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One vague background consideration that seems significant here is, like, this song doesn't exist in isolation, theres a whole Boston Solstice with a) a particular set of constraints in terms of Latent Singing Ability, and b) JeffTK's coming at it with a particular overall music aesthetic, and as (AFAICT) the Boston Guy with the best combination of musical skill and logistical execution. This all adds up to Boston Solstice having a particular musical aesthetic. I think it kinda makes sense to evaluate the song (at least this exact recording/variation of it) in that context.

Many of the initial Solstice songs/variations are by me, and selected to fit some Raymond Arnold Folk/Rock combo aesthetic, which some people are into and some are not. I know some people who really want a High. Church Choir Solstice, and people who want an Electronica solstice, and some a Mall Punk Solstice, and some a Heavy Metal Solstice, and those all seem legitimate.

I do think in most of the Solstices I've ran, there's a higher level of latent musical ability in the crowd, such that just doing the original Level Up song is more reasonable (without even making it a Choir Only piece). But if I were in a context where I thought it made sense to do a simplified version, I might keep the approximate simplified-lyrics Jeff has here, but shift something slightly about the rhythm to fit into the vague Raemon Folk Rock style. (I'm not quite sure what the difference is here, but think there's something there).

See in context

Simplified Level Up

by jefftk

jefftk

3 min read25th Dec 202216 comments

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Vienna Teng's Level Up is a great song, but when we wanted to use it in our secular solstice ( retrospective) it wasn't going to work as-is. The problem is she's a professional singer performing a piece she knows well, while we're a crowd of amateurs most of who haven't heard the song before let alone sung it.

Some aspects of the song that make it tricky to pick up on the fly:

Most of the words are pickups.
The lines don't start on a consistent beat.
Sections have small differences each time they're repeated.
It's not square.

Additionally, the sung portion ends with a build and the song's conclusion is instrumental, which is not satisfying for group singing.

Alex and I made some changes to get it to work better in our context, and while they make it a worse performance song I think they're a good compromise for group singing that keeps a lot of what makes the song worth singing. Here are the words and chords we figured out:

        G
so come out.
                   G
been waiting long enough.
                         C                                       G
you're done with all the talk talk talk with nothing on the table.
                     G
it's time to come on out.
              G
no sign from above.
                     C                                            G
you'll only hear the knock knock knock of your own heart as signal.


           Em      D    C
if you are afraid, come forth.
            Em    D    C
if you are alone, come forth now.
          Em   D   C     Bm  D
everybody here has loved and lost,
                              G
[pause] so level up and love again.


       G
begin again.
                     G
blast the dam on the flow.
                    C                                   G
your body feels the tock tock tock of time as it hammers.
                G
lord we are all cinders
                  G
from a fire long ago,
                   C                                               G
but here it is the knock knock knock of your own heart that matters.


           Em      D    C
if you are afraid, come forth.
            Em    D    C
if you are alone, come forth now.
          Em   D   C     Bm   D
everybody here has seams and scars,
                              G
[pause] so level up and feel again.


            C   D  G
and this is all we need.
            C     D   G
and this is where we start.
            C   D  G
this is the day we greet.
            C    D  G
this is the day, no other.


                     G
call it any name you need.
                     G
call it any name you feel.
             C                          G
call it your 2.0, your rebirth, whatever.
                   G
if you can feel it all,
                      G
with your doors flung wide.
             C                               G
call it your day no. 1 in the rest of forever.


            Em     D    C
if you are afraid, give more.
            Em    D    C
if you are alive, give more now.
          Em   D   C     Bm   D
everybody here has seams and scars.
                              G
[pause] so level up and live again.

Here's a rough recording of how we did it at our gathering. Note that the accompanist (me...) is rushing, and the initial tempo (85-90bpm) is a good speed.

(mp3)

I got a lot of very positive feedback on this song, and I think it was people's favorite from the evening.

