Boston

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind“, “Inside Out“, “The Men Who Stare at Goats“, “Zookeeper“, “The Heat”, “Madagascar 2“. What do these films have in common? A song. The song. The perfect one for those cathartic, all-in final scenes: the sound that becomes one with triumph in the most desperate of endeavours, achieved without a second thought for risk or prejudice. "More Than A Feeling" turns up in dozens of movies, trailers, TV series: it's one of those tracks, like "Gimme Shelter", that the collective imagination has tied to one specific feeling. One so grand and overwhelming that it is, as the title says, more than a feeling.

Credit goes to the chorus: impetuous, sweeping, built on one of the sturdiest, most infectious chord progressions on earth: G major – C major – E minor – D major (I – IV – vi – V, the same one used in "Mr. Brightside", "Shut Up And Dance", "Call Your Girlfriend", and – in a slightly different order – "Summer Of '69", "Stitches" and "Die Young"). With a guitar rhythm so gritty it inspired that all-out juggernaut "Smells Like Teen Spirit". And made even more brazen by a flourish of handclaps, counter-vocals and off-beat accents. It's an exhilarating, cathartic moment. However clichéd by now, filmmakers' choice is entirely understandable: in terms of sheer communicative punch, it's irresistible.

Having become legendary as an anthem to swagger, "More Than A Feeling" is actually a nostalgic, multi-layered song. It doesn't head straight for the chorus (even though plenty of film uses conveniently pretend it does), nor does it wrap it up cleanly and linearly either – except on its final reprise, which is, not coincidentally, the one filmmakers use most.

This feeling that surpasses itself is built carefully, layer by layer, starting from one of the most iconic acoustic intros of all time. We'll leave the nerdy details for the note at the end of the article and focus on the essential building blocks: a twelve-string arpeggio fading in, with a rising-and-falling bassline closing a circle that could loop forever. The calm verse resting on sparse, distinctly West Coast drumming, just cheeky enough not to make the HDR-sunrise glow feel too mannered. Four lines are all it takes to raise the stakes, helped by the octave leap singer Brad Delp uses on the key line: "I closed my eyes and I slipped away." Everything seems to be building to the chorus, and instead: the drums drop out. They come back in, and out of nowhere emerges the most dazzling electric guitar sound you've ever heard. Just two bars, enough for Tom Scholz's unforgettable line to lead straight into the four thunderous chords everyone remembers. Barely twenty seconds have passed since the verse ended, but in terms of sheer grandeur, the atmosphere has already exploded. Now, yes, it's truly time to let go. BAA-ba-ba-BA-BA/BA-ba-ba-BA-BA!

Such a burst of energy can't help but leave you intoxicated, but here comes another surprise: the chorus doesn't end the way it should. Instead of closing the progression, dropping a nice G chord and calling it a day... What's going on? Why has the mood suddenly gone suspended? A moment ago we were at the peak of the charge, the lyrics referenced this "old song" and brought every feeling roaring back to life at full intensity... And now instead we hear about this "Marianne walkin' away"? Who on earth is Marianne, and how did she manage to take all the song's momentum with her?

The truth is, "More Than A Feeling" is a song about the bittersweet taste of memory. Tom Scholz wrote it (and claims it took him five years!) with "Walk Away Renée" by the Left Banke in mind, a baroque-pop track whose essence lies in that very duality of joy and melancholy. Is that the "old song"? Who knows. What's certain is that traces of it made their way into the composition, since a couple of the chord progressions are lifted almost note for note. And Marianne? An old flame – though not Scholz's own, but his older cousin's. A hazy memory, one that faded long ago, yet which for a few brief instants becomes more present than ever... only to vanish again just as quickly as it appeared. But not forever. The power to bring those feelings flooding back, pristine and undimmed, still lives in the music: all you have to do is play it, and every moment and emotion returns, "as clear as the sun in the summer sky."

Solo. Someone might say: well, songs from that era always had a solo. True. But this isn't a solo. It's the single most colossally radiant thing to ever come out of a guitar. So much so that, truth be told, there are at least two guitars (plus the rhythm part, of course): one, doubled across the two stereo channels to create a choral effect, dominates the center of the mix; the other darts from side to side, doubling the melodic line first a third, then an octave above. Pure emphasis, condensed into twenty seconds or so. It can't get any better than this. Chorus. Fade out.

