Apologies for the delay, winter quarter has begun...
An Eagle in Your Mind is tuned a bit lower than A440 (maybe A438), best guess for a tonal center is F# but there's no distinguishable mode that the piece stays in.
The track begins with a nice little pad playing the high notes C# and F#. The pad has a tiny bit of LFO on the pitch so it has that wobbly sound also heard in Whitewater, In the Annexe, Smokes Quantity, and others. The flutey pad that fades in isn't playing chords so much as a polyphonic little melody shown here:
- Spoiler: show
The idea of polyphonic texture means that there are multiple different lines playing over each other in a song, rather than a bunch of chords with a single melody. Polyphony is a technique BoC utilized a lot in their earlier albums; in a way this creates an interesting parallel to classical music styles, because the first "classical" composers like Bach and the early 16th-century music pioneers often relied on polyphony, whereas chordal/melodic structure developed later with composers like Mozart and Beethoven. Because An Eagle in Your Mind has a number of distinct parts floating around the track I'm going to analyze it from a polyphonic perspective, although you could certainly come up with chords if you tried.
After the flute/pad intro the track relies on the percussion to build itself up until about 2:52 when the beat changes. One thing that's notable about the change in the beat is that from the beginning until 2:52 most of the snares/kicks/sounds used as percussion are significantly outside a regular rhythm pattern. The only thing that keeps the downbeat is the deep kick that plays every 2 measures, most of the other percussion parts are extremely syncopated. Thus, when the beat shifts at 2:52 (right after the "I love you" sample), it becomes a much more relaxed, regular rhythm, and sort of mellows out the urgency of the first part. Also starting at 3:06, a new synth is added to the mix, which plays improvisatory combinations of the notes D#, F#, G#, and A#. This stops at 3:32, and at that same time the bass begins to fade in, playing a loop of B, E#, and A which continues throughout the rest of the piece. At this point, if I were to attempt to analyze the piece relying on chords, it would look like B Major, E#5 (just E# and B#), and F#m6 (first inversion, basically F# Minor over an A). And because I'm guessing someone will take issue with an E# chord, it
is actually a perfectly valid chord option, and preferable to F5 here because E# fits better in musical language with F# than F does. More on that here if anyone's confused:
- Spoiler: show
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enharmonic
The other thing that begins to occur starting at 3:32 is the return of the irregular beats, building to a climax at about 4:12, where two things happen. The first is that we get a new high synth (with more LFO'd pitch) which plays this line:
- Spoiler: show
The second is that the irregular beat cuts off again and we get another pretty straight-forward kick-snare pattern. After a quick break at 4:42 another melodic line fades in, playing C# -> B over the B in the bass and then B -> A over the A in the bass. At 4:42 the synth "flourishes" begin as well. Whilst the E# in the bass is playing, the flourishes are actually playing parts of a whole-tone scale, namely the first flourish is C# D# F G A, and the second is A B C# D#. For a quick overview of what a whole-tone scale is, basically you just pick a note and ascend by major seconds each time. This means there are really only 2 whole-tone scales, and the starting note has no "tonic" function: either start on C or C# and go up by whole step.
At 5:12 the high synth from 4:12 repeats its line again. The rest of the song is just the other 2 melodic lines introduced at 4:42 getting progressively louder while the beats get more aggressive. I will fully admit that I have no idea what is being played at 6:18 (the final "flourish") but it sounds vaguely whole-tone and the pitch might be shifting slightly during the whole thing. My guess is it's some sample from something that BoC spent hours messing with until it was indistinguishable.
So, what makes this song tick? I've always gotten a bit of an uneasy feeling from it, probably due to the erratic beats, the pitch wobbles, the borderline-atonal polyphony (the MHtRtC period is, in my opinion, the closest BoC ever got to achieving atonality), and definitely the whole-tone scales. Try playing a whole-tone scale on your instrument of choice; it's a very unsettling scale. Obviously the percussion is a huge selling point as well, the sequencing and samples are fantastic. Out of the lengthier tracks on MHtRtC, this is definitely one of my favorites.
It starts around 1:11 in the song..
