↓
 
Home » I bring you another musical genre: the stutter song

I bring you another musical genre: the stutter song

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never really thought about it before, but there are quite a few songs that feature “stutter” lyrics. Why is it done? Emphasis, I think, and perhaps just in the name of variety. Songwriters and lyricists like to use different techniques so the audience doesn’t get bored. Stuttering might seem an odd method, but it does get attention.

I bring you:

And then there’s:

And of course:

You may have noticed something else I never realized till now – those are all stutters on the”B” sound. Makes a nice sharp effect.

But it’s not just the hard “B” sound that singers and songwriters use for the stutter lyric, as David Bowie demonstrates here with “Ch” (and another thing I just realized is that in the slow intro part here, Bowie sounds like David Cloverdale in the slow into part to “Here I Go Again“, which is not a stuttering song):

And also – yes – the Bee Gees show the stutter here with the “J” sound. This one’s sung by Robin and was a big hit in Europe in the 80s. It also demonstrates once again (as in “Barbara Ann” and “Benny and the Jets”) that the stutter lyric is sometimes on the person’s name, for emphasis and perhaps sometimes to show intensity of feeling as well:

And we really can’t forget Ray Davies of The Kinks, with an “L” sound:

And then there’s “M” for “my”:

I’ll close with this one, although there are plenty more stutter songs. However, I think this one just may be the absolute pinnacle of the genre. It’s a double stutter song, with the effect on the “B” (always a favorite, as we’ve learned) and also on the “N.” A bit tricky to perform:

[ADDENDUM: I just learned this about the stutter on that last song:

Bachman insists that the song was performed as a joke for his brother, Gary, who had a stutter, with no intention of sounding like “My Generation”. They only intended to record it once with the stutter and send the only recording to Gary.

Bachman developed the song while recording BTO’s third album, Not Fragile (1974). It began as an instrumental piece inspired by the rhythm guitar on Dave Mason’s “Only You Know and I Know”. Bachman says “it was basically just an instrumental and I was fooling around… I wrote the lyrics, out of the blue, and stuttered them through.” The band typically used the song as a “work track” in the studio to get the amplifiers and microphones set properly.

But when winding up production for the album, Charlie Fach of Mercury Records said the eight tracks they had lacked the “magic” that would make a hit single. Some band members asked Bachman, “what about the work track?” Bachman reluctantly mentioned that he had this ninth song, but did not intend to use it on a record. He said, “We have this one song, but it’s a joke. I’m laughing at the end. I sang it on the first take. It’s sharp, it’s flat, I’m stuttering to do this thing for my brother.”

Fach asked to hear it, and they played the recording for him. Fach smiled and said “That’s the track. It’s got a brightness to it. It kind of floats a foot higher than the other songs when you listen to it.”

Bachman agreed to rearrange the album sequence so the song could be added, but only if he could re-record the vocals first, without the stutter. Fach agreed, but Bachman says “I tried to sing it normal, but I sounded like Frank Sinatra. It didn’t fit.” Fach said to leave it as it was, with the stutter.

Nowadays, of course, he’d be pilloried for making fun of his brother.]

Comments

I bring you another musical genre: the stutter song — 51 Comments

  1. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream….
    K-k-k-Katy, beautiful Katy….

  5. Don’t know whether it was Randy Bachman’s reference to his straight take sounding like Frank Sinatra that inspired it, but a few years later his former Guess Who bandmate, Burton Cummings, covered You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet in a lounge lizard arrangement on his first solo album

  9. What a great collection of songs. The ones that sound closer to actual stuttering are the Bad To The Bone and the BTO song. But the closest is the one y81 mentioned, My Generation by the Who.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5zw04WxCc (the video is quite a blast from the past)

    It’s so much like real stuttering that it is quite unmusical, but the song is something of a defiant anthem, so it works. Great bass line by Entwistle.

    One the opposite end of the spectrum is Lola by the Kinks. (Which I love.) The stuttering there is so musical it barely qualifies as stuttering. The song has great energy as jack mentions even though it has a slower adagio tempo. I guess that’s because many of the notes are 1/8th and 1/16th notes.

