I have lots of songs that have been with me for many, many years. Rush songs, Beatles stuff, Bacharach and David covers, Bowie, Queen, Chic, and on and on. But, three songs written and recorded in the late 70s and one in the mid-80s are not only close to my heart, but feel like they are related. Hashtag: #BeachAngst
The first is Message in a Bottle by The Police. This song hangs on Andy Summer’s arpeggiated riff, which goes from a C#min9 to an Amaj9, B7, and finishes with an F#m. It’s a fairly standard chord progression, although Andy Summers plays it with an interesting, wide inversion of each chord, which I discussed in my Classic Chords series some time ago. Incidentally, the opening C#min9 is equivalent to a C#sus2. The D# note being the 2nd and not in the C# major scale and the ninth in C# minor.
The second song is Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach. This tune also hangs on an arpeggiated guitar riff Am-D-C, Am D-Em. It doesn’t really sound like Message in a Bottle, but it shares an edgy guitar tone and the arpeggiation.
The third song is part i of a bigger opus, the Tide Pools movement from Rush’s Natural Science. Once the strummy acoustic of the intro has ended, an arpeggiated guitar riff builds to an edgy tone – Em-C(add9)-D-G-C(add9). This riff does resemble the Echo Beach riff, albeit in a different key. Both written and recorded around about the same time by two Canadian bands. However, if we simplify the chords and put this riff and The Police riff in the same key there’s a more obvious overlap, especially as C-major is the harmonic counterpart of A-minor:
Tide Pools – Em C D C
Message – Em C D Am
Then, if we simplify the riffs from Echo Beach and Drive, She said and put them in E-minor too, we get this.
Echo – Em A G
Drive – A G Em
The fourth song is Drive, She Said by Stan Ridgway. The arpeggiated guitar of this song is like a desiccated version of Message in a Bottle splashed with Permanent Waves on Echo Beach watched over by Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis eyes. Bette Davis substitutes snow for sand. Meanwhile, chords from Bette Davis Eyes hanker after the Rush’s permanent waves and The Police’s lonely desert island.
Eyes – C Em D
Now, many years later, I suddenly had a revelation. All of these songs are angst-ridden and all of them allude one way or another to beaches, the coast, a rocky shoreline…have I really taken this long to spot that figurative connection. So, it begs the question what led all of those disparate songwriters back in 1979 to hang their song on an edgy arpeggiated guitar riff and sing about longing, with the beach as allegory?
The marine connection is obvious in Message in a Bottle – a guy stranded on the desert island that is loneliness sending out an SOS. Martha hankering nostalgically for the far away escape that is Echo Beach. Rush worrying about our little lives in the Tide Pools, ignoring the big changes, the science and nature, the permanent waves. But, what about Drive, She said? That’s about a taxi driver being coerced into being a getaway driver. But, yes, in his fear-infused imagination, he pictures an alternative reality with his gun-toting, bank-robbing passenger:
“I thought I saw the both of us on some kinda tropical island someplace
Walkin’ down a white sandy beach”
See? Angst and beaches!
Incidentally, I recorded a solo cover of Message in a Bottle many years ago, we perform Echo Beach with my band C5, but we’re yet to include any Rush in our cover songs repertoire. That said, we do Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, which is basically a musical clone of Rush’s The Spirit of Radio. I might see if the others in the band fancy doing a mashup of Stan Ridgway and Kim Carnes.
Footnote
Having shared my thoughts on social media, I started getting other examples of other angsty, beach songs, although they don’t necessarily have a compact guitar figure:
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea by The Cure – from Robin McCarthy
All for Leyna by Billy Joel – from Kevin Sargent
Staring at the Sea by The Cure – from Andrea Thomson
On the Beach by Neil Young – from Andrea Thomson
Godrevy Point, Wind in the Wires by Patrick Wolf – from Andrea Thomson