good

That floppy hair and that stupid smile

And that old blue sweater"

That lower register gives us the feeling that she's talking to herself, perhaps mumbling in the corner of a room at some terrible party, whilst she's watching this boy in his devastating "old blue sweater".

When we get to the chorus, there's a shift in perspective. And so the vocal line shifts up a bit too. 

"I swear I'm gonna lose my sh**

If you walk this way..."

And here's the attention to detail.

"Gonna lose it, gonna lose it" 

Those little leading notes (probably not the right term, but you know what I mean) on "lose it", they work a treat. Rather than expanding on the fist two lines of the melody, they kind of interrupt it and build the tension. You get the feeling that she could explode at any minute.

Finally, in the third section, just when we might expect to go back to the verse, the voice goes up another notch for a further thought:

"You look like you

You look like you

Belong in my arms"

Those jumpy notes on "you look like" sound breathless and nervy, almost like she's sobbing or, more likely in this case, hyperventilating. It's another little detail that makes the song funny.

Of course, the second verse takes it further. Whilst, in the first verse, she's annoyed at the object of her affection for looking so unreasonably fanciable, now she's just plain angry:

"You look so good tonight

I just can't catch a break

Have some consideration

Where's your sense of proportion?

Scale it in a bit, for fu**'s sake"

Obviously, they're taking the character to a more absurd place. Yes, sometimes an unexpected swear word helps land a punchline but this is really pure character comedy in song.

So, it seems that Lorenz Hart may have been wrong after all: unrequited love doesn't have to be a bore. 

Sometimes, it's 'sweet as'.