"Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day is a beautiful song. It's also an emotional song, if you're familiar with the music video. To summarize: Boy meets girl, boy joins the military, boy goes to war, depictions of girl's emotions as she misses boy, emotions of boy as he experiences the horrors of war. It was released in 2004, shortly after the reelection of George W. Bush, when tensions about the Iraq War were high. It was included on the album American Idiot, which the band made clear was about the current president.
"Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence, released in 2003, features the haunting voice of Amy Lee, as well as the more aggressive guest vocals of Paul McCoy. The narrative of this song is more obscure; the lyrics provide few clues, and the video features a sleeping woman dreaming about climbing out a window, walking along the ledge of a high-rise building, and then falling (jumping?) off the ledge.
In 2014, YouTube user Broken and Undecided created a mashup of the two songs, perhaps motivated by the similarity between the the title of the Green Day song and the most salient lyric in the chorus of "Bring Me To Life" - "Wake me up." (The song is often called "Wake Me Up" by mistake.) The part of this mashup that stands out to me is the absolutely amazing way that Lee's melody is recontextualized by Green Day's instrumental track.
"Bring Me To Life" is in E minor. The vocal melody at the beginning of the song floats above the following chord progression:
i VI i iv
i VI i iv
"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is in G major, the relative major of E minor. Conveniently, this means that Broken and Undecided did not need to transpose either song to make them fit with each other. The opening chord progression from the Green Day song is as follows:
I V6 vi I
IV iv I
The overall key of a mashup tends to be heard in the key of the instrumentals, and it is the vocals that seem to be "recontextualized," rather than the other way around. Instrumental parts comprise complete triads and seventh chords, whereas vocals usually have only a single pitch at one time (discounting backup vocals, of course), and single notes can be harmonized in many different ways. For example, the first note that Amy Lee sings in "Bring Me To Life" is a B. That B could be the fifth of an E minor triad (as it is in the original context), the third of a G major triad (as it appears in the mashup), the root of a B diminished triad, or a part of countless other harmonies. The focal pitches of the opening melody in B minor, in solfege, are:
sol le sol fa
When recontexualized in G major for the mashup, those focal pitches completely change their identity, and become heard as:
mi fa mi re
The intervals between the notes are exactly the same, but they feel drastically different! This is a classic technique of the mashup, and its effects, when done well, are marvelous. The title of this post, "More Than the Sum of Its Parts," is a reference to a 2005 article in the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail. The author, Ivor Tossell, says that mashups have the potential to add up to more than the sum of their parts. In this instance, I think it's true. I find this mashup (or at least, the verse parts) to be more enjoyable than either of the source songs. My sole critique is that the magic of this recontextualization comes to a screeching halt at around 1:27, with the entrance of Paul McCoy's vocals. The beautiful ballad is interrupted by his aggressive delivery, and it sounds incredibly out of place. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments!