This is a meticulously written masterpiece, and you can tell because of what's not in it. There only instrument you can hear without going and looking for it is a piano, which taps the same doleful quarter note pattern pretty much the entire way. There's some guitar, and percussion, and elektronika, but that's just all background lighting--the only real actors are the piano, Rihanna, and Mikky Ekko.
A word on Mikky Ekko. He has an extraordinarily stupid name, which I wouldn't mock except he chose it. And not only that, his real name (John Sudduth) in no way resembles his nom de guerre, which makes me want to give him a concerned but resolute knee to the crotch.
Anyway, the sparseness of the arrangement serves Rihanna and her inexplicably named counterpart well because it gives them the space to dominate the song vocally without having to really stretch. The whole song builds and gets more intense and louder as it progresses, but never really gets above mezzo-piano. It's too quiet and sad to dance to, but too slow to slow-dance to, which leaves the whole enterprise in a very uncomfortable place that feels like despair.
There are a couple other things I like about this song--how the rhythm of "Not really sure how to feel about it / Something in the way you move" gets syncopated in the second verse, or how the harmony in the bridge sounds like two vines climbing the trunk of a tree, or that I'm just a sucker for duets like these.
But first I'd like to bring up a cover version that is--if you roll your eyes now, you'll regret it later--from The Voice, and is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on television.
I'm not sure any performance of any song has made me go, "Yup, those two are fucking," as much as that one has. It's more pornographic than the actual music video, which spends most of its time showing a naked woman. It conveys precisely the kind of desperate, heart-pounding, sweating-from-the-top-of-your-head passion that gets you talking about how you feel like you can't live without someone and so on.
But the next line--"I want you to stay,"--is why I love how sparse the original arrangement is, because without all the extra percussion and backing vocals, and with the song hinting that it's going to get loud but never actually going there, it feels like something is missing.
A word on Mikky Ekko. He has an extraordinarily stupid name, which I wouldn't mock except he chose it. And not only that, his real name (John Sudduth) in no way resembles his nom de guerre, which makes me want to give him a concerned but resolute knee to the crotch.
Anyway, the sparseness of the arrangement serves Rihanna and her inexplicably named counterpart well because it gives them the space to dominate the song vocally without having to really stretch. The whole song builds and gets more intense and louder as it progresses, but never really gets above mezzo-piano. It's too quiet and sad to dance to, but too slow to slow-dance to, which leaves the whole enterprise in a very uncomfortable place that feels like despair.
There are a couple other things I like about this song--how the rhythm of "Not really sure how to feel about it / Something in the way you move" gets syncopated in the second verse, or how the harmony in the bridge sounds like two vines climbing the trunk of a tree, or that I'm just a sucker for duets like these.
But first I'd like to bring up a cover version that is--if you roll your eyes now, you'll regret it later--from The Voice, and is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on television.
I'm not sure any performance of any song has made me go, "Yup, those two are fucking," as much as that one has. It's more pornographic than the actual music video, which spends most of its time showing a naked woman. It conveys precisely the kind of desperate, heart-pounding, sweating-from-the-top-of-your-head passion that gets you talking about how you feel like you can't live without someone and so on.
But the next line--"I want you to stay,"--is why I love how sparse the original arrangement is, because without all the extra percussion and backing vocals, and with the song hinting that it's going to get loud but never actually going there, it feels like something is missing.
