Carousel

single
(not yet released on any album)

click to enlarge

When I wrote this song in March of 1981, I was a graduate student at Stanford University. I wrote it in an amazing place. On the second floor of the Stanford student center was a huge, often empty room, generally used for dance classes. There was a grand piano in the room, and as I played it, I would be looking out over one of the main squares of the campus, filled with students moving in every direction. The room had incredible acoustic qualities, and inspired me to write a large, booming song that took full advantage of these qualities. I could tell I was writing a song people liked, because the sounds of the piano echoed out the window and across the square, and I'd see students looking up, smiling, and sometimes even dancing or skipping to the music.

MUSIC

There are a number of musical features in the arrangement of Carousel that I find interesting. Here are some.

• I very intentionally opened the song with an instrumental bang, to perk up listeners' ears, and grab their attention:

  This is an ancient device, dating back at least to 1795, when Haydn wrote his Drumroll Symphony, which begins with a long roll on the timpani, for precisely this purpose. (And, additionally in his case, to wake up any snoozing members of the audience, in the concert hall.)

  And of course the tradition carries on into the modern pop/rock song. One of the best examples is the explosive opening to the Beatles' I Want To Hold Your Hand, which introduced them (with a bang!) to their American audience on the Ed Sullivan Show.

  The opening to Carousel is also meant to be a recognizable musical marker — not only marking the introduction of the song, but also marking the start of the second half of the song. The first half ends in a quiet manner, then a brief pause, and then that introduction again (at just about the halfway point in time), starting everything all over. . . Round 2.

• To go with the jazzy, syncopated rhythms of the verse, I developed a drum style that I call "galloping", because it reminds me of a horse's gallop.

• I created the arrangement of this song in sequence. After I had completed the arrangement for the verse, then I did the bridge between the verse and the chorus. That had such a big build-up:

  that I knew the chorus had to be arranged in a big manner, or the listener would be let down.

  If you listen carefully, you may be able to hear how flutes are at the core of the arrangement for the chorus (in addition to the vocals). When I originally experimented with this, I knew it was pretty unusual. I tried to think of songs that use the flute the way I do in the chorus (with long held, drone-like notes), and the only one I could think of was ABBA's song, Fernando.

  I've removed the voices, so you can hear the underlying instruments a little more clearly.

• A sequence of four three-beat notes are everywhere in this song. You can hear them in the verses — for example, in the words, "skip a-among a", in the first verse. "Skip" is held for three beats, and so is "a", "mong", and "a". And you can hear these three-beat notes driving the chorus as well (and establishing its unusual rhythm), in "Wo-man, up and", "car-ou-sel", "in the rain you", and "find that you are".

  
  Wo (1 2 3) man (1 2 3) up (1 2 3) and (1 2 3)

• The song goes completely silent for a moment at the end of the chorus, between the words "the child's the dearest part" and "of you". There's something I really like — something very potent — about that silence. . .

• The very end of the song — the words, "of you" — is interesting because the percussion suddenly disappears. The song doesn't fade out. It just comes to a sudden, striking end, dominated by the vocal harmonies.

LYRICS

Some things of interest about the lyrics, as I look back:

• Apparently I was in a rather literary mood when I wrote the lyrics! Some of the sentences have rather complex structures (containing clauses, for example):

  Your voice, by day,
  reflects the notes
  of human beings run by time.

  Or this whopper:

  If, in that place,
  you should discover
  you'd like to ask me in there too,
  well, know a secret,
  woman-child:
  in my heart,
  there's a place
  for you.

• As in some of my other songs (e.g., No Cares and The Man With a Thousand Dreams), the "inner child" is a major theme here. This is particularly evident in the culminating line of the chorus: "The child's the dearest part of you." But there are childlike references and images throughout the song: "[you] skip among a fish pond's stones", the carousel metaphor, "when you return where you began", "woman-child", etc.

• As in all my songs, I enjoy playing with words. You can see this in the second verse, where I play with the word, "notes". In the first use ("Your voice, by day, reflects the notes of human beings run by time."), I am referring to the notes taken by the receptionist. In the second use ("One night, you sang my heart to tears with crystal notes of heart-born rhyme."), it is the notes of a song.

• When you return
  where you began,
  when you recall
  your childhood songs,
  then you may learn to sing again
  and find the place
  your heart belongs.

  Originally, these words were sung by the song's narrator to the woman in the song. But as I read them decades later, they take on a second meaning as well: they are words my younger self was writing to me. And here I am, "recalling my childhood songs" (starting in October, 2020, with the release of She), "learning to sing again", and re-awakening a dormant part of my heart.