Domestic Left #24: The ending not quite done yet
My current jam, the song at the top of my Spotify “On Repeat” list right now, is Ezra Furman’s “Forever In Sunset.”
It’s propulsive, dramatic, synthesizers-and-guitar rock that would not be out of place on the soundtrack of a John Hughes film from the 80s (in fact, there’s another song on the same album, All Of Us Flames, titled “Ally Sheedy In The Breakfast Club”). But it’s not quite put together like a pop song.
Lyrically, Furman uses a technique Bob Dylan borrowed from folk and blues, of constructing verses by repeating the same line with minor variations — the song is more “Hard Traveling” than “Don’t You Forget About Me.” Structurally, you could say it has two “verses,” each of them consisting of two quatrains, and a “chorus” after each of them, but it’s more the culmination of a slow crescendo than a chorus, in the pop-music sense. Most importantly, the song’s hook, the insistent melody you can’t get out of your head after listening to the song, is in the verse, not the “chorus.”
That hook — the vocal melody, which is also played on synthesizers, tentatively at the beginning, more confidently in the middle of the first verse, triumphantly after each chorus — is a descending melodic line of twice-repeated eighth notes, each set of two starting on the off-beat, the whole phrase waiting until the off-beat of the second beat of the measure to begin. Played over a solid eighth-note bass line (of the sort made famous, at least to my generation, by U2’s “With or Without You”), it creates a sense of hesitant speech, or of water cascading slowly over shallow falls, propelled inexorably by gravity in one direction but taking its time to get there. It goes down three notes, almost to the tonic, then repeats — finally landing on the root note of E for the last two notes of the 14-note phrase, as the background harmony plays an A major chord. One measure later, the harmony resolves back to E major — but the melody begins again on an A note (a slightly dissonant suspended fourth, relative to the harmony).
This cycle sets up a mild but restless tension as Furman sings about a relationship that seems to largely take place in a car. There’s a fluidity to the narration — it’s not clear whether the two people whose relationship is being described are taking turns driving, or taking turns narrating the song — which prompts the listener to identify with both simultaneously, with the totality of the relationship.
All the while, the musical tension of the melody over the repeating I-V-IV chord changes (a chord progression that never quite “resolves” in the Western-music sense) pushes the song forward towards the chorus. Guitar chords begin crashing on the first beat of each measure, and Furman’s voice moves from soft narration to urgent declaration. In the final measures of the chorus, for the first time in the song, the drums lock into a standard 4/4 backbeat. The harmony repeats a I-IV change three times, then crests on a measure of the dominant V chord — and returns to the tonic for an instrumental restatement of the theme. It’s a brilliant move, importing a bit of harmonic bombast from classical music (which is fundamentally built around building tension by moving from the tonic I chord to the dominant V chord, then resolving it with a return to the I) into what is otherwise, melodically and harmonically, almost a folk ballad.
Most of the verses take place in the past — “I told you I was trouble, man”, “that summer of the crash, the winter of survival mode”, “you said you believed in me” — until the final quatrain, which is written in present tense and ends with the line “You’ve got me in your arms, maybe that’s all we need for warmth.” It’s sweet and almost hopeful, rooted in specificity about these two people, and a stark contrast to the chorus, where Furman turns to the general, remembering “when we thought the world was ending,” comparing the future to, of all things, a text message, and singing about living “forever in sunset, an ending not quite done yet.”
The song ends on an A major chord, the subdominant IV, which our ears want to resolve back to the tonic (E major). The synthesizer stops on the 12th note of the melody, an F sharp, like it’s suspended motionless on the last step coming down the stairs.
F sharp is a major sixth relative to A, not a chord tone but not as dissonant as a major seventh or a fourth. It’s a note that pedal steel players will often add in country music. It sits sweetly in the crook of the harmony, like a lover’s head on your shoulder. It is the perfect ending to the song.