Don't Say Goodbye

I told you in June about my plan for my next few posts. Although you might not have realized it, I'm taking that statement seriously. And that only means one thing.

Rick's back!

If you're closing the page as I say this, you've got the freedom to do that, but you've just defeated the point of the song. What's happening in the lyrics is that a girl is about to say goodbye and we're trying to convince her not to. So if you're heading out right now, you're saying goodbye before I can even persuade you to stay.

If you know anything about Rick Astley, who sang this song 35 years ago, you know that he's the kind of person who doesn't just say goodbye to people. (Giving up has never exactly been his thing.) So the least he can do is expect someone else not to leave him. It's a fair position to take, right?

Listen to the song here
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The producers at SAW, who wrote a lot of popular 80s songs, made this one. The way the song's written, everything seems to be building up to the line that says, "Don't say goodbye, girl!" It didn't seem to become a huge hit, though. I think it might not have gotten released on its own, so if you wanted to hear it, you'd have to join the long lineup at the record store when the whole album got released.

Speaking of the album, I've noticed that the songs that SAW wrote always seemed to be higher than the ones written by Rick himself. Maybe SAW was trying to make the next hit for the radio, and they wanted to match the standard of how high everyone else was singing (a standard that I've never really been a fan of, but maybe that's because I don't have the voice to live up to it). Meanwhile, Rick might have been saying, "You know, I'm not a girl, after all. I've got this other half of my vocal range that nobody's using. I might as well use it on some of my own songs."

Want to know something interesting I noticed about this song the first time I listened to it? If any of you jazz people are here reading this, you might recognize it.

We've got The Lick!

If Rick's hair hadn't been so long, I could have fit him into the image better.
Also, I forgot to change a setting in my image editor, so we're back to black-and-white photos. 

Now I'm going to start hearing complaints. "I knew I wasn't hearing from a real fan! I thought you were coming here to tell us about Rick, and now you're rolling off on a tangent about the Jazz Lick."

Well, the whole point of The Lick is that you point it out whenever and wherever you see it. Let me explain what I'm saying.

Around 2010 or 2011, it was discovered that jazz musicians had been playing a certain melody pretty frequently. (A lick is another name for a little melody that gets used in a composition or a solo.) There was a video posted with clips of, who knows, maybe 50 people playing it in their solos. It wasn't long before it became popular on the Internet and follow-up videos were made, so The Lick became a pretty well-known thing. Now, if you go to a jazz concert, you might just hear someone playing it as a reference to that.

Even today, you might see someone digging for an appearance of The Lick in any song they can find. Once you've heard it enough times, you can learn to recognize it. And that's exactly what happened to me when I listened to the recording. The melody that I heard Rick singing wasn't the same rhythm, but it was the right notes. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that counts.

To figure out the original reason why so many soloists were playing The Lick, I'd have to go back to the 50s and 60s - even further back than I've already gone. I'm just trying to get caught up on this record from the 80s, and now I've already found more music to get caught up on.

That'll have to be later, though. I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to this record from the 80s. In fact, I'm not even half done yet.

Keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya