Sunday 12 December 2010

The girl is mine




Words and music by Michael Jackson

4/4 time signature/Key D major/Tempo moderately bright
Single released October 18th 1982 (USA 2 UK 8)

(Instrumentation)
Drums/Synthesizer/Electric Guitar/Bass/strings

Song structure
Verse 1/Chorus 1/Verse 2/Chorus 2/Bridge/Verse 3/Chorus 3x2 + fade-out

This is a song with two friends who are Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson are having a friendly argument about a girl who they both assume is part of their lives in a intimate way, it is a very light hearted song maybe even a joke that the song was included or that Michael just wanted more variation to the album? Lines from the songs chorus Paul singing “I love you more than he” B/V’s “Take you anywhere” Michael “Well I love you endlessly” B/V’s “Loving we will share” All together “So come and go with me, two on the town” Michael “But we both cannot have her, so it’s, one or the other, and one day, you will discover that’s she’s, my girl forever” which would scare any girl away from them both. This song is my least favourite song on the album, I think it is too soppy and silly.


Starts with the clean electric guitar with chorus and reverb, playing popping sounding notes with a mixture of triplets and crochets similar to main melody, the synthesizer plays a swirly sounding ascending line down two octaves, the bass and drums are locked in with each other playing simple grooves. There are two main vocals one is Michael Jackson and other is Paul McCartney taking it in turns to sing a verse about a girl that they both think is theirs, the title lyric is repeated over and over during the song, lots of call and answer with the two main vocals and the backing singers vocals, when the line “the girl is mine” there is three layers of backing vocals singing “mine mine” The music lifts when the strings are added in the bridge playing multi layered long notes high and low range. In the middle of the last chorus the singing stops the instrumentation levels drop slightly and moves to a talking style with Paul and Michael talking to each other about why the girl is theirs in a composed argument, and then the music and vocals move slightly forward in the mix and the dynamic raises to a higher level adding a crescendo to the last chorus, which goes on to repeat and then fade out.

No comments:

Post a Comment