Rich here to admit that I'm a sucker for a particular type of clever song in which the singer self-knowingly-and-with-a-wink tells you exactly what's musically clever about the song being sung.
This kind of "telegraphing" of a songwriter's intentions isn't anything new. Way back in 1944 Cole Porter wrote the line "There's no love song finer / but how strange the change from major to minor" just as "Ev'rytime We Say Goodbye" transitioned from a major to a minor key. Very clever, Cole!
Later, in 1974, UK composer & singer Brian Protheroe did something similar in "Changing My Tune," in which nearly every line of the song describes its melodic movements: "Changing my tune slower now / Choosing my pitch lower now / I wrote a key change for you nobody could hear / Wanted to teach you the chord, nobody came near."
And then there's the band 10cc -- the Seventies band who made a whole career out of being clever. Their 1977 album "Deceptive Bends" contained the under-two-minute track "I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor" in which the punning title gave away the somewhat jazzy song's intentions -- i.e., that it's not only about buying a flat on the sea (as the song moves from an A-flat to a C chord), but that the song also served as a tutor for all the chords needed to play it on guitar, as revealed in the video below:
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