Hi everybody, my name is Ixie, and welcome back to my channel and my series where I'm breaking down the composition of Mère-de-Mont. And today I'm going to be talking about thinking of you, Brenna, and over. So this is the last part in the series. Thank you so much for sticking with me and going through this album together. Mayor de Nams, starting with thinking of you, and I can't even say the name without blushing. This is like, this is pretty sexy. It's in the key of F. Sure. But once again, it's difficult to really assign a scale to it. It just kind of morphs and changes depending on what's needed at the moment. So let's get into the breakdown of highlighting what I appreciate most about the song. So the very beginning of the song, little instrumental intro, the groove is really mostly accentuating the slow pulse of 1, 2, 3, 4. While the kick drum and the bass are kind of accenting some off beats. So there's a really nice little interplay between them. Along with this nice sludgy slow groove is a percussive element that I can't really place. It sounds like metal on metal. It's very high pitched, and it just makes me feel kind of dirty. You know, there's something sleazy about it. The bass is also pretty grimy here. It's very low. So we have the flat 3, going up to the 4, then the flat 7, to the 1. So a lot of business before finally resolving. There's an off beat accent. This has got a cool cycle in 3. So that it sort of doesn't line up with the beat the same way the second time. But then they even that off with the, can you just hear Trent resident going, so this roots us pretty well into F sharp. And then the main melodic theme comes in and the intro played by what I used to think was a synth. But now I think it's just Billy being a guitar wizard. The tone is really interesting. It's very high and piercing and long sustained notes, and that melody is going to be repeated by Maynard in the verse. This also has kind of a sleazy vibe. I think this melody. This is an unusual collection of pitches. So we have the fifth going down to the flat 2. So that's that really dark heavy sound here in metal. Then a really beautiful resolution of 4 to 3, but then this is super weird. 6 flat 2 one. They're not thinking about it this way. It's just is what it is. The intervals and the harmonies are just unconventional. One of the things I do like about this melody is that it makes the fifth, which usually sounds so stable and so right and justified. It makes it sound really kind of messed up. And the reason is is because they go from the fifth to the flat 2. The distance between those notes is a tritone. Okay, so he's going to be singing this. Billy's playing on the guitar. So that tritone is very unstable. That's the devil's interval. If I had to pick a skill for this part, I would say mixolydian flat 2. That's a first for me. Also rhythmically, it's really interesting. But they're doing that a lot. They have these sort of rhythm cycling in 3 and then they kind of square them off at the end of the phrase so that they can start over again at the beginning of the downbeat. The first verse is so cool and I think it has a lot to do with the percussion. But also the absence of the bass for the first half. You feel this emptiness, right? There's like definitely something that needs to happen that you're expecting. Suddenly there's no bass. It's just Maynard and the drums. And that guitar melody that he's singing with. When the bass does come in, it's like, oh man, right? Like I wanted that. Thank you. Now I feel sad as well. So this is a really cool bass line. It's descending. It took me a second to figure out what it's doing. It's very funky. Flat 2 to 1 and then flat 6 to 5. And 5 and 1 are counterparts in the scale. They're the yin to the yang. So to have a note just above both of them feels very consistent. It's nice. And then it goes down a little bit further. At one point it goes up to flat 7 at the very end. At one point it goes all the way up to the flat 3 at the very end. It's also got that syncopated rhythm of duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. So the bass descends in the same rhythm that the melody descends. Maynard is singing the main melodic theme that Billy is playing on the guitar. The very end of his vocal melody though he goes surrender and he leaves you on the flat 7 which is so great. And that leads you into the pre-chorus. But we're not there yet because the drums are so cool. In addition to probably what Josh is playing on the kit, they have break beats. Actually I think there might be like a hip hop groove and a break beat overlaid and the break beat gets more and more complicated on the second half of the first verse. But I love this sound. Personally I have grown up listening to dancing to and producing electronic music. So whenever I hear like this genre being