Rich here with Part Two about music that messed around with your musical instincts by adding or subtracting beats to the typical 4 beats per measure found in the vast majority of rock songs.
Unlike Van Morrison, who was an R&B traditionalist (see Part 1 of this series), Peter Gabriel was already well acquainted with complex time signatures when he left the prog band Genesis in the mid-'70s. And, interestingly, one of his first solo records to become fairly well known was a hummable pop song that featured a kick drum keeping the band on time by hitting every beat of the song -- nothing fancy, just boom, boom, boom, boom . . . one kick on every beat.
But if you tried to learn the song and tried to play it on your acoustic guitar, you ran into problems almost immediately. Once the kick drum hit its first beat following a short guitar lead-in, the melody didn't immediately turn around after four beats, like with most pop/rock songs. There were still three more beats to be had, which meant the song had 7 beats per measure, which is a type of jazz time signature(!), and what seemed like a simple pop song with a pretty melody instead became far more progressive than it appeared. The only break in the pattern is on the last line before each of the instrumental breaks, which plays one measure in 4 before returning to its 7-time. Crazy, huh?
I saw something on complex time signatures and was amazed at how many songs use it, and, how easy it was to understand
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