search: pop songs with weird time signatures and metric shifts

come to mention it, Here Comes the Sun has odd bars of 3/8 amid the 4/4

How about "Bubbles" by the Free Design, is it 15? The 'bridge' part is in 7, I think.

seems like 8/8 to me with some bars of 7 and some bars of 6

Intro:
8 8 8 7
8 8 8 7

Verse:
8 8 8 7
8 8 8 7
8 8

Chorus:
8 8 8 8
8 7 8 8
8 7 8 8

Bridge:
8 6 8 6
8 6 8 6
8 6 8 8 8

or if you like to add stuff together into needlessly large numbers...

16, 15, 16, 15
16, 15, 16, 15, 16
16, 16, 15, 16, 15, 16
14, 14, 14, 14, 14, .... then what? 16, 8? 24? silly.

Dionne Warwick's "Anyone Who Had a Heart": It goes from 3/8 to 2/4 to 4/4....in the first line.

This has been bugging me. Just sounds like straight 6/8 to me. I pulled out my Bacharach songbook and they notate it as alternating bars of 5/4 and 4/4 which is insane. You could easily count the whole thing as 3/8, but it also makes sense to do
6 3 6 6 6
6 3 6 6 6 and then straight 6/8 for the chorus

Re: 15, I meant I was hearing one less 16th note, counting it as 4/4, but after listening again that's not right. How do you count 8/8? ONE two three ONE two three ONE two?

one two three four five six seven eight. really fast in the case of bubbles.

I mean you could say it goes 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 but grouping it into bars of 8 beats fits better with where the downbeats are.

and I think when you write it out like that with eights, sevens and sixes, it helps visualize the structure better. My brain can't really parse a list of 16s and 15s. But with 8s and 7s I can see that they just cut the last bar of each phrase one beat short during the intro and verse, and then did the same thing with the second bar during the chorus phrases. just makes more sense to me that way but of course it's all arbitrary.

Ok, I was able to follow your notation--I was originally trying to count those 8ths as 16ths but it wasn't adding up. When I see 8 in the bottom of any notation I automatically think 'triplets'.

Heavy Vegetable - Song for Wesley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtgYvUpto4M

Short (1:16) but poppy song but counted out
4 4 4 4
5 5 5 5
6 6
11 13
4 4 4 4
5 5 5 6
11 14

Mario Rubalcaba (drums) does some kinda tricky things when the meter switches, always thought this was an odd song.

Ok, I was able to follow your notation--I was originally trying to count those 8ths as 16ths but it wasn't adding up. When I see 8 in the bottom of any notation I automatically think 'triplets'.

Yeah I think Bubbles is a good example of when it's necessary to count as /8. When the song starts off it sounds like it's in 4/4 and you could loop the first bar of the verse "blowin bubbles out of the window" and it would be in 4/4. But then when you get to the end of a line it's cut short a half beat which is why you need to count it in 8 or else you'd have a bar of only 3.5 beats.

Heavy Vegetable - Song for Wesley

cool song. I think the parts that you counted as 11, 13 and 14 could just be counted as 6 instead. It's just that there's a downbeat in a weird spot somewhere in the middle there.

I'm not a musician. Does either "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number" or John Cale's "Fear" fit? They always sounded rhythmically weird to me, or at least parts of them.

I just put on "Rikki" and counted 4 all the way through.

Plenty of syncopation on top of the basic beat, though, which is what I'm guessing you were hearing.

Man, Rush's "Limelight" is great. I've heard it so many times but never tried to count it until now.

OTM. On the first go, I count: Riff 1 in 4
Riff 2 in 7
Verses in 3 with one bar of 4 as a transition back to Riff 2
Chorus, part 1 ("Living in the limelight") in 3
Chorus, part 2 ("Put aside the alienation") in 4
Guitar solo first in 3, then in 4

The use of 7/4 for Riff 2 foreshadows the interplay between 3 and 4 in a way.

Chorus, part 2 ("Put aside the alienation") in 4

This begins on "Those who wish to be" obv

Actually, the first part of the guitar solo is more like 2 bars of 3, a bar of 2, and a bar of 4. It all adds up to a multiple of 3 so I simplified it that way but this is where the accents fall.

Queen - Bicycle Race.

The Stranglers had several too:

Golden Brown (3/4 - 4/4)
Nuclear Device (4/4 - 6/4 - 7/4)
Peasant In The Big Shitty (9/4)

I count Limelight's verse like this:

3 - 3 - 4 - 2 - 4 - 2 - 3 - 3 - 4(?)

But like you said it's a matter of grouping.

Yeah, yours is more precise.

I'm going to revise my pinball interpretation to:

8 6 8 6
8 8 6 6
8 8 6
8 8 8 6
8 8 8 10
14 bars of 8, one bar of 4
8 6 8 6
8 8 8 6

I count Limelight's verse like this:

3 - 3 - 4 - 2 - 4 - 2 - 3 - 3 - 4(?)

that's really cool. on paper there are 4 divisions of six, but the way it's played is just like you say. It sort of has a consistency and a symmetry despite the odd meter.