married to anything that comes from that world, the electronic music world I feel like understood. And I think that it's a really cool sound. It's the only song on the album that has this sound. Break beats are sampled from funk and R&B and jazz grooves. The other cool thing about bringing in break beats is that they're up tempo. And the rest of the song is down tempo. Meaning it's pretty slow. It's got like a half time groove. Break beat has a double time groove. So it's kind of an overlaying, a contrast between a slow pulse and a much quicker pulse. But one of the reasons that I really like songs that have slower grooves is that there's usually more space in the rhythms for more rhythmic complexity to be added. And that's exactly what the break beat is doing here. The pre-chorus is probably my favorite part. The more complex break beat takes a break. But you can still hear the hip hop groove with this little bit of a crackle and the snare that just sounds so much like a genre I've listened to a lot, glitch hop. It's just kind of this fat snare sound. And Maynard, who sometimes calls himself MJ Keenan, sounds a lot like MJ. So the funky feeling of this song is taking kind of the next level in the pre-chorus. Because Maynard is singing mostly on the flat 7. So he's just kind of... It's got some other notes, but that's the main note.I also like how he's kind of doubling his voice in octave. Sometimes he sings the high version. Sometimes he sings the low version, sometimes both at the same time. So you get this really cool variety with a fairly static melody. The rhythm is really nice too. So when he sings Tugana, he's singing this little rhythmic pattern of two 32nd notes and a 16th note. So Tugana, Tugana, Tugana, Tugana, Tugana. I saw that down. Tukata. Tukata. Tukata, Tukata. Tugana, rhythm. So, that's really cool. And that kind of mimics the rhythmic complexity of the breakbeat. After that, Tugana, I'll read them to the fansion. That's in my head. He syncs back up with that accent with the drums and the bass, his last line look on your face like leaves us hanging, but also on the flat seven. So that's exactly the harmonic or melodic equivalent of what he's doing with his lyrics. Look on your face like the transition into the chorus is pretty awesome. So there's a big west which feels like a big inhale and makes that like like you're falling off of something like. And then we get these nice big hits with the drums and the guitar and bass. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. One. So it's like a rest and then a measure of six, eight or you could just do seven, eight, then four, four, then six, eight, and then four, four. But that's cool. They're continuing to sort of blast apart all the rhythmic structures that we're all used to hearing. So Maynard's vocal melody. We have, he's just singing the root of the chord there, which is a flat seven chord. Sweet revelation goes down to the fifth of that chord. It's all kind of seems to center around an E chord instead of the F sharp chord. But I still think we're in F sharp. It's just a cool way of like emphasizing a chord that's not the home chord. It feels cool. It makes you definitely want to keep going. What's next? Vocal harmony. Then there's a vocal harmony. I don't know who's singing it because live Billy sings it and Billy kills it live. I'm going to show you some footage in a second. But in the record, it could have been Maynard or Billy. So it starts out harmonizing on a major third. But it quickly just goes down and joins the main melody in unison. Sweet. And then it goes to harmonizing in parallel fourths. It leaves us on this long suite on the E chord. Sweet surrender. And that note is the flat seven in the scale because we're on the flat seven chord right now. Surrender. So you get left with that funky feeling once again when he goes back to. So the surrender is supposed to be the resolution to the long, sweet tension. But it doesn't really feel that way. It's kind of low and it's not really a satisfying resolution melodically. It's kind of surrender. I don't know. So it kind of feels anti-climactic. Oh god. Pardon my phrasing. The transition out of the chorus is a lot like the intro to the song. We get that kind of gross, sleazy feeling, a t-t-t-t-t-t sound. And there is no second verse. Look at that. Goes right into the next pre-chorus. But this pre-chorus is even better than the last because the vocal harmonies are amazing. In fact, I might call this a counter melody because it can kind of stand on its own. So again, not sure who's singing what here could be two Maynards on the album and then Billy sings it live, but either way, the upper voice kind of takes over what Maynard would singing originally, and now there is a lower voice, and it's really hard to tell which one is the harmony, and which one's the