"Care of Cell 44"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I knew I'd been procrastinating on this, but I didn't know how long I've been procrastinating on this.  Back in June after I posted the chords to "Care of Cell 44" I learned the vocal melody.  There are a couple interesting things that I felt a recording illustrated better than just text, so I recorded an abbreviated piano version.  I think all I omitted was one of the initial two verses, but because I played this from memory and not along to the recording, it goes a lot faster (as is apparently my wont).

The "better, baby" in the first line ("Good morning to you, I hope you're feeling better, baby") has an ascending melody (G A B C), which reflects the meaning of that adverb.  There's an ascent to represent that optimism ("I hope") and improvement ("better").

I've written before about how - while the speaker/singer seems optimistic - there are some musical things that portend ill toward the relationship in the song (like the static bass part in the bridge [to which I can now also add the static vocal melody; it also gets stuck on a G note for a while] and the dissonant tritone [G and C#] in the a cappella sections, not to mention the lyric "Kiss and make up," which seems to indicate that the speaker/singer had some involvement in the girl's incarceration).  I found some more of those.

The "home" in the line "Feels so good you're coming home soon" is sung to an A note.  The song is (mostly) in G major though (where the musical "home" is a G note), so there's sort of a musical implication that the home to which the girl is going isn't the same one that the singer/speaker is talking (or singing) about.  It's as if she's going to A major instead.

During the bridge (particularly during the A7 chords, so roughly for the lyrics "we used to walk" and "we used to talk"), the melody is on the off-beats, which implies that the two people walked out-of-step and that there was some friction in their talking to each other.

The "and it could be so nice" is sung in either a different key or with a lot of accidentals (it's G G F Eb F D).  Because of that foreign tonality, there's a feeling of difference, which I suppose the conditional "could" also points to, but it remains that the different tonality there is because of either a different key or a lot of accidentals (implying that the girl would have to go somewhere else for it to "be so nice" or that - like the accidentals - the speaker/singer would have to change a lot).