Songs That Suddenly Change

[concorde1]

I have found these are quite rare, songs that somewhat abruptly change in tempo, volume, musical instruments, etc.

The 4 that I recall are:

Led Zeppelin - Bring It On Home [about 1:40, guitar and drums come out of nowhere!, and the vocals are different]
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Bold As Love [about 2:45, I believe the tempo and notes used change]
Pink Floyd - One Of My Turns [around the 2 minute mark, boom, big change in volume and instruments]
The Corrs - Erin Shore [around 3:05, a big drums interlude begins]

Share if you have noticed any songs that change in some big way.

 

[andrewjohn007]

90% of every drum & bass, dubstep and UK garage tracks ever released

 

[CinDyment]

Well of course the most obvious, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Baker Street.

Crazy Train at some level.

 

[julian_hughes]

It's not a modern thing! Listening to early music you'll find songs which meander and change course from start to finish. The music follows the song and all its feeling, rather than the song conforming to a musical format, so melody is fluid and chorus may be absent or very variable. I think there is even a particular word for this and know I once read about it but as I am a music lover and not a musicologist I totally forgot the term.

 

[CinDyment]

Elenor Rigby

 

[Rednaxela]

Two outros that contrast with the main song:

 

[Mnyb]

Early RUSH is filled with the stuff , 2112 , Xanadu

 

[deprogrammed]

Early RUSH is filled with the stuff , 2112 , Xanadu

Yep' My first thought was Spirit Of Radio.

 

[mhardy6647]

I am guessing (inferring) that the OP is focused on pop/rock music as opposed to, say, a symphony with multiple and rather discrete movements?

First thing that pops into mind are songs" that were written/arranged as suites. Perhaps the most obvious example is Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Stephen Stills' ode to his galpal Judy Collins).

I've always thought that Stills' song Bluebird, from his Buffalo Springfield days, was a prototype for the aforementioned suite (and I further suspect that Ms Collins was the subject of this one, too?).

Yes sort of made a habit of such things. Many of them way, way (way) over the top, but a couple that I still like all these years later are Starship Trooper and And You and I. These are not for the faint of heart

Some more "normal" pop/rock songs with very different sections embedded in them?
Here's the first one that jumped into my mind. We tried to dance to this one at my Senior (high school) prom. It was a bit of a challenge with the middle section in 3/4 time.

The great (IMO, at least) and long-lived east coast-ish band (originally from West Virginia, if memory serves, but huge in Baltimore when & where I grew up) Crack the Sky was particulary adept at this sort of thing. Here's a personal fave.

And, of course, Pete Townshend was a master of this sort of thing. Who was that band he used to play in?

Am I "warm" with respect to the original question?

 

[Sir Sanders Zingmore]

 

[Axo1989]

Do you mean changes like these?

You may lose count. The acoustic version (naturally) doesn't do as much of that:

Just the intro, the main switch halfway in and back again.

 

[Hugo9000]

 

[Axo1989]

Another one in that vein:

Numerous switches of rhythm/key and of course genre.

 

[JSmith]

JSmith

 

[charleski]

There was a paper that analysed this last year

What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music

Previous work demonstrates that music with more surprising chords tends to be perceived as more enjoyable than music with more conventional harmonic structures. In that work, harmonic surprise was computed based upon a static distribution of chords. This would assume that harmonic surprise is...

www.frontiersin.org

Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study finds

Childish Gambino's "This Is America" ranked highest in challenging musical expectations.

arstechnica.com

They conclude that artists are using ‘harmonic surprise’ to drive up interest in their work, and that this is subject to inflationary pressures, becoming more prevalent over time. Childish Gambino’s This is America is apparently the most harmonically surprising work of recent times.

It’s interesting to contrast this with hard-core minimalism from the ‘70s, like Philip Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts, in which it seems like you’re just listening to the same phrase over and over again, but then you realise a few minutes later that something has subtly changed without you noticing it.

 

[CinDyment]

Fame - Irene Cara

 

[freemansteve]

3 changing parts and key changes. Not hard to do on guitar though. May not be what you meant, but I like the build up to the end, where he gets excited...

 

[Grumpish]

 

[Killingbeans]

Blur - Song 2

Skrillex - Bangarang

The Smashing Pumpkins - Today

 

[jae]