Progressive rock: a self-indulgent analysis courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood time-waster posted by Kiron on September 5, 2009

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Opeth's "Windowpane" is a pretty incredible song. It's progressive rock, and appropriately clocks in at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, but unlike most songs of its genre, it seems entirely effortless. In fact, the rest of the Damnation album does likewise, but this is the longest track (the shortest being just over four minutes.)

With most progressive rock, it seems like the songs are either really long just for the sake of it, or over-complicated concept albums that only really make sense if you have an hour or more to waste to sit down and really pay attention- which, most of the time, isn't what I'm looking for in music.

As such, it has been one of my ongoing ambitions in songwriting to pen a song with such complicated beauty as "Windowpane" without losing the flow that carries the song in a way that barely makes you realise the length exceeds that of the average radio single.

To completely recap my progress on this front would undoubtedly result in a long-winded musical autobiography, so I'll boil it down to two major milestones. My longest released song (although that says nothing; I've barely released maybe a fifth of my work) is titled "In Fear", and has the duration of 5 minutes and 40 seconds. However, well over half of this is a long-winded intro, followed by two minutes of mindless shredding (which, to add insult to injury, isn't even performed with real guitars on the released version.) In other words, that isn't even remotely close to my goal.

The other milestone is a recent song called "Gridlock," which is five minutes long. Although its riffs are endlessly more sophisticated than the former, it still relies on a long build-up before getting to the meat of the song, after which a fairly conventional verse-chorus-verse-chorus takes place, followed by a short guitar solo, and then the end.

To return to my prime example, "Windowpane" surprisingly adheres to a standard pop structure itself for most of its run. Until the bridge section, the only irregularity is the guitar solo placed directly after the first verse; the instrumental intro riff acting as a chorus, it then goes into another verse, followed by the bridge. After that, we get an extended breakdown, followed by a repetition of the main riff, another verse, and then the end.

So what is it that makes this song so special? From the moment it starts, before anything particularly interesting even seems to happen on a technical level, the song grabs you by the arm and pulls you along. The real genius lies in the song's riffs, on top of which all the other odds and ends are built. There's no particular rhyme or reason to why these riffs are just so damn cool, and by extension, no true formula to writing a song this good.

Enfin, writing a good song is mostly luck.

Currently listening to: Kiron Pubben - Thursdays (Demo 2) (Mix C) · View Comments

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