There's no point beating around the bush: Boston played every card they had in their hand on "More Than A Feeling". The other tracks don't add anything new: they revisit the same ideas, searching for other possible variations on that dazzling sound. At least the following two, "Peace Of Mind" and "Foreplay/Long Time", are essential listening in their own right, and the rest of the album makes for a thoroughly satisfying complement to that formidable opening trio.

"Peace Of Mind" shows better than anything what "revisiting the same ideas" actually means. The chords it's built on are the same ones from the chorus of "More Than A Feeling", rearranged and raised by two tones. Galvanizing from start to finish, the track alternates a rock'n'roll shuffle in the verse with a chorus built entirely on vocal harmonies borrowed from a good decade of folk-pop and post-Beach Boys baroque flourishes. Everything unfolds according to the already-tested script: there's the surprising break ("Take a look ahead"), there are the stop 'n' go moments and the megagalactic riffs, there's the larger than life guitar blowout... Wait, hold on a second: this one really can't just be dismissed like that. Scholz's double/triple solo, kicking in just after the three-minute mark, is something out of this world, a stereophonic ping-pong of hard rock guitar bursts that, after a couple of call-and-response exchanges, converge into a completely anachronistic entity: a fragment of Nineties melodic death metal transplanted right into the middle of the American Seventies. In barely twenty seconds here, and in another fifteen or so in the intro of "Something About You", the layering of multiple harmonized lead lines is taken to a level of grandiosity that will only be surpassed in the Sweden of At The Gates, In Flames, Dark Tranquillity — not for nothing, this is the country that in the Eighties would become home to a thriving late-Adult Oriented Rock scene directly indebted to the style of Boston and their acolytes.

Scholz, an essentially sole composer, the band's principal musician and undisputed leader, grasped a simple doctrine: with one guitar, rock sounds good; with two, it sounds better; with three, it's the best of the best... and so on, upward. For the instrumental coda of "Peace Of Mind", he ends up layering at least six different guitar parts one on top of the other. As throughout the record, he doesn't drag it out for too long, but the brief runtime doesn't stop the passage from being recognized as one of the high points of grandeur ever reached by rock music of any era.

Hard-rock broadsides, folk arpeggios, West Coast-style vocal harmonies, baroque pop progressions mixed with chord changes fit for dozens of beach-pop earworms: these are the ingredients so far, both for Boston and for the emerging heavy AOR strand they pioneered. To tell the story properly, though, one fundamental component is still missing, and it comes from across the ocean: prog. Already a key element in the formula of Kansas and Styx, in Boston's music the progressive lesson is reworked in a less overt but, if anything, even more thunderous way. After all, it's from the marriage of rock and classical music (of which he's a great devotee) that all the neoclassical flourishes Scholz stuffs into his phrasing come from, and it's to the shifts in atmosphere the British masters excel at that he looks when structuring his songs (though he tends to always end up favoring the more emphatic colors).

"Foreplay/Longtime" is the track where these influences show themselves most overtly, on one hand through a long intro built on Hammond organ ("Foreplay"), and on the other through the interplay of density and rarefaction that drives "Longtime", the second single released from the album right after "More Than A Feeling". Scholz's references all point directly to the more rock-leaning wing of the genre: Deep Purple and Uriah Heep with their organ fury, Wishbone Ash, among the first to bet on harmonized guitar lines, Yes, whose Steve Howe always showed he had no qualms about the most classically rock'n'roll strumming.

