Dissecting Sarah Kinsley's Sublime to Find the Undissectable (first draft)

Welcome! We're going to do some good old art analysis today.

The first time I heard Sublime by alt-pop artist Sarah Kinsley, the fourth track off of her debut album Escaper, doesn't feel like the first time I heard it. I remember enjoying it as my best friend played several songs from the album for my partner and I during a car ride—I went this is so good and they went isn't it though—but for whatever reason it didn't stick. Only on another car ride with the same set of people, as I was dipping in and out of anxiety-riddled brain fog over an existentially-suffocating Internet debacle (essay on that forthcoming), did I tune back in to this song on the car speakers and quietly go "Oh, right, there's this waiting for me outside of all that."

I say this to give context for the emotional lens with which I hear this piece. Its place in my experience hits a particular string in me, the notion of escaping what appears to be the "real world" to get to something more real, more true, more alive. Not that that's absent from the text itself—the album's called Escaper, for crying out loud—but this definitely colors my analysis, and I don't intend to run from that.

If you haven't yet, please do listen to the song, and if you can concentrate on reading while listening to music with lyrics, do put it on repeat (it's on the radio here!) It's a very repeatable song.

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Tuning

So the first immediately noticeable thing about this song—if you're like me, at least—is that it sounds out-of-tune in a vintage sort of way. And if you're really like me and have absolute pitch, you maybe realize that it's not just detuned from one identifiable key, it's smack-dab in the middle of two of them (specifically, it's in F half sharp).

Detuning is hardly unique within synth pop. Tuning a piece flat generally makes it feel warmer, cozier, or "lower." It also tends to sound vintage in this context, as when record players or tape players run slow or lose power, the pitch falls. My cassette player once fooled me into thinking Lucky Black Cat by Pentangle was a half step lower than it actually is by virtue of not running on full battery, and I'm still sour about the song not "really" being in C#, which sounds far moodier and thus more fitting to my ears. Tuning sharp, on the other hand, makes a piece feel brighter and more energetic; orchestras in Europe during the 1800s somewhat famously tuned sharper and sharper over the years in large part to sound brighter and more enlivened than competitors. It also makes a song sound vintage, for a similar reason: Radio versions of singles in the 80s were often slightly sped up from the album versions and, thus, pitched slightly higher, making them more energetic on the fronts of both pitch and tempo.

So what does tuning exactly between two keys produce, then? F half sharp is simultaneously very sharp (from F's perspective) and very flat (from F#'s)—it is as sharp or flat as either can get without flipping into the other's domain—so depending on the perspective, Sublime is either maximally lively or maximally soft. Really, it's both. Listen close enough and you might be able to mentally flip it back and forth, like a Necker cube or Yanny-Laurel situation, but to my ears, it pretty comfortably straddles the line between both sides.

And of course it does; the whole song does. As I'll look at more in-depth when discussing the lyrics, this is a song about leaving someone or something for the better, the freedom of departing and also the tender sadness of departing. Seeing the other side of the hill without having crossed yet. The drive catapulting forward and the gravity pulling back. Not a tug of war between two feelings—two keys—but a bittersweet feeling that blends the qualities of both.

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And as a testament to Sarah Kinsley's musical know-how, whenever she performs this song live, it's not in F half sharp—this would be beastly to tune everything to and then back from during a concert—but it's also not in either of the neighboring "normal" keys. Typically, if pitching a song away from its original key for live performance, it's best to pitch down; singing live is more demanding than singing in the studio, so going lower can make things easier for the artist. Tune right down to F, though, and the song would sound genuinely flat compared to the baseline listeners are used to. So Kinsley circumvents this entirely by fully diverging to E instead. Now, even though it's lower, it doesn't feel dulled, it simply feels like a choice to move key centers.

You can hear this done less elegantly (no shame, I love this song so much) in Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, an 80s song that's (infamously) pitched up slightly from E in the studio version, but performed live in plain E. Listen to the contrast here:

And for comparison:

See what I mean? Rhythm Nation just feels that much more like a flattening of the original when done live, compared to the jump made for Sublime. It's not even audio quality; in both videos I lead with the lower-quality concert recording, and still, to me Kinsley's shift sounds refreshing in a way Jackson's doesn't.

(And as a tangent within a tangent, doesn't Kinsley's drummer look like he's having so much fun?)

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Harmony

My piano teacher would often, during recitals, invite a parent of a student who'd never played piano to come up and play an improvised melody over chords. There's a trick here to making anyone sound decent while doing this; play a classic 12-bar blues progression in D# minor, and have your improvizer only hit the black keys. It doesn't grant perfect rhythm or melodic cleverness, but it does ensure that no notes ever sound sour.

Much of modern Western music uses diatonic scales—Sound of Music's "Do-Re-Mi," and any scale with those notes in the same order but with a different starting point. Within any diatonic scale, there's a pair of notes—in the major scale they're Fa and Ti—that are a tritone apart. The tritone splits the octave perfectly in half, and for that reason can be said to sound maximally dissonant; the two notes are as far apart from each other as they can get.

