Sunday March 23, 2008 at 20:39
Song #2 that I Only Half Like:
Fefe Dobson - “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head”
Fefe Dobson has never quite had the hit she needed to break out from the post-Avril clone ward, but she’s talented and basically a bad-ass, and I feel like if someone had just done a bit more due diligence on this song, it could have been her big thing.
The music is good, the idea for the song is KILLER and feels like it was written across my still-stuck-in-high-school brain, the singing is engaged and emotional. So what went wrong?
Well the lyrics could have used, um, a second pass. The line “If I looked in your eyes / One, two, too many times” gets AWK written on it in red pen. And then in the bridge, there’s this extended metaphor about a porcelain doll. 1) Was this song written by someone’s grandma? No one alive today has any frame of reference for a porcelain doll, particularly the tweenage audience this song is presumably intended for. 2) It’s a clunky metaphor that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny in any way that ties back to the rest of the song. (Admittedly this might only bother former English majors.) 3) At the end of the bridge, I always want her voice to go up higher on the word “head.” Like she stays on the root, and I want her up an octave higher, on the major third. (I think? I don’t have my piano with me. Check my math, music jerks.) It’s trivial but would have heightened the emotion going back into the last chorus. This is Diane Warren 101.
Sorry Fefe. I’m still pulling for you.
(earlier)
