The Postal Service, "Grow Old With Me"

Song: "Grow Old With Me"
Artist: The Postal Service
Album: Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign To Save Darfur
Written by: John Lennon
Year: 2007
Key: Em
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: let's love each other for as long (or as little) as we have left; vow, interrupted
Where used: verse



Since I started maintaining a year-by-year list of the songs I've been able to identify as using the SFCP in some capacity, a few folks have noticed what seems to be an increase in its popularity in the last few years. I certainly hope so, as that was somewhat at the core of the article that started this mess at the end of 2008. If you're looking for a song emblematic of the sense that the SFCP has been on the rise, you could do a whole lot worse than the Postal Service's "Grow Old With Me."

The reason for that is simple: the song's a cover, and there was no SFCP in John Lennon's version. There didn't need to be. It was already almost unbearably heartbreaking in its original incarnation, which came out in 1984. It wasn't even that Lennon's murder three years earlier altered our perception of the song; outside of his inner circle, there wasn't one single person who wasn't painfully aware from the very first time they ever heard it that the sweet invitation and implicit promise that he was offering to his beloved could never be realized. When it was recorded, the song was a celebration; by the time it reached the public, it was a sad fantasy.

All of that happened without the SFCP. But that was during the early 1980s. By the time the Postal Service took their turn at it in 2007, it was in the thick of a veritable SFCP boom. Whether Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello had that in mind or not, the fact remains that their recording altered the verses to revolve around a SFCP absent in the original, and they did it at a time when the progression was beginning to pick up substantial steam. (If inserting a ubiquitous chord progression into a song written without it isn't reflective of prevailing musical trends, then we are working off of different definitions of "trend.") The resultant version was moody and ominous where Lennon's was warm and open. It's not clear that Lennon himself would have agreed with the darkness that the Postal Service gave to his song, but then, it had already been irrevocably, fundamentally altered before it ever saw the light of day.

Full song: The Postal Service, "Grow Old With Me"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Beyoncé, "If I Were A Boy"

Song: "If I Were A Boy"
Artist: Beyoncé
Album: I Am... Sasha Fierce
Written by: Toby Gad/B.C. Jean
Year: 2008
Key: Em
Classification: SF1
Lyrical content: anything you can do, I could do better; Beyoncé solves the battle of the sexes but sends 50% of the planet's population into fits of frustrated agony
Where used: verse



For as much as she fits an almost Platonic conception of sensual feminine beauty, Beyoncé has never seemed especially touchable. There's something too guarded, too plastic about her, to the extent that there are times when she barely registers as an actual human being. She may have put the half-robotic Sasha Fierce character out there as a conscious statement about strength through artificiality and the roles we play, but it's actually one of the most honest assessments of her public persona that she could have possibly made. It's telling that amidst the rote meticulousness of the "Single Ladies" video, the only note that rings false is when she softens into a smile at the very end. Instead of breaking character, that's the precise moment she slips into one.

That's not to say that the Yonce is incapable of wringing emotion out of her performances in an effective manner. On the contrary, she can be almost maddeningly efficient at it. Her voice doesn't have the forceful purity of tone you find with, say, Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera. In a way, she has more in common vocally with Rosanne Cash, with flaws (including a nasality that's sometimes held just barely in check) that she's smart enough to turn into strengths by using them to convey vulnerability. That's what's happening on "If I Were A Boy," where Beyoncé constructs a fantasy in which she gets to undo all of the bad she sees being done in the battle of the sexes – the fact that she implicitly absolves herself of the equally real mistakes women make is irrelevant, a testament to how much she gets us to invest in her – and reveals a deep well of unabashed disappointment and hurt.

None of that would have remotely the same impact without the SFCP. It's crucial here, acting as a sort of bonding agent for the ideas of the song. The music, the lyric and Beyoncé's vocal are all speaking the exact same language, making sure that the message gets delivered without getting lost somewhere along the way. She eventually breaks the pattern in the bridge, as she becomes less and less measured in her frustration and shifts to the reality of the situation that sent her into her hypothetical daydreaming in the first place, only to slip back into the SFCP when she hits a wall and realizes that all of her protests aren't going to change a thing. Boys will be boys, girls will be girls and the cycle will continue ad infinitum, as the SFCP rolls on.

(As a special grammar-nerd postscript, allow me to tip my hat to writers Gad and Jean for correctly using the subjunctive "were" in their title, rather than "was," and to Beyoncé for leaving it alone.)

Full song: Beyoncé, "If I Were A Boy"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song

Neutral Milk Hotel, "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

Song: "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"
Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Album: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Written by: Jeff Mangum
Year: 1998
Key: Em
Classification: SF2
Lyrical content: the ghost beckons; the heart yearns for that which it does not know
Where used: bridge



I've spent much of the past few weeks immersed in Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records, commemorating the 20th anniversary year of the label, so the time seems exactly right to talk about Neutral Milk Hotel. And yet. There's been so much said about In The Aeroplane Over The Sea over the years that I almost don't know what else I can add. I can, however, point you to Glenn McDonald's heart-stoppingly great review (one of my two favorite record reviews of all time) and Taylor Clark's excellent Slate piece tracking the whereabouts of the man who pulled a perfect album out of his head and decided, well, maybe that's enough of that. So let me just say this: it seems more obvious as the years go by that this fever dream of a record is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Less obviously, it should also be mentioned that it is a fantastic album to run to.

That said, I've always had a hard time excerpting from it. So many songs bleed into one another that trying to put something from it on a mixtape, for instance, requires that you either cut the music flat dead at the end of the track or include more than one song. And the problem with that is that you end up with a run of three or four songs in a row, in which case, why aren't you just burning the whole album? It's not just the lack of clean gaps between tracks, though. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is an album that practically demands to be listened to in a single sitting. The second time I put it on, I had intended (as is my habit) to listen to two, maybe three songs, just to get a sense of them individually outside the flow of the album; the next thing I knew, Jeff Mangum was putting down his guitar and exiting the studio. I once saw someone posit that the album emitted, and I quote, "hypno-rays" while it played. It's not the least plausible theory I've heard.

One of the only songs that's even remotely self-contained is the title track, where we first meet the ghost that haunts Mangum over the course of the album. It's a testament to how subtly and cannily he uses the SFCP that despite the fact that I got In The Aeroplane Over The Sea not long after I first identified the SFCP and listened to it Lord knows how many times in the ten years since, it still took one of the commenters to this blog for me to actually notice that it was sitting right there in the bridge. (Thanks, Benjamin.) I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since Mangum's accomplishment with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has nothing to do with inventing radically new chord progressions and everything to do with what he did with them. (It's worth noting right here that the verse progression is also a mainstay: the archetypal doo-wop I-vi-IV-V, albeit used quite differently.) In a way, that's one of the album's strengths: the way Mangum takes a fistful of basic chords and transforms them in a kind of alchemy into a musical narrative that I still haven't fully gotten to the bottom of more than a decade on.

Full song: Neutral Milk Hotel, "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"
Listen to the SFCP clip for this song