A unique episode on the album alongside the closing "Let Me Take You Home Tonight", "Longtime" doesn't see Scholz as the sole guitar protagonist: on both tracks, it's second guitarist Barry Goudreau who handles the main lines and solos. Live, for obvious performance reasons, responsibility for the guitar parts is split between Scholz, Goudreau, and singer Brad Delp. In the studio, however, it's usually Scholz who reigns supreme: after all, Boston was born, and essentially remained, pretty much a one-man band. An engineer trained at MIT, as early as the beginning of the Seventies Scholz had built a recording studio in his basement, where he fine-tuned devices to make his guitar sound unique. The core of the songs on the debut album was composed by Scholz well before that fateful 1975, when, thanks to a demo tape recorded in his personal studio, he managed to catch the attention of Epic/CBS. The label wanted the band's debut (which also featured Delp, Goudreau, and drummer Sib Hashian as performers) to be recorded in a professional studio, but Scholz didn't agree. So, together with co-producer John Boylan, he hatched a plan to keep the record executives happy: while Boylan would fly to California with the rest of the band to record only "Let Me Take You Home Tonight", written by Delp, Scholz would finish the work on the bulk of the album. A way was also found to spend at least a little of the generous budget available: Boylan added to the expense report the thousand-dollar custom acoustic guitar Delp bought during the California sessions. Meanwhile, in a Boston basement, Tom Scholz was recording some of the greatest hits in rock history on a $100 Yamaha acoustic.

Scholz's devotion to rock'n'roll is evidenced by "Rock'n'Roll Band" and "Smokin'". Both built on a boogie backbone bolstered by the usual dose of hefty guitars, they diverge quite a bit in how they develop. The first, a mix of power-pop choruses and John Bonham-style off-beat rhythms, celebrates a rock band's career arc, from bars to stadiums. Despite its apparently autobiographical opening line ("Well, we were just another band out of Boston"), it's as fictional in the events it describes as the crowd noise Scholz overdubbed in his home studio. "Smokin'", the B-side of "More Than A Feeling", instead dusts off the pomp-rock arsenal of organ, Clavinet, and classical-leaning progressions, setting it within a somewhat ZZ Top-ish groove. Aside from the already-mentioned "Let Me Take You Home Tonight", it's the only track Brad Delp also had a hand in writing.

With its almost bucolic opening, which within a minute and a half blossoms into an explosion of organ and guitar effects, "Hitch A Ride" is perhaps the most complete synthesis of the Boston sound, a meeting of opposites that manages, in just a few minutes, to reconcile the power of distorted guitars with the laid-back grooves of the Eagles and Jeff Porcaro, and the immediacy of plain four-chord progressions with the kaleidoscopic quality of progressive rock.

Less remembered today than the three opening tracks, these songs too were standards on FM radio stations for years, which in that very period were consolidating a format built around playlists that also included deep album tracks — songs that hadn't been pushed by the labels as singles.

Released at the end of August 1976 and pushed on radio by a tracklist considered all killer no filler, the album born in a basement gradually climbed the charts, and by December 1976 sat at number three among best-selling albums in the United States (above it were "Songs In The Key Of Life" by Stevie Wonder and "Night On The Town" by Rod Stewart). It held that spot for over a month, then gave way to Wings (meanwhile, "Hotel California" had reached the top); it would take another four months for it to drop out of the top 10. To this day, with over 20 million copies sold and seventeen platinum certifications, it ranks among the best-selling debut albums of all time.

The band tears it up live, and its reach stuns promoters: not only did it sell out three shows at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1977, but its concerts filled arenas across the entire Midwest. This was a far from common occurrence for an era used to artists whose success was more geographically confined.

The record's runaway success created huge anticipation for future Boston releases, but the follow-up was a long time coming. Bound by contract with Epic to deliver ten albums in six years, Scholz let two years go by and only released the second album, "Don't Look Back", in 1978, under the label's insistent pressure. According to the artist, this compromised the result, but the audience didn't seem to mind much: although it sold less overall than the debut, the album shot to number one on the US charts, and the subsequent tour was a huge success. Critics at the time were quick to note that the formula was essentially the same as the debut's, complete with self-quotations and just a hint of extra "Don't Fear The Reaper" in the lead single (also titled "Don't Look Back"), but overall critical reception was positive as well. Scholz, however, remained unsatisfied.