    We’ve got the line, “tastes like cherry cola, C-O-L-A co-la,” which is not a stutter, but it sets up the timing with “C-O-L-A co-la” as (1/16, 1/8, 1/16, 1/8; 1/4, 1/4). Then when it comes to “la-la-la-la Lo-la” it is (1/16, 1/8, 1/8, 1/16; 1/4, 1/14). Almost the same, but two notes are flipped.

    This is cute (from Wikipedia):
    He [Ray Davies] noted that he knew the song would be successful when he heard his one-year-old daughter singing the chorus, stating, “She was crawling around singing ‘la la, la la Lola.’ I thought, ‘If she can join in and sing, Kinks fans can do it.

  10. A lot of people think “Jive Talkin” by the Bee Gees is a stutter song, and I distinctly remember Kasey Kasem answering a question from listener in the early 80s that asked about #1 songs that had a stutter lyric, and the answer he gave was the BTO song, the Elton John song, and “Jive Talkin”. Another listener wrote back a few weeks later correcting him on “Jive Talkin”. The lyric sounds like a stutter, but it actually, “It’s just your jive talkin”.

  12. As mentioned above, “My Generation” by the Who before all others, often covered live to close shows by Patti Smith.

  14. Prior to “My Generation” were “Baby Let’s Play House” by Elvis and “Walking The Dog” by Rufus Thomas. Though more rhythmic stuttering and only once or twice each song. I suspect there are other such examples.

  18. Maybe it’s just me but the stuttering part of these otherwise good songs has always annoyed me … every time I hear it … for decades and decades …

    Probably the only one where I actually like the stutter is “ch-ch-ch-changes” and maybe because it’s the soft consonant “ch” sound vs the “hard consonant “b” ?

  19. Dale Light – thank you for K-K-K-Katy.
    Interesting topic and a lot of fun musical numbers

  20. One thing i have noticed about being creative… its in the story about bachman, i can confirm it in my photography and other art… and i bet its quite common…

    the artist themselves, for some reason, do not know what would win the audience

    im forever making art i like others dont, and the stuff i create that i dont care for they go nuts for… same thing with my generation… they never saw the value in it over the other songs…

    while galleries are crap now and serve no real purpose for graphic artists, this is a thing a audio producer brings to creation of albums (still)… which of the plethora of works is worthy of the album, which goes forward to be the hit, and so on..

    the artists seem to just produce…
    of course like anything there are artists that have fingers on the pulse of the public or are lucky that so much of what they do naturally fits the desires, but its an odd effect for those that are aware of this part of the creation process.

    you will see the story dotting all over, especially in music where they have an A side a B side and need to feature..

    like in Bob Segers, Against the Wind there is a hint of it:

    “Well those drifter’s days are past me now
    I’ve got so much more to think about
    Deadlines and commitments
    What to leave in, what to leave out”

    Billy Joel shows awareness of it in his creation and desire to stay on top in the song the Entertainer (reminds me of the other personal side of Blues Traveler “the hook brings you back” which is about the song):
    “I am the entertainer, I come to do my show
    You’ve heard my latest record
    It’s been on the radio
    Ah, it took me years to write it
    They were the best years of my life
    It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long
    If you’re gonna have a hit
    You gotta make it fit
    So they cut it down to 3:05”

    and

    “I am the entertainer
    The idol of my age
    I make all kinds of money
    When I go on the stage
    Ah, you’ve seen me in the papers
    I’ve been in the magazines
    But if I go cold, I won’t get sold
    I’ll get put in the back in the discount rack
    Like another can of beans”

    who decides it runs too long? are we really glad they didn’t cut Pink Floyds “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” which runs 26:01 or The Allman Brothers Band “Mountain Jam” which runs 33:41

    Heck, i love and have memorized the whole of “Thick as a Brick” (Jethro Tull), which is 43:50….

  21. Thanks for the “stutter” compendium, including the mention of BTO. Always thought one of the great “working man (or woman)” songs was BTO’s “Blue Collar”, with the nice vocal and some oh so sweet guitar. It’s always worth another listen.

  23. Neo:
    You insist on glorifying Pop music, your Golden Oldies, which I also like, and utterly ignore the classical side.

    Bach and Handel both died in 1750, and their music will live forever. Maybe a couple of Beach Boy songs will be around in 2121. Maybe. The trend, with Hip-Hop and Rap, is dismal. Loud Africa-inspired drum-banging is the norm. Melodies are crap. Sing along? Ha. What are today’s teens going to deem their Golden Oldies when in their 60s?

