Weekly Basslines #157: Two Tickets To Paradise (Eddie Money)

This weeks basslines falls in the category of "almost forgotten but yet rediscovered".

I'm the kind of guy who needs loud music for cleaning up my flat. So when it is my turn again the first thing I do is picking a record from my collection to be my "Cleaning soundtrack".
Lately I took the debut album from Eddie Money, which I haven't heard for about decades and believe me I really had a good time cleaning up. Starting with this weeks song "Two Tickets To Paradise" the whole album really kicks ass, including the hymn of my teenage dreams "Wanna Be A Rock'n'Roll Star" (yeah I almost made it ;-) and the wonderful ballad "Save a little room in your heart for me" and the lead single "Baby hold on". No wonder this album gained triple platinum status.


"Two Tickets To Paradise" only comprises three chords: G, A and D. At first glance this suggests to be the key of D major with G being the IV and A the V chord. But the album version of the song (which has no fade out) ends on A, so that we have to consider A to be the key center of the song. When we do so, we have G as bVII and D as IV. This is called the "mixolydian mode", which is really just the notes of the D major scale beginning on the fifth, A.

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Weekly Basslines #156 - Through Before We Started (Soulsister)

Soulsister??

You might not know the band, but it's really likely that you've heard their biggest hit "The Way To Your Heart" before. 1988 this Song with it's vintage Motown sound was a major international success for the band from Belgium hittin' the charts even in the US.

I neither had heard of them before, when I first saw them live in the early 90ies.
The were opening up for ???? (I just can't remember).But they blew me away and the next day I went straight to the record store and bought the two albums  "Heat" and "Simple Rule". "Through Before We Started" was the first song on "Heat".

I would've almost forgotten about the band, if not one of my students recently requested a transcription to a nice "bass and voice"-version of the tune performed by them live in 2011:

Here's their biggest hit "The Way To Your heart":

Weekly Basslines #155 - Witchy Woman (The Eagles)

Wow, it's really been a long time since I posted a new bassline to the "Weekly Basslines" column, really absurd, couldn't even name it "monthly basslines". But sometimes the priorities change for a while, so I started playing more live again and found a band with nearly "weekly gigs" :-)
Also I had to reorganize my music-school business, which really kept me busy for a longer time than I thought.
But now I'm confident to pick up the habit of posting "weekly basslines" again and the new bassline day is going to be tuesday. So check my blog every tuesday to find new basslines.

But now let's get started:

I have a new student, who's a passionate Eagles fan, playing guitar and singing in an Eagles tribute band.  Now he wants to learn the basslines to the songs. So I'm recently transcribing lots of Eagles basslines and here's the first one. "Witchy Woman" from the 1972 debut album:

Songfacts:

written by Don Henley and Bernie Leadon
key: g minor

 tempo: 100bpm

released as second single from the debut album, august 1 1972 and reached #9 in the billboard charts

lead vocals by Don Henley