But then what happens? At 3:30, we go into a major key and the song divides into two, shedding the dirty skin of its first half. The last song on Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, Rocket Queen, has several pale imitations of their best riffs with some half-arsed braggadocio and a truly sub-Jane Birkin panting section. It's not even a very good song - but maybe it makes sense in the context of the entire album. We could happily have another half hour of this, but they understand the concept: leave them wanting more. As the last chord of the chorus is fading into silence, a lazy drum fill and a 12-string sweep take us into falsetto and string heaven. So who has got it right? Ahem, you may not believe me, but go and listen to Teenage Fanclub's The Concept. Come on! It is, however, great for DJs as it brings the night to a suitable climax before sending girlfriends off to the cloakroom whilst their lesser halves indulge in a bit of air wah-wah. After resisting their muso tendencies for an entire album, the Stone Roses let loose at the end of I Am the Resurrection with four and a half minutes of the worst baggy funk jamming this side of the Spin Doctors. After blustering around one of the great riffs for just over three minutes (again) we have a four minute piano-based chord cycle that reaches the limits of its welcome with still another two minutes of MOR drifting to be endured.Ī generation later, the idea of quality over quantity still hasn't caught on. Ditto for Layla by Eric Clapton/Derek and the Dominoes. In other words, the two minutes of fade out NAs are utterly redundant. If he was being sensible he would have used the golden ratio to calculate that the prime length of NA NA-ing is exactly one minute and 56 seconds (which renders the total song length 304 seconds, making the ratio of the NA NA section to section A identical to that of section A to the whole song). Unfortunately that leaves a whole four minutes of NA NA-ing, which is trying even to the most McCartney-sympathetic of patiences. But it is a great song - in fact, up until 3:08, one of the very best. As with many great songs we have been rendered blase to its charms by familiarity. To get us in the mood, let's look at the famous ones. Of course, this doesn't actually happen very often, but when it does it's rather satisfying for the ears. A good coda will introduce new material that allows the listener to look back and reflect on the themes of the rest of the song whilst providing a balanced emotional counterpart to the preceding four minutes. An outro could just be a guitar solo over the main riff or the chorus repeated endlessly to fade all in all not very interesting. To continue the pedantic theme of this blog, here are the rules: A proper coda is distinguishable from an outro.
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