The 18-note chorus of the song "I Love You More Today than Yesterday" must be one of the tensest and most desperate bits of music ever written.
Can you hear the chorus in your head?
I love you more today than yesterday,
but not as much as tomorrow.
This is my first question: What are
these words doing paired with
that music?
(But since there's no answering that question — indeed, the words and music "always already"
are paired — I'll consider the chorus as it exists.)
The worried music transforms the lover's Hallmarky words into a pained confession — the confession of one who is hopelessly burdened. The lover's love has grown and grown unchecked, and now the growth is out of control. To listen to the chorus is to witness the exhausted lover realize that he has become powerless. I don't find this pleasant, personally. I think it's sad.
The lover sings the three high notes of
"YES-TER-DAY" like he's banging his fist three times on yesterday's back door, begging to get back inside. (He knows it's futile; he bangs anyway.)
Then, the lover starts the word
"to-MOR-row" on a down note, like an underconfident pole-vaulter running toward a high bar he knows he won't clear. The second note of
"to-MOR-row" goes high in exactly that not-quite-high-enough way that foreshadows the swift, decisive fall of the third note. The lover ends the word
"to-MOR-row" on the lowest and most depressed note of the chorus. He has hit bottom, and there I was to hear him arrive there.
I want to exit the song
now.
