🌊 And I'm in so deep...
The vultures are stripping the world for parts, but you have to find joy where you can, so let's talk about a thirty-year-old pop song, shall we?
Linger was the second single from The Cranberries' debut album and also their breakout hit. It was released in 1993 in support of the cheekily titled Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, accompanied by a nonsensical video (embedded above) that seems less interested in the band than in faux Cinéma Vérité. Their debut single, Dreams, was a bold statement meant to establish a sonic identity centered around frontwoman Dolores O'Riordan's thick and unapologetically abrasive Irish accent. But Linger is a bit more subdued, less about leaning into the band's unique aesthetic than about using that aesthetic to support a musical narrative. It's a fascinating song and one that I've been somewhat obsessed with over the past few months.
Specifically, I've been obsessed with the way this song does "tone-painting." If you're not familiar with the term (also called "word-painting"), it describes the interplay between music and lyrics in a song, and the way they reinforce each other thematically. This can cover anything from song structure to arrangement to little bits of ear-candy going off in the background. You've heard a million instances of this before. Like when a lyric features the word "shake" and then you hear a shaker in the background. Or when a line ends with "stop" and then all of the music stops abruptly. These are obvious examples, but there's a lot of room for nuance here, and I love the way Linger takes the idea of "lingering" and just runs with it.
So let's break it down.
The first thing to note is that this is a song with no hard transitions. There's never a drumroll into a chorus where all the instruments kick it up a notch and the arrangement goes wide. Instead, sections emerge from each other. The verse and the chorus are plainly distinguishable, but they flow naturally into each other without ever breaking stride. The lead in to the chorus "and I'm in so deep," is just an extension of the verse lyric, the culmination of the way the melody slowly builds and raises in pitch and volume.
This idea of emergence is most plain in the transition from the intro to the first verse. This intro is a wild choice, by the way. The mantra in pop music is "in it in a minute to win it," which means that you want to get to your chorus hook within the first sixty seconds of a song if you want it to be radio-friendly. Linger... does not do this. Instead, we get thirty-five seconds of gentle arpeggios and cinematic orchestral swells that are never repeated in the rest of the song. They aren't even the same tempo. And then the verse chords just start in and the strings play that violin melody and the effect is that you are surprised to learn that you're listening to a song you like--and you have been for the better part of a minute. Then, when O'Riordan's vocal starts, it's buried in the mix. But as that first iteration of the verse melody develops, she gets more audible and slowly takes center stage in the song.
The construction of the main verse melody is also meant to reinforce that idea of "lingering." The shape of the melodic phrases are very repetitive, meandering around a note before resolving to it. Those meanderings get increasingly complex, but they always resolve down to a predictable place right around the downbeat and hang on that note. The exact placement varies--it may start a quarter of a beat before the downbeat, or half a beat after, but it will always start in the middle of a word and last until the end of the second beat in the measure. The vibe is that the melody is trying to escape that note, but it can't, even when the resolution is uncomfortable. For instance, the third phrasing ("why were you holding her ha-and, is that the way we sta-and") is resolving from E to D over a Cadd9 chord. That's introducing no small amount of melodic tension, E being the major third in that chord, and D being the major second (and also the 9th).
The choruses are a bit more melodically straightforward, which is typical. They're less allergic to the downbeat, and the final phrase actually resolves to the tonic of the underlying chord, which is the key of the song. Or, in layman's terms, she finally sings a D over a D chord in a song that's in D. Again, this is unremarkable for an adult contemporary pop song, although it's not without its flourishes. The melodic run of notes for "finger" dances all around, but studiously avoids, the root of the C chord underneath it. And here's where O'Riordan's accent really helps bolster things. She has that Irish "R" that's heavily rhotic and she just leans into it, which calls more attention to the way the word "linger" is being drawn out.
The second verse starts out a bit simpler, wresting control of the melody back from the chorus and easing it into the complexity of the verse. Again, there are no hard transitions; it's all about flow. There's a short instrumental bridge that keeps the same chord progression. In true 90s fashion, the bulk of this song is four chords played on repeat. There's another chorus and a repetition of the string melody that guides us into an outro that echoes--but doesn't directly repeat--the intro, and the song slowly dwindles to nothing.
A few years later they would release their next single, Zombie, supporting the album No Need to Argue. Zombie is a straightforward four-on-the-floor grunge rocker, which was meant to make them appeal to a younger audience and get their videos playing less on VH1 and more on MTV. The tour for that album was my first real concert. I got a T-shirt with the dead kid from the Zombie video and wore it all the time--much to my mother's chagrin. Funnily enough, we didn't know how encores worked, so we left when they said "good night" and missed the entire encore. I ended up hearing Linger from the parking lot while we waited for our ride.
Which is a shame. The Cranberries were an off-kilter and hard-to-categorize band, even by the standards of mid-to-late-90s rock. But they had an interesting sound and an iconic singer who could emote the hell of lines like "why were you holding her hand?" which looks quaint on paper, but is absolutely heartbreaking with O'Riordan's performance. They never matched the success of Zombie, garnered some controversy from the political content of their follow-up, took a hiatus in the early aughts and reformed in the late aughts until her death in 2018.
In that light, Linger is kind of a weird blip on the radar. But I still smile when I hear it come on the Muzak.
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