Since making that recording I've tweaked the chorus not to use "love" every time, with "feel" and "live" on later times through. So many songs are about love, and while this song does cover love it covers a wider range of human experience and it's better if the chorus reflects that.

The place where I'm least happy with this adaptation is that it drops the slow first half of the bridge:

let your faith die.
bring your wonder.
yes, you are only one.
no, it is not enough
but if you lift your eyes, I am your brother.

These are great words, but the way the original song places them, especially the first two lines with one hard-to-predict note on each, wouldn't work in this context. If anyone has ideas on how to fit this in without making the song much harder to sing along to on the fly I'd love to hear it!

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[-]gwillen7mo51

I am a little concerned that this would be totally unsingable for anybody who actually knows the original well (which is maybe not many people in the scheme of things, but the Bayesian Choir out here has done the original song before.)

[-]Raemon7mo110

I do think there’s an upfront skill you can gain of… just accepting multiple versions of a song as existing, which I think generalizes once you really grok it. (It probably does involve grieving , and like, not a simple thing. But I think it’s pretty valuable for opening yourself up to new positive experiences)

My feeling listening to this one was ‘yup, seems like a fine alternate variation.’ I do find some elements good and some a bit meh (I'm not sure I can articulate the differences at the moment, but, once you get over the general 'aah this is different', I think it's still legitimate to look at what a song is trying to do, and evaluate both how well it succeeds at that thing, and whether the thing it was trying to do was the right thing)

[-]Raemon7mo42

(Maybe to clarify: you say "totally unsingable for anybody who actually knows the original well", and I want to say "this is definitely false. A true statement would be "for people who know the original well, and who index songs in their head as having one canonical version", or something like that)

[-]jefftk7mo86

I probably should have presented this here as a cross-genre cover, and not a straight simplification, fwiw

[-]Orual7mo70

Yeah, that's my main issue, too. I know the original incredibly well, I worked out the chords on piano from scratch years ago. So while I get the motivation here I would really have trouble with the adapted version.

I natively have higher expectations in terms of congregational musical and rhythmic ability, due to where I grew up (Congo), so I always feel the need to push back when people dumb down songs for group singing. My brain expects random untrained people to be able to do melody and descant, syncopation and pick-up notes, and so on, because that's what I grew up with, though I know that's not necessarily the case here, not with this demographic.

One thing that would work is to have part of the song being sung by the leader, not the whole group. That might be a workable way to incorporate the bridge back into this version of Level Up. Drop back to just low accompaniment and have the best singer do that part solo, then bring people back in. If you were to attempt something more like the original, you could also do this with the start of the song, where the beat is a lot less consistent. Have the leader start the song and then bring people in as you move toward the first chorus and the groove really kicks in.

Also, I wonder if an unclear understanding of the time signature of the original (or an attempt to fit it into something more standard) is causing issues. It's pretty much all in 7, especially once the beat gets going, and a good rhythm section that can hit the accents right really makes everything quite easy to hit in proper time. There's a quick and tight 1212123 (with the occasional 1231212) through the whole song (though for the into and first bit of the first verse it's a lot more nebulous) and most of the "challenging" notes actually land on that first beat of the 7. But yeah, you'd have to have the band really work on the song to get it to a place where you could lead it well in its original form.

[-]Raemon7mo40

A strong generator for my overall Solstice plans was an attitude that my Grandma (who is a jazz musician), brought to our Christmas singing – she noted that there are cultures (and gave some some African countries as examples), where it's just take as a given that everyone can learn to sing fairly complicated things. And, because of that belief, it becomes true – people are encouraged from a young age sing confidently and complexedly. And they aren't punished along the way for trying.

So, my overall attitude with Solstice is that the opening songs should be extremely easy, such that, i.e. 80% of the people can sing along easily and the other 20% can sing it with a bit of a stretch. But, over the course of Solstice the average song difficulty ramps up, which acts as a bit of a de-facto tutorial for singing. Meanwhile, throughout the rest of the year have more singing events that end up training the community in some musical skills such that the average quality of Solstice singalongs improves over time.