This is very useful—the tension in these two notes means the resolution when a chord changes away from them can be very satisfying—but not all scales utilize it. If you take those two notes out of the diatonic scale, you're left with a major pentatonic. This scale can also be constructed by taking a starting note, going up by fifths (a very consonant interval) four times, and rearranging the resulting notes to fit into an octave. Either way you construct it—building off of maximal consonance or removing maximal dissonance—the end product is a scale that typically sounds congruent, easeful, steady, close to universal (one can find pentatonic scales in musical traditions the world over.)

As you might have guessed, the black keys on a piano form this pentatonic.

Sublime allllmost sticks entirely to this scale. The melody does, never employing—ummm—B half flat or E half sharp. But the chords frequently dip into the diatonic.

The first of the song's two main chord patterns goes from—ok, the half-sharps are going to make this unwieldy to read, let's pretend this song is in F—from F major to A minor to D minor. If you know the infamous "four chords of pop," this is a slightly more melancholy variation on the first three. That A minor is technically an Aminor/E, with the major seventh (one of the two notes in the tritone) setting the foundation as the bass note of the chord—immediate tension. Those other chords, F major and D minor, are the only ones in the song that are fully major-pentatonic-compatible: The root chord and its equally stable minor counterpart. It's gravity pulling back home.

The second, if you're in the verse, goes between B♭ major to C major—the fourth, the fifth of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (if you're in the chorus of Sublime, these are preceded by another F major. I'm also simplifying here too, there are added notes in these chords that make them feel richer, but they don't change the function the chords fulfill). Both of these chords belong squarely to the diatonic; C major is made major by that E, and B♭ is its fellow in the tritone. This pair of chords is also an extremely common way to lead back to the root chord (F major here), with a sequence of upward-moving notes from the diatonic scale embedded in that progression from the fourth to the fifth to root. It's forward-moving drive.

And the melody, by virtue of being pentatonic, never clashes with either of these. It's the same as with the tuning. These two modes dance back and forth with each other; the presence of dissonance never actually distrupts the ease that's also present, nor vice versa.

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Rhythm

I thought Imogen Heap had me covered for "song with best atypical introduction of drums." It's typical enough for pop songs to go without percussion for, say, the first verse or part of a verse, and have the full beat kick in right at the start of the first chorus—maybe leaving with one or two measures open at the beginning before the drums come in on the next downbeat. Heap's Headlock subverts this by waiting until the second chorus to, with no buildup, slam into you with the full instrumentation, including the first introduction of any percussion. It's a song all about needing to be pushed or shocked into action. Delaying the surprise makes that fully hit home. The song is served so well by Heap's decision to really relish that initial calm, dreamy atmosphere for every second she can before pulling the rug out from under you with a wink. It rocks.

But Sublime beats it. The verse does that expected pop first-verse-with-no-drums thing, it leaves the first two measures (I'm counting it as two, makes my analysis for this part a touch easier) drumless to keep things feeling wide and open and suspended, and then the beat comes in on the upbeat of the third measure with the snare. The first kick drum to come in is on even more of an offbeat. I, look I'm doing my best to explain the logic behind the music theory I'm geeking out over from the ground up, but like, you don't do this. Listen to it. You haven't heard that before, right? That's the best way I can put it. This is weird.

But I'm not content to go and happy-flap my hands over how unique this rhythm introduction is—what is it doing here?

I feel like I have to again abandon the logistical analysis, at least to start, and just describe what I hear right in front of me: It feels like a jump. Not a leap of faith, but a straight jump into the air from the ground in an open field. The first in a whole series of them. Those two open measures stretch the anticipation as far as it will go, but the itch to jump around—not up, really, around—takes over at an unexpected, even awkward, spot because that's how desires kick in. It's a "fuck it."

What I notice analytically, with that image in mind, is that the snare hit coincides with the first highest note in the chorus, the first melodic peak. That's part of the jumping feeling, I think; there's an extra punch given to that soaring "byyyyyy!" in "babyyyyyy!" That moment before the next kick, that extended stretch of time afforded by the second offbeat, feels like it briefly slows down the first jump in a cinematic sense, lets us linger at the top before coming back to earth and kicking about to the rhythm. Drum patterns starting with the kick builds a foundation for other percussion to reach upward from. By starting with the higher snare, it's like we're starting unmoored from gravity, and only later pulled back down.

That rhythm, by the way, is one you've almost certainly heard before. It's Reptilia, maybe Hey Mickey, basically every D&B song, only with rawer and earthier drums. That specific pattern is what lets the song do that weird little time trade-off with the first snare and kick, before settling into something more known by the next measure. Still, that elastic moment where the snare has room to float before being pulled back down by the kick happens in every single measure where drums play, even if it only feels so monumental in the beginning. The drive to lift up and away and the tether to earth become the status quo, the beating heart of the song; not two elements at war, but two inextricable consequences of a very simple, feelable beat.