Determined to regain full control of the project and its timeline, he broke with Epic and, after a lengthy legal battle, signed with MCA. Meanwhile, he'd reawakened his engineering/tinkering streak and founded Scholz Research & Development, Inc., the company behind the Rockman guitar multi-effects processor (used, among others, by David Gilmour). He also set to work on ideas for the third album. “Third Stage” came out in 1986 after eight years of gestation, with a completely different lineup and musical climate compared to the late-Seventies feel of the two previous records. This time the stylistic shift is unmistakable from the very first track, the sweeping opening ballad “Amanda,” which—for the first and only time in the band's career—topped the singles chart. The album's tone (which also hit number one) is this time quite varied, with near-metal flourishes alternating with more atmospheric passages, sometimes darker, sometimes more dreamlike. All of it was crafted by Scholz with heavy use of the Rockman: although the ear might suggest otherwise, no synthetic or orchestral elements were actually used. Ten years after first surprising the world, engineer Scholz's creative streak can still make you wonder: where on earth is this sound coming from?

A nerdy note on “More Than A Feeling”

As you might have gathered: “More Than A Feeling” sounds deceptively simple, but it's actually a piece of clockwork precision. Without getting bogged down in unanswerable questions about the songwriters' compositional self-awareness, here's a brief breakdown of what happens across its just-under-five minutes, at least on a harmonic level. To begin with, there's no consensus on the key. English Wikipedia states: “The song is written in G major, but the published sheet music mistakenly notates the verses as being in D major.” Mistakenly? The entire intro and verse are built on an arpeggiated D major chord, over which various bass notes are layered (including G). The melodic line follows the G major scale, but centers on A rather than G—a circumstance that points to the Dorian mode. So what we have is a verse centered on A, built over a D chord, moving through a G scale. Sure, you could cut through the ambiguity and just call it G major, but doing so hides the most significant aspect of this verse: the way it hovers between three tonal centers—A, D, G—exactly the three notes that open the arpeggio (the next one is an F sharp: keep that in mind, it'll come in handy later). It's a serene yet twilight-toned verse, waiting for the arrival of more light and more energy.

The chorus resolves the ambiguity, gaining in radiance: it's clearly in G major, and melodically closes on G, right on “'Til I see Marianne walkin' away.” But it's exactly here that the clarity starts to crack. Ignoring the melodic line, “walkin' away” closes harmonically not on the tonic (G major) but on the flat sixth (E flat major): a decidedly rare kind of cadence. What's going on? Let's take a close look at how the chords move (in one of the many available transcriptions):

G C E♭

'Til I see Marianne walk away,

Em7 […]

I see my Marianne walkin' away

The movement at the end of the chorus is I – IV – ♭VI. You might instead have expected I – IV – I. And indeed, a flat sixth chord is a possible “substitute” for the tonic, since it shares a note with it (the root, no less: in our case, G). Thanks to this property, that E flat can be “slotted in” in place of the concluding chord, adding variety without making the progression unrecognizable. It remains, however, an unusual choice: how should we read it?

It helps to have a few similar examples in mind, and, as often happens, that cornucopia of harmonic solutions that is the Beatles' songbook can serve as a good reference point. The Lennon/McCartney duo were particularly fond of a specific trick for “slowing down” a IV-I harmonic resolution: it involves inserting the minor fourth between the two chords, creating a IV – iv – I sequence. This “minor plagal cadence,” which some on Reddit have taken to calling the “Beatles cadence,” turns up in songs like “In My Life,” “If I Fell,” “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” and “Blackbird,” always producing a similar perceptual effect: a direct, clean, comforting major-key passage gets “veiled” by the minor in an unexpected way, as if a small cloud briefly passed in front of the sun, drifting away almost immediately but reminding us that clear skies aren't a given, just a fragile stroke of luck.

Before getting to the point—and explaining what any of this has to do with the IV – ♭VI in “'Til I see Marianne walk away”—it's worth noting that this device is basically a calling card for hardcore Beatles devotees: it's used by 10cc (“I'm Not In Love”), ELO (“Xanadu”), Bee Gees (“How Deep Is Your Love”), Oasis (“Don't Look Back In Anger”), and Radiohead (“Creep”). It also shows up in “Starman”, “Moon River”, “Come On Eileen”, “Can't Get My Eyes Off Of You”, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, and “Circles”.