Listening again, I believe that last 4 in Limelight's verse is actually a 7/8. What a great song.

bob weir - "playing in the band" the entire song is in 10/4.
allman bros. - "whipping post" is in 11/8 for a few bars.

I love how Give It To Me by Timbaland has a single drum sample throughout, yet it shifts it (or crops it?) so that, further into the track, beat 1 of the bar occurs at a different part of the sample than it did in verse 1, which defeats your expectations in an exhilarating way.

Survivor's Eye Of The Tiger does a clever thing in the intro, dropping a beat so that the guitar chord triple whammy occurs a heartbeat earlier than it did the first time round, mimicing an expert boxer's unexpected (to his opponent) timing.

I'm not sure these are genuine "weird time signatures" or rather examples of odd beats being cut in order to "create interest". The I Should Be So Lucky example six years upthread is a good one - some weird triplet thing happens at "hand in hand I'm dreaming...", although it stays in 4/4.

Listening again, I believe that last 4 in Limelight's verse is actually a 7/8. What a great song.

I think you're right!

'Rockwrok' by Ultravox is mostly in 4/4, but the guitar solo section is in 7/4.

That's just 'missing a beat out' tho.

It's still a time signature change.

tru

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGSZKjTEaTs

This song is 4/4 but the "In the evidence of its brilliance" line she sings in 7/4, but around 3:48 she sings it on top of stuff that's being sung in 4/4 and it sounds kind of crazy.

Suddenly I think I understand part of the appeal of Idlewild's When I Argue I See Shapes. The middle-eightish vocal line that comes in at 3:13 is in 3/4 but then merges over another line in 4/4. (Video might be blocked, it is for me, fuckers.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPNFApou5_4

The chorus 'Remind Me To Smile' by Gary Numan has an interesting one:

(4/4) - "Remind me"
(4/4) - "To smile, you"
(4/4) - "Know the 'old"
(4/4) - "friends' line it"
(4/4) - "gets so I"
(7/4) - "feel like I'm in this"
(5/4) - "cold... glass cage"
(4/4) - *riff*

The 7/4 and 5/4 could be written as three bars of 4/4 - and this seems to help keep the Roland drum machine rhythm pattern in time when it gets to the next verse (which is rigidly stuck in 4/4), but it seems impossible to count them as three blocks of 4 because of the way the beats are stressed.

always enamored by this one:
Barbara Manning - B4 We Go Under (teenbeat records classic, written by Robert Scott, later re-covered by his Magick Heads)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsfW6QmL_zc

my attempt at parsing:
intro/verses: 4 4 4 6
chorus: 4 4 6

This is a crazy one that doesn't get talked about a lot, would love for the formalists talk this one through:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V7lTFzdSn0

Pre-chorus and chorus are obv in 4/4. In the verses, the rhythm section's parts are based on a pattern of 10 eighth notes grouped 3-3-2-2. You could notate that as a dotted rhythm in 5/4 or else in 10/8, which isn't a very common time signature but does seem to describe what's going on. The keyboard part still seems to be in 4 though!

(It's late and I've been drinking rum nog though.)

AMG describes it as "a surprisingly straightforward ballad"!

Is anything on the rest of Panorama this ambitious, rhythmically?

You could notate that as a dotted rhythm in 5/4

Would prob do this.

Please tell me I'm not crazy! My friends hear nothing but 4/4 in this George Jones song, but I'm hearing shortened measures early in the main verses. First happens about 13 seconds in. Very unusual for a traditional country song, methinks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whj-ONfbH64

You're crazy.

Yeah, Jazzbo, you're not crazy...but you're not hearing the song correctly, I think. It's straight 4/4, a very simple two-step, completely standard structurally. Nothing unusual about it at all. What may be fooling you is the way it picks up within the measure, and the way it goes from I to V within the structure. You'll look in vain for a country tune that has any metric shifts or unusual time signatures; it simply doesn't occur.

There is absolutely one measure of 2/4 in each verse

Count along

4 bars of 4/4
1 bar of 4/4 • 1 bar of 2/4 • 2 bars of 4/4
4 bars of 4/4
4 bars of 4/4

It's not Dream Theater or anything but there's two beats dropped in each verse

yeah, E, but the song is simply a two-step. does the bassist ever deviate from playing the same pattern? Nope. you simply count the song in 2. One, two, one, two. Where's the complication here? There is none. What is perhaps notable is the structure of the song, which is completely standard in country music. There are no beats dropped at all. This song is quite similar to the Jones hit "Someone I Used to Know." Any country musician worth his salt would immediately see this is nothing to worry about and also, completely intuitive. The thing that makes it distinctive is the way it picks up from the second beat of the 2/2 measure, which I guess gives the illusion that there's something like "dropping beats" going on here. Great song.