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Instrumentation

This'll be a small section, but only in writing the previous one did I realize how deep this dialectic runs in the song (yes, I'm calling it a dialectic). The drums in this song are simple, with very little extraneous percussion outside the kick and snare. There are little rimshot+shaker(?) sounds adding extra accents in the second chorus, a tumbling drum fill leading into the second chorus, and an extra louder snare layer in the final section, but none distract or fall far from the tree of the existing rhythm (that fill is later heard in the chorus as a percussion layer, so while it functions as a transition when first introduced, it also keeps the chorus steady).

They're also decidedly acoustic in feel; even if that final extra snare does sound like a layer added in production and not a live snare, it still sounds distinctly material. These drums are wood and metal; they're tangible. They drive the song forward, while also rooting it.

They're not synthy, is my point—and yet, the rest of the instrumentation is. All melodies and chords and basslines—outside of Kinsley's voice, of course—are synthetic, even spacey. There are frequent changes in the rhythm with which the chords are articulated, ghostlike melodic layers, arpeggios and shimmers and embellishing tones—all things that conjure a sense of breadth and possibility and upness—but they also move more slowly, fade in with soft attacks, linger around more. Like the drums, they both push onward and pull inward; like the in-between key, they're both bright and cozy.

It's a part of why they work so well together despite, on the face of it, coming from two different worlds; emotionally, they're cohesive with each other.

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Lyrics

I haven't found anything from Sarah Kinsley herself on the specifics of this song's meaning, so while bound by intellectual integrity, I'm free to run with this a bit.

As I said before, on the surface, this is a song about leaving a person who's hurt you. It's a breakup song. Thing is, I thought I could grab the title drop in the chorus as an example of that...

Oh, life would be so easy

Oh, life would be sublime

If I could forget you, baby

...except it ends on this:

If I did not need your kind

And already, we're in much more complicated territory than "breakup song about a singular individual."

Were I coming into this with more of an agenda, that might inspire me to spin this as a song that's really about addiction—"So dependent on the chemical to settle in"—or oppressive aspects of Christianity—"And the way it takes apart my soul every week"—or spiritual awakening—"Oh, the days they'll make you out to be nothing but insane/Running through the portal to live is to be unchained"—but this feels dishonest. These are isolated moments in the lyrics, not concrete recurring themes, but disparate yet cohesive snapshots of a common impetus. I feel that, for some listener, it is about leaving the church. For another, it's about returning to it. For another, it's about an abusive partner. For yet another, it's about moving across the country.

For me, on the drive to work one Sunday morning, it was about work. On the ride back, it was about memories of a "friend" I left years ago. On that first car ride when this song lodged itself in me, it was about the Human Design community and ideology and not letting its definitions of self stick onto me—"You could never know what I became."

It's an anthem to a feeling. The drive to leave, to live, to seize, to run for it. An intolerance to being diminished or numbed, no matter by who or what. You hear it at the end of the second verse:

The moment's fleeting, why not live despite the pain?

But I think it's best said in the first half of the chorus:

Oh, pretty, pretty baby

All you do is make me cry

Oh, how I feel so crazy

When you start to ease my mind

Those last two lines get me so hard. I commend Kinsley for the choice to fully embrace the paradox and say "start" instead of "try"; it's a much truer line for it. Explaining beyond that would be less effective than your feeling it yourself, I think.

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And crucially, fascinatingly, perfectly in keeping with the dialectic, the leaving never occurs in the lyrics. The chorus remains in the realm of desire to escape, of hope that one might be able to escape, but not of escape. Kinsley sings of "why not"s and "there has to be"s in her verses, but not of the actual event of going. You can see it functionally in the choice of lyrical perspective. The second person of the song, after all, is the "pretty, pretty baby" the singer wants to leave. The drive is strong, but there's a substantial gravity remaining: The need to explain, to say all this to the very thing being left behind. Maybe out of an inner pressure to make one's piece heard, maybe out of a hesitance to make the jump, maybe out of a desire to help it escape too; I can feel any or all of that in here.

It's that bittersweet dance mirrored once more. But here, I feel the weight distributed a little differently. I see more clearly why those opposites aren't in conflict with each other in the rest of the composition—sharpness and softness, consonance and dissonance, earth and space, striving and sinking in. When I snapped back to reality in the car upon felt this song as a truth lying outside of everything my head was swarmed with, I felt a desire for the real—for the totality of direct experience, not the suffocation of a singular, overbearing narrative claiming authority on human nature. Total experience comes with both, not as opposites in dualistic conflict but as colors and tastes and sentiments that merge into distinctly new qualia. The thing that keep Kinsley down in these lyrics is beautiful, is pretty, and so it fits beyond the rhyme scheme that she would sing of life being not beautiful, but sublime: The "beauty" that is not comprehensibility and prettiness, but immensity and awe. Grand enough to fit ease alongside pain.

And as for what becomes of that tension, that "will she/I, won't she/I"? Well, listen to that final stretch of instrumental. Hear that burst of triumph, the drums even more solid and the synths even more sparkly; feel the gravity start to shift to a new center. The lyrics end, and I know it: Sarah's gone.

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