Owl City — “Alligator Sky” — A look at the accompaniment

All Things Bright and Beautiful, a 2011 album from artist Owl City, is an excellent resource of many of Adam Young’s musical hallmarks: compelling, non-standard chord progressions, a fondness of analogue and digital synths; and incredibly catchy rhythms, especially in the backgrounds — the subject of this post on one of the album's prereleased tracks, Alligator Sky.

In what seems to be a reference to the track’s title, and the narrative of the “life in the sky”, Alligator features a very prominent use of strings. Right from the get-go, grand, sweeping strings introduce a quality of ‘airiness’, setting the scene for the rest of the story to take place. (Even the opening synth glide seems to suggest the image of a rocket lifting off.) This is the ‘first role’ of the strings — to set the scene of the wide-open sky.

At the first verse, the role of the strings switches to become rhythmic, starting up the ultra-cool dotted rhythm which defines most of Alligator's accompaniment. But do the strings remain as just background material?

Interesting things happen at the first chorus (transcribed in the excerpt attached to this post.) Here the function of the strings becomes blurred: they’re not background anymore, because they enter into direct dialogue with Young’s own vocals; but they’re not foreground either, because they still hang on to their accompaniment rhythm they established earlier. So what’s going on here?

Broadly speaking, the strings break loose from their background status and begin to imitate the contours of Young’s melodic line. This is seen most clearly on the words, “I’ll never know,” where the alignment happens to be exact. Elsewhere, the contour of the strings rises and falls, loosely mimicking Young’s vocal part. (Notice at “And carried you away,” the strings borrow the notes almost exactly from the vocals!) But still, at certain points (over each ‘A’ chord) the strings are faithful to their old accompaniment rhythm. So it’s a hybrid — the strings are neither foreground, nor background, but somehow both — in this snippet of Alligator Sky.

For you music buffs out there, notice how the new string rhythm in this passage contains the old 'ultra-cool' rhythm from before (highlighted notes in the first line.) So this truly is a hybrid between two things: a rhythmic background accompaniment, and a foreground element which engages in direct dialogue or interplay to the vocal part. A neat way to utilize material!