    Popular music, 99% by the young, who insist on ODing on illegal drugs (see Prince, etc. etc., etc.) after earning zillions is drowning out the Classics. Symphony orchestras are dying. Chamber music has become quaint.

    Classical music is worthy of analysis and comment!

    Try Mozart’s Coronation Mass, a thing of exquisite instrumental and vocal beauty, for example. And Beethoven’s Symphony #9 and his Archduke Trio, both totally amazing. All pop is trivial, superficial dreck in comparison.

    Don’t turn your back on Bluegrass either! Invented in America, ca. 1950, with fine instrumentalism and comprehensible lyrics.

  24. Interesting topic and neo was right to restrict it to consonants. I would be hard pressed to come up with a song lyric that DOES NOT have a vowel stutter. Lyricists and singers play games with vowels all the time; to better fit rhythms, add emphasis, etc.

    Granted, it would be pedantic to separate out tremolo and vibrato (another topic covered extensively by neo) on vowel sounds from stutter, but one cannot do tremolo or vibrato on a consonant without it becoming a stutter (I think maybe…).

  25. Cicero, “All pop is trivial, superficial dreck in comparison.”

    Porter’s “Night and Day?,” Ellington’s, “Take the A Train?” Gershwin’s, “Rhapsody in Blue?”

  26. Not known as a singer, but George Armstrong Custer had an “F” stutter and a lisp.

  27. I once made a playlist of songs like the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” (fa-fa-fa-fa….), Simon & Garfunkle’s “The Boxer” (lie-lie-lie…), Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (nah-nah-nah…) etc. Songs where the same syllable kept getting repeated over and over again.

  28. Mozart’s Coronation Mass??? I prefer his Clarinet Concerto… not easy to play (when i was young i was first string… still have my Buffet with the golden age serial number)…

  29. Rufus T Firefly:
    Fine, your exceptions prove the rule. “Take the A train” and “Rhapsody” are jazz, not pop. And who plays them today for mass audiences? No one. Porter’s has decipherable, non-vulgar lyrics and a real melody that will buzz in your head, also no longer heard as “pop”.

    BTW,Simon and Garfunkel are >50 years old. They are no longer heard except by greybeards like you and me. Sic transit gloria.

    None of your citations sufficiently offset my assertion that most pop, especially today’s, is transient, and today’s Hip Hop and Rap are black racist garbage, without melody, full of vulgarity and big booming Africa or New Guinea-like drums. White kids listen to it; I feel the bass at 100 decibels emerging from their tiny Hondas.

  30. Cicero:
    I wonder if you ever even bother to read my replies to you. First of all, I write what I want to write, and pop is one of the many kinds of music I like. But secondly, I have responded several times already in some detail to that criticism of yours that I ignore classical music4. Each time, I have listed and given links to the many MANY posts I’ve written about classical music. So I’m not going to waste my time listing them again.

  32. I think the musical stutter comes about as a way of solving the problem of how to sing the same note in quick succession. It’s easy to do on an instrument but difficult to do with words and have those words understood or not sound rushed. As I was trying to find confirmation on the internets, I found an interesting discussion on verbal stuttering bleeding over to playing an instrument: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Stutter/comments/2lm84v/stuttering_and_playing_an_instrument/

  33. The Kinks “David Watts” has a fa-fa-fa-fa refrain, though I don’t think of it immediately as a stutter.

    As far as classical vs pop music goes, well, so what? I had Mozart and Beethoven and Bach in my house growing up, and much of it became intensely boring to me, elevator music at best, aural wallpaper without interest. Good for you if you only like what’s familiar and avoid novelty.

    I don’t meanwhile have anythi9ng like the same musical taste as neo, but I don’t despise her choices.

  34. Eva Marie raises an interesting point and she got me thinking of other songs that use nonsense syllables or sounds as filler. Scat singing is an obvious format unto itself and scat fits Eva Marie’s category of musicians using vocal sounds to mimic an instrumental solo.

    However, in a different (I believe) genre are songs that also use nonsense sounds as lyrics. And there is an even different (I believe) category of songs that use sounds as instrumentation, but are not scat.