melody. So the line that is sung below is now a perfect fifth below all those notes. In order to do that Maynard has to let go of the flat two and start singing a natural two. So we're going to listen to Billy doing an amazing job with this upper line in a live performance. There's no video, sorry. That's such a great modification. It's so epic. Okay. Essentially, so we get this like cool little major third resolution there. Back up to the fifths, and finally, we get what we wanted all along, which is for that flat seven, to resolve to the tonic. It's right there. It's so close. That's what it's supposed to do. And then we get a repeat, but it's really cool the second time, because we have it. Parallel. So either Billy was already a really good singer when he started collaborating with Maynard, or he learned a few things from Maynard, a little detail. I love the way Maynard says that. No enunciation required. I'm going about a little evil that makes that. And there's a little evil. That's just fun to say. Little evil. And the second course, the main difference is that now it's extended. So after we have rendering, we get this sweet surrendering, and it kind of tumbles down. It's just Maynard, and it sounds so harmonically lost. It feels like it's not fitting in to any chord. It's just sort of this surrendering, and you really do just kind of have to surrender. Bridge is really awesome. It changes to thinking of the E chord as the tonal center. The whole thing starts to feel like E mixolydian, sounds like this. Remember how they kept emphasizing the E chord in the chorus? Well, now they've made it official.I can't help but think about corn again, like shoots and ladders. Everything, before the guitar solo comes in, everything drums, vocals, bass, is just hitting the same rhythm. Thinking of you, thinking of you, thinking. Once again, we have a cycling in three that evens out at the end of the phrase. Thinking of you, thinking of you, thinking. This is very similar to, da da da da da, da da da, da da. It's just sort of like a different variation of it. It forces Maynard to just say, thinking. Maynard's sing whispering kind of on the E for the most part. And like how he kind of sings, thinking of you differently every single time. Like especially the way he sort of like ends the phrases. His inhales though are very pronounced, right? They're labored and quite obvious. He's not trying to hide them. He's using them as a rhythmic element. Guitar solo is playing on the mixolytian scale. Sounds kind of psychedelic here. It's very bright, kind of warm, but also has that edge because of the flat seven, which is such an important note in this song. The drums start to give us a kind of counter rhythm or do what they sort of are supposed to do, so to speak, of hitting snares on two and four. But a little film between, da da da. So now we get kind of a nice structure against all this syncopation. I also hear the da da da da in the fill, which is Tugana. In the last chorus, the way that they sort of differentiate it is that sweet ee-eat, that descending line, sweet takes center stage, sweet. So that becomes like the predominant melodies that have just sweet. For render, no harmonic resolution left here, like da da da da. Now to Brenya, which I know is some of y'all's favorite. It's a very beautiful song. So this intro, I'm so glad I found out before I record this video, thanks to one of my patrons, bottles and fans, this is actually a bass part. It's got a beautiful shimmer to it, and already I feel both sort of like comforted by the chords and also like a little bit put off by them. There's some dissonance and some convention being mixed together. So first chord, this is like a B flat minor seventh chord without the fifth, no fifth, but then you get this half-step thing at the end. Ooh, tense, tense. But that is then relieved a bit with the next chord. So in the first verse, oh my gosh, the guitar here is really pretty. I just want to take a moment to talk about this a little bit of music theory nerdism. This is what I'm hearing. Now, you can look at the notes and you can figure out what chord it is, but to my ear, what it sounds like is this major triad over a somewhat unrelated B flat. Together, they make I think a seventh chord, but the way that the chord is voiced matters because if we were to voice the seventh chord in reposition, we'd have really pretty but it sounds like a seventh chord. If you voice the upper structure of that chord differently, so instead of this, but like this, same chord, but this note went on top, it's called an inversion. Now you have a big space between these pitches here. So there's this big open feeling, there's a big open fifth, it allows your ear to almost hear the separation. Like, I just like that feeling. And then the magical flat six chord in this case, it's a