Once again I’m going to delve into the Coustics repertoire to have an in depth look at one of the songs we play. We’ve done a guitar club song, and a blues club song, so fair’s fair, it’s ukulele club time, so I’ve chosen “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey, one of the newest songs in the book. Journey are an American rock band, formed in 1973, and they still perform today, with guitarist and backing vocalist Neal Schon being the only original member.
Let's have a listen...
My personal history with this song is pretty limited, and by limited I’d say that up until about a year ago, I knew of the song... but wasn’t really much of a fan. I was asked to stand in on bass for a friend’s band about 9 months ago, so I had to actually listen to it a few times properly to make sure I didn’t make a twit out of myself on the night. In doing this, begrudgingly, I have come to respect it as the rock anthem that it is, and that’s mainly because it pulls a very interesting trick which is pretty much contrary to most perceived wisdom regarding ‘anthems’, it doesn’t have a chorus.
No Chorus???
Let’s just unpack that for a moment, it does have a chorus, but not what we nowadays think of as a chorus. To most people a chorus is a repeated section in a song that conveys the central idea and probably contains the song’s title. It’s the bit that people sing along to. I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw relating to R.E.M. where a concert crowd desperately mumbles the high paced, vaguely unintelligible lines of the verses to “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” only to happily join in unison for the refrain. The only repeated section it has is what we might consider a pre-chorus (Strangers, waiting… up and down the boulevard) because although repeated, it doesn’t really fulfil the criteria we just mentioned.
“Don’t Stop Believin” has an old fashioned chorus, like a show tune chorus, that is a unifying idea, but only comes at the very end. That’s right, that famous line….. ‘Don’t stop… believin… Hold on to that feeling’ only appears less than a minute from the end of the song, yet everybody knows what’s coming long before that. Like I said, good trick. How that trick is fully achieved is another conversation, but it's a combination of riffs, repeated melody and a building dynamic.
Other than this songwriting peculiarity, the song and its inception are pretty run of the mill, for such a successful song. The lyrical themes are exactly as they sound, the only even slightly interesting thing I can find is that the line ‘born and raised in South Detroit’ is geographically incorrect. Detroit sits on the north bank of the Detroit River, south of Detroit is the city of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
For a music blog, you might be feeling a bit cheated right now. Surely it’s at least in an interesting key or something? <<checks>> It’s E Major….<<nope>> And 118 bpm isn’t going to break any records. All I can say is, enjoy it for what it is!
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We’ll be giving our first public performance of our version (D major and faster) at this year’s Hayling Island Ukulele Festival which runs all May Day bank holiday weekend. We’re playing early Sunday evening at 6pm. I don’t have any video of us playing it, but I did find this video of the Austin Ukulele Society playing their version, (in C) which has some handy chords and TAB for you to try. Remember guitar chords are the same as ukulele chords, so guitarists, you could play along with this too just fine.
I’m sure once we’ve played this year’s festival I’ll report back in.
Cheers.
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