I love rhythm. And weird time signatures. And syncopation. And all that fun stuff. There are so many examples of me getting sidetracked by this. It’s part of the reason I love flamenco. But I also have been known to read books about Cuban Rhythms and Konnakol.
Have you ever been tapping your foot to a song, and then all the sudden it lands in the wrong place? The beat is still there, you just lost track of where the downbeat is, and a moment later it is back to normal and you’re fine. Then it may repeat a few times, and so on and so forth.
I can safely guess that most of the music you listen to is in 4/4. Four beats to a bar, even and predictable, the rhythmic equivalent of walking on flat ground. It’s so common that the older name for it is literally “common time.” But that doesn’t mean that all of them are. A surprising number of songs you already know move into five beats, or seven, or something stranger, and if it’s done well, you don’t notice unless you’re paying close attention.
First, what a time signature even is
If you can clap along with a song but you’ve never had to read music, here’s what you need to know.
A time signature is two stacked numbers. The top one tells you how many beats are in a measure and the bottom one tells you what kind of note counts as a beat. In 4/4, you get four quarter-note beats per bar, which is what your foot is doing on autopilot. In 3/4 you get three. 6/8 is six eighth-notes per measure.
The asymmetry is what makes a measure “odd”. It doesn’t have to be an odd number (although it often is). Five and seven don’t split into even halves, so they get built out of uneven chunks, usually a mix of twos and threes. A bar of 5 is normally felt as 3+2 or 2+3. A bar of 7 might go 4+3, or 2+2+3. Your ear keeps waiting for the pattern to square up, and it never quite does. A bar of 10 might be 3 + 3 + 2 + 2.
Other musical cultures are much more at home in these than Western pop is. Balkan music, a lot of Indian classical music, plenty of jazz: all of it lives comfortably in meters that trip up listeners or musicians.
Here are five songs that make this feel pretty relatable.
“Mess Is Mine” — Vance Joy (2014)
This is a radio-friendly indie tune, the type of song you’ve heard in a coffee shop without a second thought. I taught this song a lot.
The verses have a seven-beat phrase, most easily counted as a bar of 3 followed by a bar of 4. Instead of the tidy eight beats you expect from two bars of 4/4, you get seven, and the phrase loops a beat early. People will argue about how to chop it up, this is what I think is the best way to do it. Count “1-2-3, 1-2-3-4”.
“Rand McNally” — Death Cab for Cutie (2022)
Same idea. The verses have an odd seven-feel and then the chorus drops into clean 4/4. When I was researching for this blog, I saw arguments over whether this is 7/4 or 7/8. For what it’s worth, unless I’m writing it down, I will just say something is in 7 and leave it at that (and I would say 7/4 for this).
Some quick internet searching tells me it’s a nostalgia piece about Death Cab’s early touring years, navigating the country with a physical Rand McNally road atlas unfolded on the dashboard. I mention this because we still have some of those in our car.
Death Cab leaned all the way into that theme when they released it. Before the album came out, the only way to hear the song was to physically travel to one of 800-plus venues they’d played over their career, from the site of their first show at the Pacer House in Bellingham to Madison Square Garden to a club in Tokyo, and unlock it with a geotag. Which is a very cool release strategy, if you ask me.
“Here Comes the Sun” — The Beatles (1969)
Now one almost everyone has heard.
The verses are nice, easy 4/4. But the bridge, the “sun, sun, sun, here it comes” part, is definitely not an easy 4/4. The transcription I have is a pickup into 3/8 3/8 5/8 4/4 2/4
You don’t need any of those numbers to feel it.
I usually count it as 123 123 12312 1&2&3&4& 1&2&
Side note: I will often count 5 as 2+3 or 3+2
George Harrison wrote it when he was deep in Indian classical music, a tradition with a much wider rhythmic vocabulary. You can hear that influence in how natural this section feels, never academic. Listen to these kids do Konnakol. Their rhythm is wild.
“Schism” — Tool (2001)
The bass riff starts alternating bars of 5/8 and 7/8. Supposedly the band described the feel, half-joking, as “six-and-a-half-eight.” From there it just keeps shifting under your feet.
It won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 2002, which is proof that this stuff can connect with a big audience and not just impress other musicians.
I personally wasn’t interested in metal at all until I heard Tool. But shortly after this came out, I picked up Lateralus and it is one of my favorite albums ever, and has been for decades.
“tolerate it” — Taylor Swift (2020)
This is another one where the internet is in disagreement about how to count it. The producer, Aaron Dessner, said he wrote it in 10/8. Critics at the New York Times and Vulture called it 5/4. They look similar on a page, but the labels imply different feels. Either way you’re in five.
So why do songwriters actually do this?
The meter isn’t a gimmick or a difficulty flex. At least, I don’t think that was their intention. Maybe they thought it was cool? Maybe it just happened?
The best examples are the ones you don’t catch, because I assume their goal is not to make you count, but to write something you enjoy listening to.
A few more worth listening to
If you want to keep listening, here are a couple more.
- “Money” — Pink Floyd
- “15 Step” — Radiohead (and several more from them)
- “All You Need Is Love” — The Beatles
- “Crystalline” — Björk
And there are plenty of others. Sufjan Stevens does it, there are plenty more Tool songs. Rush. More beatles songs. Have fun!
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