G flat chord, but I gotta say there is something going on. I can't tell what it is, but there is some low level dissonance happening in this chord. Maybe the bass is bending the string up a little bit above the G flat. Something about is a little bit off. Like how dare they tarnish the flat six? And just kidding, the flat six can handle anything. And turn it into magic. I don't know, I feel like the drums here are kind of romantic. There's a certain kind of syncopation that just feels like dramatic. The vocal melody is a very pretty kind of minor scale melody, but with a little bit of a blues tinge. You hear that, hey, let me, a little blues. And that part, he'll meet, repeats twice and make it kind of a memorable plea. Maynard syncopated rhythmic style comes through once again. By the way, this, that's making that flat six chord into a major seventh chord, which is one of its superpowers, so beautiful. It's part of one of the reasons why that's so gorgeous. Seven, the sixth is also kind of a beautiful lost sound. Now into the chorus, which has some really interesting chord structures and phrasing that are a bit unconventional. So we have this. The drums are punctuating that or playing that melody, so to speak, so that's something that Josh just, a lot, it's really cool. I don't mind, sorry. I feel a bit lost in this timing, but I don't mind. As a listener, I just kind of sweetly surrender. So I'm gonna try not to make so many jokes. Anyway, I just kind of surrender and enjoy the unexpected in this part. If you counted, it all evens out to five measures of four beats, but that doesn't really actually capture the metric emphasis and phrasing of the songs. You'd have to probably count in smaller groupings. I think the drummer is feeding into this ambiguity a bit by putting in these fills, like lots of fills. So you can't really rely on the fill to tell you where the end of the phrase is. It just feels like the phrase keeps ending and ending and ending again. In fact, I don't really know where the beginning of the phrase is. Is it? Dun, dun, dun, dun.Or is it... Dun dun dun dun! Where's the phrase end? Where does it begin? You can see it from multiple perspectives and angles, just like... Maynard sores over the instrumentation. Vulnerable. And it kind of seems like maybe we've kind of changed key or something? It's different. There's definitely been a shift. G-flat, A-flat, D-flat? Sorry. I know that sounds weird, but that is the most correct way to say that in this case. What I like about this section is that it doesn't really ever feel like there's any resolution. Like, we're fighting against something, or we're trying to find our place, but there's just nowhere to go. And then a sense of surrender with its all right. Where's the difference between any sings vulnerable? Because melisma for one thing, which is just kind of floating, and again doesn't feel connected really to this chord. A-perfect fifth down to fifth. So that's how they transition back into the verse, and into back to the B-flat as being the tonal center, is just... The other thing that's different is what the guitars are doing. So Billy is playing this kind of beautiful line underneath Maynard's melismatic voice. It's just dreamy, it's lost, it feels perfect under the word vulnerable. And then when he sings it's all right, it's just power chords, and no melisma. Way more structurally sound and certain. I also don't really exactly know how to make sense of the lines in the guitar and bass in between. Like when the phrase feels like it keeps ending and ending again. It almost sounds kind of fifthsy and pentatonicy. Those are words. In the second verse there's no preamble. We just kind of melt through the... pulls us all the way over, and then heal me, heal me. And then he sings a full second verse. In the second chorus there are some beautiful vocal harmonies I wanted to point out. After another vulnerable, we have... That's the vocal harmony. Look at these parallel thirds. Which sounds really nice, but I love the last one, because listen to what happens against the B. That's really nice. That sounds like a major seventh chord. Fifth, seventh. But then at the very end. Goes up to the fourth, which is kind of what you expect. What you expected when they did this instead. Now it's resolved, more resolved. And then it goes back down to the B-flat. The bridge is gorgeous. We're back in the B-flat minor world, and we're milking the flat six for all that is worth. Something distinctly tool-like about this bridge. I think it's lyrics, but also the melodies. So the guitar is playing this really nice ascending line over and over again. First over the one chord, then over the flat six. Maynard doesn't start singing until the flat six chords. We get this whole section, which is built up. So he starts on a ten-spotted ends on one. And