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OTHER ACTS' ANALYSES (Lavigne & Walker / Avril Lavigne)
When You're Gone is one of the four collaborations Avril has had with musician Butch Walker, who plays guitar and piano and has a fantastic voice. While not entirely "generic", this is a typical power ballad, enriched by a superb arrangement and using the typical formula of two cycles + bridge + chorus, having a recurring motif appearing three times in the song (intro, end of first cycle and outro). The same structure appeared in My Happy Ending (but with two choruses at the end) and Walker's Cigarette Lighter Love Song. Music
by: Butch Walker Produced
by: Butch Walker Keys:
G, Em
Typical one-bridge song, as many of those composed by Butch Walker (e.g. Bowling for Soup's Girls All the Bad Guys Want, SR-71's Right Now and Butch's The Best Thing You Never Had), and the vast majority of punk-rock in general (e.g. Tom Delonge's All the Small Things and First Date). Another generic detail is the sharp contrast between sections, which appears in all the other Lavigne/Walker collaborations: My Happy Ending, The Best Damn Thing and the blink-esque Everything Back But You.
In this matter, this song is indeed standard: all sections last four or eight bars and all phrases end-up in the dominant.  The beautiful piano motif that works as intro, spacer and outro. It's actually a variant on the 1st phrase of both verse and chorus (same as the Happy Ending motif is a variant on the same sections). The IV > vi intro appears in other rock ballads such as November Rain and My Immortal, but as opposed to those two, the tonic is well-defined from the start since the opening chord is actually C with augmented eleventh (effectively clearing what pitch-set is being used). This motif appears at the beginning of the first two cycles and then closes the track, leaving an interrupted cadence (since the last chord is the dominant). The fact these chords are slightly "jazzy" makes the tune stand-up from other typical love songs. Based on the 1-6-4-5 cliché (see Eternal Flame, Making Love Out Of Nothing At All, Unchained Melody and a very long etcetera) with some passing chords spicing up the harmony. On the record, the melody's quite static, while live Avril tends to make some subtle variants. Note the melody's quite similar to My Happy Ending (verse too), which is also composed by Butch Walker. Another case where he sort of plagiarized himself is The Best Damn Thing (compare "where are the hopes..." with the chordal intro of his solo song My Way). Nice contrasting phrase, ii > I > IV > V progression with built-in ascending bass, a simple but effective way to execute a transition from verse to chorus. Most of Avril's co-songwriters have applied similar tricks in their own ways. Similar progression to My Happy Ending again (IV > vi > V instead of IV > I > V). The melodic structure is AAA'B (same as in Happy Ending, again), and the second phrase is a nice variant on the lift, demonstrating that (cleverly or subconsciously) Butch Walker isn't a rookie songwriter. The I > V > IV progression appears on Green Day's Jesus of Suburbia ("I won't apologize" and "when you've been victimized"). There's a contrast between the two phrases: the first starts with the iii > IV > I progression that can also be found in November Rain, modulating at the end to the relative. The second phrase has fast melody finishing on a dramatic scream over the dominant of the main key (as in Butch's Cigarette Lighter Love Song). IV > II > V is an excellent way to come back to G, but it's still somewhat predictable in these ballads. So yes, When You're Gone is far from being musically complex, unusual, original or sophisticated, but it's a beautiful song, so if you like it, then enjoy it and tell critics to get lost! |
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