snowstorm (1989)

Galaxie 500. Rock/Dream Pop/Slowcore, Boston MA USA

key: D major
mode: D E F# G A B C#; guitar solos with blues
melody: L d r m f s
form: strophic with intro, refrain, interlude
meter: duple

English function names:     tonic     subdominant
Tagg (modified):            home      counterpoise (away)
Riemann:                    T         S
Scale degrees:              I         IV
Chords:                     D         G

intro:
  D                 G
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / :| 3x

verse:
  D                 G
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / :| 4x

refrain & interlude:
  G                 D
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / :| 
  D                 G
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / :| 

Somehow I missed this song when I was in high school, which is a bit strange, since I lived within earshot of Boston and this was a Boston band and I listened to this kind of stuff. Well, better late than never. Most of the song is a tonic-subdominant shuttle, with three moments of a subdominant-tonic shuttle. 

Does this song have a refrain or a chorus? It's short, with two sustained ahs, so I am going with refrain. But I would certainly accept someone's argument that this is definitely a chorus, since it does come back without the verse toward the end of the song.

Other points of interest: 

Dean Wareham's vocal range and timbre, which he has described as "high, loud, and scared." I'm not so sure about the scared part, but there is certainly an appealing sense of desperation which contrasts the mundane topic — I mean, mundane if you live in Boston, anyway. We New Englanders are quite used to snowstorms, after all.

Damon Krukowski's use of cymbals — in some ways they take over the song, perhaps like waves of snowfall. It's a bit of the opposite approach to say, Throwing Muses, where David Narcizo didn't have cymbals (at first), but did have some drum corps chops, creating a very particular approach to the kit. You almost wonder if Krukowski doesn't have a snare, until the fill that signals the refrain. Then it only enters on beat 4 either as a hit or a fill. During the guitar solo, it takes on the usual pattern of 2 and 4. This is not your usual rock drumming!¹

Naomi Yang plays more of a countermelody, than a regular, simpler bass line. I can certainly think of other songs where the bass is more melodic (That's Entertainment by the Jam, comes to mind; and pretty much everything Chris Squire played in Yes), but it's especially lovely here.

Lastly, the un-bluesyness of the song yet the guitar solo eventually settles into something quite bluesy, even though it's just a few pitches — the contrast piqued my interest. At a little over five minutes and with all of these finer details, I am reminded of Robert Ashley's quip, "If it's under five minutes, it's pop; if it's over five minutes, it's classical."

During deep COVID-times, I had a gig doing a maternity-leave cover at a school teaching middle and high school band, five bands in all [two first year, one second year, one third year, one high school]. I saw the students in person for about 10 days and then it was online for months. It was rough. People join groups to be in a group — duh. It's hard to create that sense of group cohesion when you don't actually get together as a group. And let's be real: for a lot of band kids, playing in class is really the only time they play. They rely on the momentum of a group to keep them moving along. They don't practice at home. The loneliness of practicing does a lot of people in. We did what we could on Zoom, but it ain't the same. Not even close.

We reconvened in person for the last six weeks of school. There were no concerts; the only culmination were run-throughs during the last couple classes. I decided to mainly focus on small group work at first, having arranged a bunch of two-chord songs in a flex-band format for the students to choose from.² With the second year band, the group that picked this song to work on was struggling, so I decided that we'd work on it as a class, as a whole band, both singing and playing. For me, and I hope for at least some of the 7^th graders at the time, working on this song felt redeeming somehow. It was good to have the band back together.

1. Mr. Krukowski has a fine substack you should be reading.

2. Flex-band, for those not in the know, is when you arrange something into three or four parts plus percussion and you just transpose it for all of the instruments. This way, if you have a small group with unusual instrumentation or a group with wide skill levels, people can pick the parts that work for them.