But what's the connection to “More Than A Feeling”? The progression is different, but related. The chord on the fourth degree is there: it's C major. Then, though, it moves to the flat sixth, and here the paths seem to diverge irreparably... Except that the flat sixth is simply the relative major of the minor fourth. Just as A minor and C major share a very tight relationship (two shared notes in the chord, and every single note identical across their respective scales), that E flat major is a direct relative of the C minor we'd have encountered in a IV – iv – I. Again, nothing new here: the device is rarer, but it turns up in the Beatles' “Hello Goodbye,” “Oh! Darling,” and “I Saw Her Standing There” (as well as in “For What It's Worth” and “Young Turks”, to name a couple more examples, or in a slightly varied form in that other total Beatles homage, “Sowing The Seeds Of Love”). It works essentially the same way as the progression mentioned earlier: it slows down and darkens the resolution to the tonic, while at the same time smoothing it over through a gradual chromatic descent toward the dominant (in G major: IV features an E, iv and ♭VI an E flat, I closes with a D). As musicologist Dominic Pedler observes in his monumental “The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles” (Omnibus Press, 2003), although iv and ♭VI serve the same harmonic function, ♭VI sounds “more rock’n’roll” and makes the passage feel more surprising and harder-edged.

Is everything clear now? Well, no. Because in reality “'Til I see Marianne walkin' away” doesn't resolve to G major (I) at all, but to E minor seventh (vi7)! So is it IV – ♭VI – vi7? With a little effort, we can now make sense of the logic. E minor is the relative minor of G major: it's the same relationship as A minor-C major, or the C minor-E flat major we saw above. So the substitution holds up. It works even better when supported by the addition of E's seventh—that very D which closes off the descending motion characteristic of both IV – iv – I and IV – ♭VI – I. In short: IV – ♭VI – vi7 is an unusual but effective way of reworking the classic IV-I plagal cadence. Effective in what sense, though? In terms of unpredictability, certainly, but also expressiveness: the break that follows marks an emotional shift away from the full power of the chorus. A clouding-over, a doubt too big to fit into a single chord, requiring an entire verse instead: an extended passage in which the song's framework turns minor, led by that E minor seventh.

Harmonically speaking, there are two different versions of this break. One is in the first chorus, which, after shuffling the deck a bit further with an A major, dutifully returns to G and dissolves into the D arpeggio of the second verse. The break in the second chorus, however, takes a different turn: after the E minor seventh and A major, with a descending bass line it closes right on A major—a chord outside the key, which, rather than settling the anomalies, throws more fuel on the fire. That A major, which overloads the atmosphere, is one of the factors that makes the guitar solo just past the three-minute mark so electrifying. The A functions as a springboard into a change of melodic key: from the notes of the G major scale, the electric guitar shifts to those of D major—the dominant, perceptually a notch “above” the tonic in terms of excitement. For much of the solo, the melodic line gravitates around F sharp, an even more “daring” position since it sits just a half-step below the G that dominates most of the song. The solo finally comes back down to earth, and with a progression borrowed from “Walk Away Renée” reconnects to the D of the familiar arpeggio; but not before one last burst of daring: just an instant before closing, the first and second guitars fire off a pair of extremely high D notes (one of them at the 22nd fret—literally the highest note possible on the Gibson Les Paul used by Tom Scholz).

Whether or not Scholz followed similar reasoning in working out the song's composition is, all things considered, fairly irrelevant. Like most people, he probably drew on pieces he'd already heard and, guitar in hand, reworked them by ear according to his expressive needs. Besides, the chain of subsequent inspirations doesn't stop with "More Than A Feeling". Its possible influence on Nirvana has already been discussed, but even without going that far, it's worth noting how another celebrated Aor track, Styx's "Come Sail Away", released just a year later, features at a crucial point a deceptive cadence built on exactly the same degree as the one in "'Til I see Marianne walkin' away". In that case too, it comes at the end of the chorus, where a similar IV–VI♭ leap opens the heavenly, quasi-minimalist interlude that Kevin Holm-Hudson analyzes so well in his short essay "'Come Sail Away' And The Commodification of 'Prog Lite'" ("American Music", 2005, University Of Illinois Press).

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24/10/2021