Call Me Maybe

For the first day of my new pop-oriented Aural Skills II class at NYU, we analyzed “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. I have been using this song as a listening example in music tech classes for many years because it is the apex of maximalist brickwall-limited caterpillar-waveform 21st century pop production. In the music tech context, I tend not to talk much about the song itself, but it’s a perfect entry point into pop aural skills too. Here’s the video, in case you have been trapped in a well since 2012.

Delightful though the song is, at first it seemed to me to be too simple and repetitive to be interesting from a notes-on-the-page perspective. However, once I dug in, I found more going on than I had thought.

Before we get technical, here’s Tom Breihan’s assessment of the song from his Stereogum column, The Number Ones:

“Call Me Maybe” is the platonic ideal of a pop hit. You hear it once, and you find it catchy or irritating or some combination of the two. And then you hear it again and again and again, to the point where you can’t imagine a world without this song in it. The song worms its way into your life, altering your brain chemistry and coloring your memories. Decades from now, the song will function as a time machine, instantly sweeping you back to the summer when it was all over the radio, when you couldn’t leave your house without hearing it. That’s how pop music is supposed to work. It almost never happens.

Part of the secret of “Call Me Maybe,” I think, is that it’s the work of a few people who knew what they were doing. Josh Ramsay produced “Call Me Maybe,” and Tavish Crowe plays virtually all the instruments: guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, fake strings, backup vocals. Carly Rae Jepsen has a perfectly pleasant voice, but she doesn’t sound like a world-conquering pop supernova. She sounds like someone you might know who might be good at singing. These things register, whether consciously or not, and they make a difference.

Breihan says that the gloriously fake strings were inspired by “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox. That makes sense. (That song’s video shows Annie being romanced by Hugh Laurie and John Malkovich in the Baroque era, it’s a good one.) In “Call Me Maybe”, the strings are played on two different orchestral patches and doubled by multiple layers of guitar for extra hugeness. You can get a sense of the production and arrangement from listening to the stems:

The actual Pro Tools session had well over a hundred tracks in it. Which isn’t even that unusual for a current pop song.

Here’s my chart. I combined some of the string and guitar parts together for the sake of visual clarity.

The song is in G major, and it starts on a G power chord. This power chord continues throughout the verse and prechorus, even though it conflicts with some of the harmony. This is going to be a theme.

When the verse starts, a chord loop begins that runs under most of the rest of the tune. What are these chords? I hear them as C, a brief G, D, and a brief Em, repeating. The harmonic rhythm is unusual and ear-grabbing. The C hits on the downbeat of each two-bar hypermeasure. The G comes in on the “and” of four of that same bar. The D hits on the “and” of one in the next measure, a highly unusual place to put a chord change in a pop song. Finally, Em hits on the “and” of four at the end of that measure.

Not everyone agrees with me about the D chord. Cory from 12tone hears it as G/D, though Cory also doesn’t think the chords matter very much, and rightly so. (We will talk about that in a minute.) It is true that during the verse, the chord is ambiguous between Dsus4 and G/D, and the melody would seem to support G/D. But when the chorus hits, that chord becomes an unambiguous D, and that makes me want to hear the chord in the verse as a D retroactively. Also, the notes in the melody don’t play the same decisive role they usually would.

To understand the intrigue of this song, you need to understand something about the conventions of Western tonal harmony. If your song is in the key of G major, then your melody will be mostly or entirely made from notes in the G major scale. Traditionally, the specific notes you choose from within that scale should match the underlying chords.

• Over a C chord, you usually emphasize C, E and G.
• Over a G chord, you usually emphasize G, B and D.
• Over a D chord, you usually emphasize D, F-sharp, and A.
• Over an Em chord, you usually emphasize E, G and B.

You can use other notes over these chords, and people do, but usually non-chord tones are fillers or decorations: as connectors between chord tones, say, or as temporary dissonances that quickly resolve.