I have a dream of the overall musical culture eventually "catching back up with" the sort of culture you're familiar with.

[-]jefftk7mo20

My brain expects random untrained people to be able to do melody and descant, syncopation and pick-up notes, and so on, because that's what I grew up with, though I know that's not necessarily the case here, not with this demographic.

I also grew up in a community where a relatively high level of musical proficiency was the default, though more melodic than rhythmic. But this is a different situation, and adapting to the situation is a lot of making things go well.

or an attempt to fit it into something more standard

Yes, this version is not in seven anymore. I don't think our group would be able to sing a song in seven, and it would strain my abilities as an accompanist as well.

[-]jefftk7mo20

I talked to people afterwards, and the only person who raised anything along these lines said something like "I could tell that you'd changed some things, but didn't have trouble singing it".

I suspect we didn't actually have anyone in our group of 35 or so at the event in the category you're describing, people who really thoroughly knew the original song. My guess, however, is that if we did have someone like that they would likely also be musically talented enough that they would be able to pick the adapted version up.

[-]Raemon7mo42

[-]Rubix7mo40

I gave the recording from this year's Boston solstice a listen and disliked it - I feel bad about saying this, and am pushing through that bad feeling not due to unkind intent, but because I imagine you want access to negative feedback as well as positive. It feels like the same reason I dislike the original tune of [] Wrote The Rocks and prefer the Alex Federici version (https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/god-wrote-the-world). In both cases, the tune I like less seems meandering, overly jazzy, and out of sync with the serious/gritty character of the lyrics.

I agree that singing the original tune of Level Up as a group wouldn't work for the reasons you name - I heard that the Bay Area solstice asks the audience to be quiet while the choir performs it, which seems good to me.

[-]jefftk7mo30

am pushing through that bad feeling not due to unkind intent, but because I imagine you want access to negative feedback as well as positive

Thanks! Confirming that this is what I want!

I heard that the Bay Area solstice asks the audience to be quiet while the choir performs it, which seems good to me.

I do think that having choir-only pieces works well in some contexts, but it's not something we like to do at our event. When we've tried doing it we mostly get the feedback that people want to sing along, which makes sense to me given the rest of the aesthetic of the Boston event.

[-]Slider7mo20

The emotion of love is significantly different from the action or existential stance of love.

Having it be comparable with mere experiences seems like a downgrade to the narrower meaning in my ears.

[-]jefftk7mo20

Can you give it more context about what part of the post you're responding to? I can't tell what you want to be different.

[-]Slider7mo35

I've tweaked the chorus not to use "love" every time, with "feel" and "live" on later times through. So many songs are about love, and while this song does cover love it covers a wider range of human experience and it's better if the chorus reflects that.

This is an anti-improvement on the semantics level. It would make sense for "philia" and "eros" senses but given other memes the sense of "agape" would be fitting. It is a error similar to "we have diversified the repetition of mathematics with occurences of geometry and analysis as the scope is wider than numbers", which commits the error of taking mathematics to be a synonym for algebra. This obscures the concept of mathematics (as there is a namespace collision) and makes the total be a scatter of separate branches instead being an unified tree.

[-]jefftk7mo20

FWIW the original chorus didn't use 'love' every time. It was only my intermediate (in my opinion over-)simplification that did.

I don't think most people's immediate interpretation of 'love' in this context would be as broad as this?

[-]Slider7mo20

Yes, statistically it is unlikely to be taken in that sense and it seems an important consideration. But it is a place where perpetuating the thinning of the concept happens. As in can be quite subtle, using the remaining degrees of freedom to support a revelatory rather than obscuring closer reading benefits from using every turn it is possible.

Might be specific on how I read and project meaning. Multimeaning messages are hard to manage.

I do think that you can get from

What is love? Baby don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. No more

to Amor Fati (which I guess I am kind of reinterpreting as Fate of Love rather than Love of Fate)

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