Reflection
-Quinn Hart-
Motivation and Context for the Study of this Project:
I first chose to annotate the Grateful Dead’s song, “Touch of Grey,” as an admirer of their vast music library. In addition, the track was the first song released by the group to make the top ten on the “Billboard’s Hot 100,” chart in 1987. At the time of its release, The Dead was twenty-two years into its existence and had never had one of their songs reach the mainstream.
Why did it take them so long to platform their music? At its core, the band was a counter-cultural act. In the early days of their music career in San Francisco around 1965, they only played live. Recording in a studio was a universally rejected idea among the members, which is why their earliest albums are live-recorded shows. In their first two years of existence, they only played live shows and did not take the initiative to get their original work on a vinyl record. They did not believe in monetizing their music and never signed with a label that would limit and direct the creativity in their music. Bootlegging tapes of live performances were very looked down upon, however, the band allowed their listeners to plug their microphones directly into their sound system. The only money that the band made was from ticket sales, but the price of admission was always incredibly cheap. The decision to demonetize their music, and allow bootlegged audio to make their music “timeless” was just one of a plethora of ways the band’s image deviated from the mainstream.
The second was their music. The Grateful Dead pioneered a new genre of music that ignored popular song structures, and methods of songwriting. Their music lacked structure and steadfast parts. They generated music based on general musical frameworks that were carried out by musical improvisation and jamming. Live tracks exceeded the length of mainstream music by upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes reaching durations upwards of forty minutes. Setlists for live performances never prioritized popular, crowd-pleaser songs. They were randomly thrown together to include a distribution of their music where almost every song ever written was played equally as often. Instead of pleasure and comfort, the Dead focused on creating weirdness in their sound. The sonic atmospheres created were incredibly experimental and were not composed for the sake of appealing to a mainstream audience.
Now that I have provided a brief and general background illustrating the band’s countercultural image, I can now explain the purpose of my research. Considering the band’s rejection of embarking on the typical journey most artists take in their careers to make money and get their discography in the mainstream, I attempt to answer what made their album “In the Dark” and more specifically the hit song off of the project, “Touch of Grey” so successful. In my analysis of the two albums’ lyrical content, I investigate the frequency of words for each LP and use that data to make conclusions about overarching themes and motifs. In addition, I close read and annotate “Touch of Grey” to situate my findings with the two selected works. In my analysis, I look for lyrical structures and choices that mimic common techniques frequently seen in mainstream music.
Annotations:
My annotations of the Lyrics for the track, “Touch of Grey” attempt to point out how the song perpetuates themes that resonate in pop music. Examples of some of these “signifiers” are: positive messaging, an appealing satisfactory rhyme scheme, distinct and joyful meter, lyrical repetition, sentiments of collectivism, and recognizing struggles that their audience can relate to. Through my observations, I wish to clarify a lyrical methodology that resembles techniques and formulas used in pop music to explain the song’s success.
In my close reading, my annotations point out certain techniques resembling popular music in the mainstream, radio-adequate sphere. The most obvious is the regular use of lyrical repetition throughout the song. The chorus repeats the line “I will get by” three times subsequently in a row before adding a slight variation on the fourth iteration when Garcia sings, “I will survive.” The chorus happens four times throughout the song, further adding to the repetition of the lyrics. The chorus thus becomes more catchy and memorable. This lyrical appeal is common in the process of writing pop music which is often intentionally constructed to become stuck inside the heads of its listeners to encourage more album sales. Today, in the age of streaming music, this technique persists in generating revenue from playtime on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify. “Touch of Grey” does not challenge common song structure like much of their other discography. Its use of lyrical repetition adopts existing techniques that have proven to guarantee more musical success.
Furthermore, the content of the repeated lyrics exemplifies positive and hopeful messages that evoke a pleasant, happy, soothing experience for the listener. The repeated lyric “I will get by” perpetuates sentiments of perseverance and encouragement through hard times. The lyric “But it’s alright” which repeats in most of the verses throughout the song has a similar function. In addition, no specific struggle is tailored to the song which leaves space for the audience to prescribe their own anxiety and stress to relate to the song. This allows the positive messaging to be universalized and serve as a general emblem of overcoming hard times.