So that’s the conventional way to write a tonal melody. This is not what Carly Rae Jepsen does in “Call Me Maybe”. Every note of the song comes from the G major scale, but the melody is remarkably independent of the chords. The first line of the verse (“I threw a wish in a well”) repeats the note B, along with an A toward the end. This would be a perfectly ordinary thing to sing on top of a G chord, but the verse starts on a C chord. Jepsen is singing the seventh and sixth!  Duke Ellington might do that, but a pop songwriter typically would not. On the line “I looked to you as it fell”, the string of B’s ends on a pair of A’s, but those two A’s are sung over the brief G chord, which defies the sense of resolution that G would otherwise convey. The words “in my way” form an arpeggiated G chord, but if I’m right that the underlying chord is a D, then that is yet more melodic/harmonic disagreement. You can hear similar melodic-harmonic divorce in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift and lots of other recent pop hits.

In the prechorus, the vocal melody aligns with the chords more, but the harmonies don’t necessarily. On the phrase “hot night, wind was blowing”, the upper harmony on “hot” is an F-sharp in it, which is quite a dramatic dissonance against a C chord. (It’s less like Ellington and more like Monk.) In the bridge, the high guitar part also emphasizes that F-sharp over C.

The first two bars of the chorus are an arpeggiated G chord over a backing of mainly C and D chords. The destination point of each phrase in the chorus melody is a G. Sometimes the G lands on the brief G chord, but otherwise it lands on C or D. It is so cool! Also, check out the phrase “call me maybe.” The word “call” is a blue note, right in between B-flat and B-natural. The track’s mix engineer talks about how they didn’t use much Auto-Tune on the vocals, because Jepsen didn’t need it; if they had, it would have steamrolled out the blue notes.

Drew Nobile talks about “Call Me Maybe” in his article, Counterpoint in Rock Music: Unpacking the “Melodic-Harmonic Divorce”. He identifies three different kinds of divorce:

• Hierarchy divorce – The melody carries the musical structure, and the harmony embellishes it rather than acting as its foundation.
• Loop divorce – a short, looped chord progression lacks goal-oriented harmonic motion, so the melody creates the formal structure independently of those chords (this is what’s happening in “Call Me Maybe”).
• Syntax divorce – Melody and harmony both have structural importance, but they contradict each other.

All three types tend to involve melodies that revolve around the tonic triad, because these notes feel stable even if they momentarily conflict with the chords. Remember that the chorus to “Call Me Maybe” starts with an arpeggiated G triad, even though that fights the C chord underneath. Nobile adds an important qualification:

The word “divorce” is itself problematic, as it implies both that the melody and accompaniment are not related at all (which is rarely the case) and that they were at some prior point “married.” The latter assumes a historical lineage from common-practice tonality to rock music—a lineage that is dubious at best. To avoid multiple terms for the same concept, I will retain the term “melodic-harmonic divorce” with the understanding that I am using it to mean a stratification of the melodic and accompanimental layers (p. 190).

Chord loops are especially common in pop music of the last fifteen years, and as a result this repertoire provides copious examples of loop divorces. In these songs, the specific chords that make up the loop are generally of secondary importance, and one can often substitute a different loop without significantly affecting the song’s structure… the identity of “Call Me Maybe” is contained in the melody; the chord progression is not as integral a part of the song (p. 196).

Nobile points out that two of the official remixes of the song use completely different chord progressions that still work fine with the melody.

Nobile concludes:

[T]he melody’s structure does not seem to interact with the harmony. The chord progression is more of an afterthought, inserted to provide a backdrop for the melody rather than as a structural feature of the song. It is literally an afterthought in the remixes—added to the preexisting vocal line—but even in the original version it is clear that the melody’s structure is conceptually prior to the chords. The fact that artists remixing or covering “Call Me Maybe” do not find it necessary to retain the original chord progression suggests that the melody alone contains the core aspects of the song. The harmony is thus not only divorced from the melody but also hierarchically subordinate (p. 197).

Is this good composition? Bad composition? I was talking to a music theory colleague about prepping her new wonderful pop-oriented theory class. She is a classical musician and this was the first time she had transcribed much pop music. She was cheerfully appalled by the “bad” voice leading. How much of this kind of rule-flouting is naive and how much is intentional? In my experience in the rock and pop world, it’s a mixture of both. There are plenty of people who are simply untrained, and who just put their fingers down on the guitar or draw into the piano roll until they find something they like. There are others who have some idea what they are “supposed” to do, and for whatever reason, don’t do it. Sometimes the result is just clumsy! But sometimes it sounds brilliant.

Oh, speaking of this song, be sure to check out the 1000% slowed down version, it’s lovely: