As I said in that same podcast, a good song emotionally connects you to the story. Which, as I just said, feels fresh and new because we come back home to the starting key of D Major. This all culminates with the last verse, pre-chorus and final chorus with the ad-lib fade out. Third, it allows the lyrics to change their voice (more on this a little later), and fourth, it provides an opportunity for reframing the sections we’ve already heard to feel fresh and new when they come back around. First, it sets the section apart from the rest, which every good primary bridge does. The bridge does something really interesting here, it moves to the key of F Major. Up until now we have been happily plodding along in the key of D Major. This is the primary bridge (a.k.a the B section, middle 8). This next section blew my 14 year old mind when I first heard it. Lyrically it’s nothing more than “back in the summer of ‘69”, but we get the title and the harmonic cadence that signals the “this is it!” of a chorus. Then we come up on verse 3, which moves back into another pre-chorus, but this time we get some payoff, because it goes to a real chorus. There's definitely a little bit of “not yet” going on here with the production. It’s almost a re-intro, except it extends to the V chord (an A major), and adds a melodic guitar hook. From there we hit this section that, in every way, sounds and feels like a pre-chorus (a.k.a the transitional bridge), but is it? You don’t really question it until you realize the next section should be the chorus, but it has no lyrics (at least at first). We start with an intro of just the I chord (a D major in this case) for 4 bars, which seamlessly flows into the first verse “I got my first real six-string…”, which flows right into verse 2 “me and some guys from school…”. The odd thing about Summer of ‘69 is that it comes from an era of very tight (predictable?) song forms, but it veers from the norm and is, in some ways, ambiguous. For me the song form, lyrics and rhyme scheme are equally important to the arrangement and production. I was a songwriting major in college, so I will dive into the internal relationships of the song elements because that is what makes a great song to me. Whatever the case, let’s take a look at Summer of ‘69 and see what makes it tick, and why it is a great pop/rock song and production. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because it does what a great song is supposed to do: it makes me part of the story, and the images and feelings that play out in the song all become my own. Maybe I’m still just tickled by that key change in the bridge, like I was when I first tried to learn to play the song. What makes this song so memorable that I would choose it decades later as a “best” anything? Perhaps the fact that I still remember it at all speaks to that. Sure, I could think of hundreds of great pop songs from different eras, but this one has stuck with me from the very first time I heard it. “That song is my jam.In a recent Production Expert podcast, when posed with the question of what I thought was the best pop song, my answer was Summer of ‘69 by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. That said, he insisted in the Times that he would have shouted for a different Bryan Adams song had he been the heckler: Run to You. Ryan Adams had in fact occasionally played Summer ’of 69 even before the 2002 incident, and has done so since, including one performance of it at the Ryman in April 2015. The pair share a birthday, and he wrote in the NYT that he emails the other Adams every year to wish him happy birthday. He’s mellowed towards his Canadian near-namesake now. He also said, back then, that Bryan Adams “is quite embarrassing in general”. In the wake of the incident, he described the Ryman – famed as the former home of the Grand Ole Opry concert, and one of country music’s most sacred venues – as “a shithole … that has the balls to charge you for security when you play there but if some college kid, and I mean SOUTHERN college kid, decides to get wasted and scream through seven songs of a solo acoustic performance, they couldn’t give a fuck”. In 2006, he told Spin magazine: “I had to go into therapy because of the whole Bryan Adams Summer of ’69 thing.” He also described his audience as “a bunch of cocks” who “come to my shows just to provoke me”. The incident certainly became famous, with the Tennessean newspaper’s account travelling around the world, and affecting Adams deeply.
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