#(i'm queueing this answer because it's a tad late at night rn and i like letting things be seen by the whole entire world sometimes

[nobody-knose--archive]

hello! i recently re-stumbled upon one of your hawaii part ii music theory posts and i thought id ask about Murders and its wack af time signatures. i havent been able to make any real sense of it other than it feels like its in 3 sometimes??? unless im overthinking and should just accept it as like 1/1 time lol

hm. well, first of all some lovely people on sites such as musescore have transcribed murders themselves, giving a quick & easy look into how those time signatures seem arranged. still, i think i'd like to do my own analysis, because if thinking of good day as including sections of 3 4/4 measures + 1 1/4 measure & interpreting neil cicierega's use of 10/4 to really just be 2 4/4 measures & a 2/4 one stacked on top of each other in a trench coat tells me anything, it's that i can have some personal music notation interpretations. as a treat.

murders is most easily understood when broken down into as many little sections as possible. for example, "i was in the middle ground, looking to find the" is in an easy 6/4. "fountain of infinite mirror" and the whole rest of that chorus is generally all in 6/4 (as one would expect the chorus to be one of the most straightforward/comprehensible parts of a song). however, "flowers in the garden" & other things that can follow the line [format of] "looking to find the" are very different. i'll call that the verse format, and cover it using the first verse.

to cover the first verse i have to say that the whole song starts off with a 9/4 measure that can't be described any other way because the piano chords part, as often as possible, is completely static staccato in articulation, and so where measures line up is most easily determined by other factors such as pitch changes or the lilt/cadence of the words. also, the verses generally start where the lyrics do, for simplicity's sake- if "owls on the night watch," a verse with the same structure as "he was in the forest" has the onbeat on "owls," then the onbeat should also be on "he," meaning everything preceding that first word in the song is just some silly little buildup. a measure of 9/4.

anyway! the first verse. "he was in the forest looking to see the" is a measure of 6/4, as previously stated ("looking to see the" & other similarly ending lines are in 6/4 throughout the song). "trees but none were there" is two measures of 3/4, "he found a girl" is 2/4. "she found the erlking (lalala)" is 5/4, making this whole first chunk a procession of (after a measure of 9/4) 6/4 3/4 3/4 2/4 5/4. i'm not simplifying the two measures of 3/4 in a row into 6/4 or the 2/4 & 5/4 into 7/4 due to the placement of the emphasis. this analysis will be pedantic like that. the next verse follows the same format; this will be called the verse format and is really the only terribly complex sequence in this song.

we break away from the verse format with "i was in the middle ground looking to find the" which, as previously stated, is just more 6/4, and that proceeds into another two instances of the verse format, then this "looking" line. then is the chorus, which as stated earlier, is just 6/4. the 6/4 proceeds all the way into "owls on the night watch," the start of another two verses, then back to the chorus.

"i was in the clearing" to "how they came to be" is in a lovely little 4/4, almost like a cruel teasing of how simple this song could be immediately before a piano break that is nigh-certainly designed to fuck with you. just kidding! it's two more instances of the verse format, complete with a "looking" line at the end. after that comes just a bunch of 3/4, then the slow part, which is in 4/4 (maybe 2/4?), as can be rather easily detected by the hi-hat (hi ross).

"all for nothing at all" continues in 2/4 (sure actually i say it's 2/4 i think we don't get enough of that in music), then the final line in the song is a 6/4 measure and a 4/4 one, just getting very slow. and there you have it! murders broken down as simply as need be.