then... Flat seven to five. They have a very nice partnership. So you can see that the heel... that's variation or its evolution is opening to... bass is doing some cool stuff. I can't tell exactly what's going on, but just pay attention to it next time you listen to it. Especially in the bridge. It's moving a lot, because these are very slow chord changes. So it's keeping things interesting. At one point, I distinctly hear that B-natural or C-flat come back in. It sounds really dramatic when it does. So Maynard leaves us on something called a suspension, and then he resolves it. So we have... he just waits on the tense note. It's just above where we want to resolve to. And there's a guitar solo. And it feels like they are jamming on this chord progression of one in flat six. All these guitar lines really does make you want to go into that flat six. Like they're pointing down to it. Right at the bat, Billy goes, so he's doing kind of what Maynard was just doing a little bit. He isn't resolved down here, but he resolves to the fifth, which is another good choice. But hear him leaning on that note. So that's the ninth. Okay. So... Minor key, I find the ninth to be particularly heartbreaking. Then he goes... It's really pretty. Straight up minor. Flat six to five is a very satisfying resolution right at the tail end of his solo. See, it's all leading up to that. Then he has this line that starts low and jumps up and kind of goes down to the scale. But there is something about it that always sounded like, whoo, what's that? Is that blues? Because we have a chromatic motion there. And then he goes... Up to the flat five. This is my favorite part when it goes... It's that part. Tasty, tasty. So it's kind of like an A flat major chord, like over a B flat minor chord. But I guess another way you could say it is that it's a B flat minor 11 chord. It doesn't repeat it again, but he starts too, so that's really nice.Ooh, seventh. The song unexpectedly ends right after this guitar solo. It kind of has a thin new mouth and it just falls down, down, and just kind of fades out actually a little bit. Everything gets quieter and this chord comes back from the very beginning and leaves you there on a seventh chord. And the very last track on the album is called Over. I got admit I did not give the song a chance when I got this album in high school. I didn't have the patience because it starts out very sparsely and simply. Instrumentation is very different than what we're used to. There's a kalimba which is an instrument from Zimbabwe and there's a piano. The vocals and the kalimba are like partners in this song and the piano is sometimes joins them or just gives them a foundation. I do think that this song was maybe a little bit influenced by trends sensibilities. So this is written in D minor and the main melodic theme is tonic flat 3, second or the ninth. We were just talking about that and the flat 7 and the 1. At the very beginning we just hear in the kalimba. When the manor starts singing then he starts singing. But the kalimba starts to play that full figure. So they're kind of singing playing a very similar thing right here. But then kalimba goes down to the flat 6 and we hear a beautiful tritone. So it sounds a little bit emotional. When the piano comes in we hear manor distinctly inhaling so they just left in his breaths which felt really intimate right feels like he's very very close to the mic. When the piano comes in and Billy is credited as the pianist in this song we hear a solid 1 flat 7 for progression. So Billy is repeating this figure with every single note but then the second time around we get 1 and that was notes fit in with the C chord, then it goes right back, then it feels like things get shaken up a bit harmonically because the bass changes to an E, D and a C. This part of the song sounds as if now it's an E minor but manor's still singing like he's in D minor. Now we out of this D major chord, things take a particularly nailsy turn. And that's because we switched from D minor to D major in the chord but this melody that the kalimba's playing and that he's still singing is in D minor. So there's like a mode conflict here, that sounds like a pretty bluesy jazzy chord to me. This track closes out the album with the sounds of the kalimba drifting out into the background and manor's vocals snippets from other songs in the album kind of come in and out whispering spitting at us, reminding us of what we just listened to. And it's not always pretty, there's a lot of angst and this reverse piano note is swelling and that is a wrap on this series. Thank you so much for watching and sharing and liking and commenting. It means so much to me. Those of you that have joined my Patreon as a result, I'm so grateful to have you and your support. Woo! We did it. Thanks everybody. Until next time.