| Pink Floyd – Seamus Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I'm not sure all of you have paid close attention to how the dog's barking and howling fit into the rhythm and harmony of the song. Listen in a quiet room to hear the exact pitches in the quiet parts. Either the dog howled a perfect blues, or they wrote a perfectly natural-sounding blues to fit a recorded howl, or they spliced and pitch-shifted a recording of a dog to form a blues solo while leaving it sounding as if it had come naturally out of the dog's mouth (without getting pitch-shifted or off-timed guitar sounds into the mix). So there's an air of mystery, and just the suspension- of- disbelief fact of a song that plays as if a dog had sung a blues. I'm not sure what more you need out of a song. Wolf and dog packs howl in chorus, with quite finely tuned harmonies, and Nick Mason's book "Inside Out," while apologizing for the song, says that Seamus had been trained "to howl whenever music was played," and that "It was extraordinary." If Seamus truly just barked and howled that thing along with the guitars, that is something that had to be documented. This was in 1971, the days of analog magnetic tape, not digital signal processing and sampling keyboards. I don't hear any evidence of slowing down or speeding up. One spot might be a splice. Obviously the producers of Meddle knew some tricks with a tape deck, but...? Listen one more time and tell me either you don't hear what I mean, or if you do, how it happened. |
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