These annotations are helpful because they attack a different understanding of the song than a typical genius lyrics page which explains lyrical significance to clarify the story the artist wishes to tell. I critically examine tropes, patterns, and other choices that push the song into a more palatable sphere for the average music listener. My analysis serves an audience who, like me, is interested in deeper engagement with music structure and songwriting, and for enthusiastic “deadheads” interested in investigating how the Grateful Dead’s discography evolved as they continued to create and perform.
Ultimately, my annotations support my initial hypothesis: The band integrates lyrical techniques common in mainstream music culture. Overall, the project deviates from their typical strange, experimental songwriting and embraces more palatable, predictable, and enjoyable listening experiences. Based on my conclusions, I believe Touch of Grey represents the Grateful Dead’s take on a writing pop song, and their exploration of taking their sound and style into a more mainstream sphere.
The resources I used to view the lyrics for “Touch of Grey” were both listening to the song and viewing the lyric page below on Spotify, and a copy of the lyrics located on the Grateful Dead’s website under the “songs” tab. Both sources were consistent with one another and did not have differences in their transcriptions.
Data Analysis:
Data collection was facilitated using a program developed by two computer science students at Dickinson College, Aster Fredley (‘28), and Jules Borusiewicz (‘28). The lyrics of every song in their respective album were input into the program and word frequencies were output into a spreadsheet. Visualizations of this data can be located on Owen Buroker’s reflection page on the home page of this website.
The predictions for data hypothesized that stranger obscure words would appear more often in the lyrical analysis of Workingman’s Dead because it failed to go mainstream and more experimental themes and song structure that remained truer to the band’s image. On the contrary, words that constructed more typical themes found in the mainstream such as love, heartbreak, happiness, and empowerment, were expected to appear in In the Dark.
The top five most frequent words found in Workingman’s Dead in order were: one, “murder” (32), two, “trouble” (18), three, “high” (11), four, “gotta, ahead, notion, crossed, beg” (8), and five, “hear, driving, cocaine, watch, speed” (7). At first glance, murder is used a disproportionately larger amount than other words. Most of this usage comes from lyrical repetition in the song “Dire Wolf.” The commonality of “murder” is a testament to the exploration of life and death, which the band focused on in much of their earlier unique music. The frequent use of trouble is indicative of the troubling, strange themes that are represented in songs throughout the album. These themes are more obscure and disturbing and tend not to resonate in the mainstream like more positive and relatable topics for songwriting do.
In the case of In The Dark, the top 5 most used words are: one, “ashes” (32), two, “enjoying” (19), three, “muddy” (10), four, “singing” (9), and five, “push” (8). It is a coincidence that the most frequent word, “ashes,” has the same number of uses as “murder” in Workingman’s Dead. The appearance of “ashes” is due to the incessant lyrical repetition of the last line in the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie,”– “ashes, ashes, all fall down” featured on the track, “Throwing Stones.” Ashes correlates with the stranger themes explored in Workingman’s Dead. Ash is like the corpse left by fire, to use death as an analogy. The second most frequent word throughout the album “enjoying” supports our initial hypothesis. When the word is isolated and judged objectively as it stands alone, its profile resides on the positive side of the English language. The repetition of “enjoying” obviously does not make the album more palatable and enjoyable. However, when situated with the band’s canon project throughout their career of exploring the experience of life through their music, it does suggest this LP’s focus on painting life as an enjoyable experience. The top five most frequent words do not necessarily display a clear trend that denotes certain themes that commonly resonate with mainstream music, other than, “enjoyable” and “singing.”
In conclusion, the collected data does not suggest a significant shift in the lyrical content and general themes explored between Workingman’s Dead and In The Dark. Thus, no real conclusions can be made through lyrics in each album that explain the success of the Grateful Dead’s twelfth studio album. In order to further investigate this question, I believe a musical analysis that covers the keys of each song, the instrumental structure, and the chosen melodies across each album would need to be conducted.