    Here’s what I’m thinking of: Spike Jones’ “Marsey Doats,” and the ’40s and ’50s hit, “Ragmop,” or (“Raggmopp”) are songs that repeat sounds with no lyrical merit or meaning to fit the melody. The Talking Heads also messed around with this concept; “Swamp” and “I Zimbra” are two examples. Lyrics that sometimes make sense, or appear to, but are mainly chosen for their sound and how they fit with the music*. (And Talking Heads spin off, “Tom Tom Club” often did the same. Their song, “Wordy Rappinghood” is a neat example. The video is worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.)

    Regarding the even different category… Many of you probably know Bobby McFerrin. He had a hit in the late ’80s with the song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” You also likely noticed or know that the entire song is done a capella, without instruments (except where McFerrin himself is an instrument). So there are a lot of sounds McFerrin is making vocally, including whistling, that are chosen strictly for their sound. This is similar to segments of “Marsey Doats” and “Ragmop” and “I Zimbra” and “Swamp.” But it seems different to me because it’s not vocalization chosen to substitute for a comprehensible lyric. It’s vocalization chosen to substitute for a sound. Even though it may be as incomprehensible as “I Zimbra,” it’s not supposed to sound like a lyric. It’s supposed to sound like a non-vocal instrument.

    Todd Rundgren played around with this concept in his 1978 song appropriately titled, “Onomatopoeia.” And then really dove into it eight years later with his album, “A Capella” where every sound is done with his voice.

    And then there are rappers and hip hop artists who make instrumental sounds with their voices to imitate drums and other percussion as well as striking their bodies with their hands to make percussive sounds.

    And, I’m no expert here (paging Cicero), but I think there are one or two operas that feature sopranos imitating birds and/or flutes.

    *”I Zimbra” is based on a Dadaist “sound poem” by Hugo Ball

  37. Little Richard:

    “Tutti Frutti, oh Rudy! A wop-bop-aree-bop-a-lim-bam-boom!”

  39. La La Means I Love You: The Delfonics
    Easier Said Than Done: The Essex
    Dance With Your Baby: Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs
    Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing: Stevie Wonder
    *I lllllIiikkked this topic…..!

  41. I read an interview with one of the Who. He said that My Generation depicted a “Mod” who was so goofed up on pills that he couldn’t speak properly.

    Used to see Mel Tillis on Johnny Carson back in the day. I believe Tillis had a stammer (hesitation) rather than a stutter (repeated words or word fragments).
    I think Tillis (among other things) wrote Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. I know Neo is not much into country music, but for those who are, I think other good Kenny Rogers songs include The Gambler and Lucille. [I was in the Philippines years ago and was startled to see there was a chain of Kenny Rogers restaurants.]

    OT: I’ve been buying RC Cola instead of Woke Coke, but learned that its parent 7up-Doctor Pepper was another wokester, so I bought a 12-pack of Shasta Cola at Menards. 2nd Vote gave its parent company a neutral rating, and I bet it’s just as good as the wokesters’ products.

  43. Dr. A. Fauchi; the witch doctor of this decade, and his chipmunk at the CDC; she who is terrified or something.

  45. That’s Bobby Banas doing the Nitty Gritty with about 20 million views on YouTube of a long forgotten clip from the Judy Garland TV show. And wonderfully Banas is still around to enjoy his new found popularity. Here’s a compilation video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tqYHJjLfKwM

  47. Artfldgr on April 18, 2021 at 12:19 pm

    Is art in its moment of creation or in its reception by an audience?
    I once had a debate with a professor who insisted nothing is art without an audience. I argued that if Michaelangelo sculpted David then buried the statue in his backyard, it would still be art.

    Neo: That you have a “grammar and language” tag makes my heart sing.

  50. FOAF,

    The old Canadian comedy sketch show, “SCTV,” did a parody of the movie, “Melvin and Howard,” where Melvin and Howard sing “The Name Game” to pass the time on their drive until one of them (Howard?) suggests, “Chuck.”

    I have to imagine every child between the ages of 8 and 28 stumbled onto that pattern within minutes of hearing that song the year it came out!

  51. I remember a wonderful DJ bit from the 60’s. It purported to be a commercial for the “All time rock & roll stutterers album,” followed by multiple 3-second bits of R&R stuttering. Ah, the golden days of DJs. Where’s Johnny Fever when you need him, and by the way, “Booger!”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