The lady is doing a cross-stitch and watching American hallmark movies. You know the kind; a pretty girl moves back to her small hometown after a failed relationship in the city. Her high school boyfriend is now some troubled heartbroken dude who wears a lumberjack jacket and chops up wood, and it’s all a bit awkward. City boyfriend turns up and he’s all suit and smarmy and our plucky heroine ends up having to choose between the bright lights and the home comforts, just as the Christmas snow starts falling.
Sunday afternoon. I like it. The curtain billows and the sun is warm. The sky is summer bay blue.
Meanwhile I’m not wasting my time! No way! I’m watching YouTube clips of a jazz musician dissecting and explaining how cool the Thomas the Tank Engine theme is. Honestly, the way it modulates through the keys using the ol’ 2-5-1 progression, switches up, switches down - ends up in A flat having started in C! Amazing! And it does all that while smoothly chugging its way into your long-term memory.
Elsewhere ‘Brad’ is pushing away Chloe’s advances while Jack is buying the local cookie store and evicting old Edgar and Mary. It’s all too much for Clarissa who’s considering her future in Hunters Valley or whatever it’s called this week.
You’ll never guess what the hi-hat Is in Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a steam engine puffing across the beats! Love that. And the way the bridge gets you back to the theme motif! Genius.
I suppose the best tunes are the ones where the melody, the counterpoint, all the components of the music dance around a central idea, in harmony, different, unique but beautiful when brought together.
I thought about that a lot just now, here on the sofa in the open-window summer breeze.
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