3 Song Thursday – Wordless Codas

A coda is a musical means to an end. It’s the final transition into a song’s finish. This concluding passage is often what the listener remembers after the glow of the music has faded, and it determines whether a song sprints or stumbles over the finish line. These are a few of my favorite songs with instrumental codas, in which the singer is either too exhausted or too overwhelmed to continue.

1. “PDA” – Interpol

Interpol’s albums have grown exponentially worse with each new release, but this song is from their moody masterpiece of a debut, Turn On The Bright Lights. The song chugs along mechanically, led by throbbing bass drum hits and stabbing, dissonant guitars, returning to a confounding chorus about sleeping on “200 couches.” But then the song pauses, brightens. The chugging returns more excited than before, carrying a fragile organ coo on its shoulders, and the sounds zigzag and crash into silence.

2. “I Know There’s An Answer” – The Beach Boys

This wonderful Pet Sounds track is buried awkwardly in the third quarter of the album, which is perhaps why it is so criminally ignored. All the components of the song’s final 37 seconds are singularly present throughout the entire song: the bizarre circus piano, the merry banjo, and that tambourine. But it’s not until the song’s wordless coda that the threads are played together, and it is the blending of these elements that create true magic. It’s Christmas morning, it’s your first kiss, it’s absolutely perfect.

3. “Stop Breathin’” – Pavement

The song seems to begin in the middle of a phrase, without introduction. Stephen Malkmus croaks, “Dad, they broke me,” over drunken arpeggios and repeats the line twice at the finish of the first chorus. But he sings it only once for the second chorus, so we know a change is coming. Suddenly all falls silent, save for the sluggish 6/8 heartbeats of the drums. A brooding finger picked guitar line enters and is soon joined by another, each of them rising, falling and intersecting. The noise builds to a fever pitch, narrows to one single note of feedback, and then erupts again, roaring into a second coda.

Related posts:

1. 3 Song Thursday: Overlooked Gems of 2008
2. 3 Song Thursday: Anti-Valentines Songs
3. 3 Song Thursday: Justin’s 3 Favorite Songs of All Time