Quote:
Originally Posted by DownOnRodeo
I am probably the last person on Earth to have noticed this, but I wager that Stevie had Poe's The Telltale Heart in mind (consciously or unconsciously) when she wrote this line.
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Yes, could be. Isn’t that cool? What’s even more cool to me is the clever way that the same line replicates the kick drum across the bar, which is both groovily hypnotic and sound-sense resonant. Each syllable falls on the beat — like a guess what? A heartbeat!
- heart (kick)
- beat (kick)
- drives (kick)
- you (kick)
That’s an entire bar that drills in its meaning in your brain. “Mad” in the bar immediately following is sung on a syncopated (off) rhythm, which keeps everything from sounding too robotic and unnatural. We don’t want to ignore the fact that there’s a real woman singing, feeling real desires. The best way in any art to keep something genuine and fresh is to add variation. “Dreams” has a lot of sophisticated, subtle tricks like that. Mick hits the hi-hat on the second syllable of “thun-der,” is another example that gives you a little crash of thunder at exactly the right moment. You don’t necessarily have to be fully aware of these subtleties; they work their way in through the back door after repeated listenings. It’s exactly what they mean when they say that some Fleetwood Mac songs hold up on repetition. You pick up more the second, third, and fourth time. That’s the true magic of Fleetwood’s orchestration: the arrangement and dynamics of all the individual tracks reward hearing the same song over and over. That could be why
Rumours keeps selling.