Just the Way You Are

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My cover of Bruno Mars' beautiful 2010 love song, Just the Way You Are, for which he won the Best Male Pop Vocal Performance Grammy Award in 2011.

That single repeating riff: a truly unique song arrangement. From the perspective of a songwriter, this is a truly unique song, with a unique arrangement! The most amazing thing is that the song is driven by just a single melodic riff — which starts at the very beginning of the song, a keeps repeating until the very end of the song. . . which is truly amazing; very few pop songs have ever pulled off that trick successfully.

So here is the melodic riff, just so we can train your ear to hear it:

Then it keeps repeating, over and over again, like this:

Different instruments are used to play the riff, throughout the song.

The riff is accompanied by a four-chord sequence (in which the riff is repeated four times), which also repeats over and over again throughout the song:

The song is in the key of F, and the four chords are as simple as possible:
F    Dm    B♭    F
If the song was in the key of C, the four chords would be very familiar ones:
C    Am    F    C

Now listen to the full instrumental song, with the repeated riff and the repeated chords. (This is the karaoke arrangement I sang with.) I've left out the vocals so you hear the riff and chords more easily:

At one point in the song, the synthesizers are so loud that you might almost think they stopped playing the riff. But if you listen carefully, you'll hear that it's still there, it's just harder to hear. The riff never stops playing!

The closest any other songwriter/arranger has come to pulling off a feat like this is Sting, in songs like Every Breath You Take, where he also has a repeating riff. But the melody in his riff moves up and down, as the chord shifts, whereas in this song, the melody of the riff never changes at all. Secondly, in Sting's songs, there is always a section where there is a break from the repeating riff, presumably to avoid boring the listener with too much repetition. But in this song, there is no break, and the listener is perfectly content with that — a truly amazing arrangement!

Singing a "high voice" song with a lower voice. When I first considered singing this song, the first thing I had to consider was that Bruno Mars has a much higher voice than me, and a significant part of the song (particularly the chorus) is sung in a voice beyond my range. One way for singers to deal with this sort of thing is to change the key to fit the singer's voice. So I considered lowering the key. However, another thing I've become sensitive to (after singing many songs) is how changing the key also changes the "vibe"(or vibration) of the song (literally). For instance, a passionate communication of love in a high voice does not touch the heart in the same way, when sung in a lower voice. So the question was: how could I somehow sing this song with the "feeling" of a high voice?

I faced the exact same quandary when deciding how to sing Richard Marx's Right Here Waiting. And the solution I found was to sing the chorus with two voices singing together: my normal low voice, and a high falsetto voice singing an octave higher, slightly in the background. ("Singing an octave higher" means they're essentially singing the same note together, just one in a high voice and the other in a low voice.) It worked really well! And it gave the song the necessary "high voice" feeling. So I did a little test, singing a portion of the chorus of Just the Way You Are with my low voice and a high falsetto voice an octave higher. It sounded even better for this song than for Right Here Waiting! So I went ahead with singing the song, using that approach to the chorus. The verses were just within my normal singing voice, but shaping my mouth so as to make the voice sound higher.