Composition
The song includes piano, police sirens, and Rivers Cuomo singing in falsetto, and it contains 11 segued verses in total. In an interview with Rolling Stone Cuomo, when questioned about how practising Vipassanā affects his music, says that the song is a lot different from any song he has previously written: "It's the most ambitious song I've ever attempted. It took me a few weeks of writing. And lyrically, it's a huge departure for me. I have a long history of writing songs from a victim type of place, and in this, I'm bragging."
In order, the themes are:
- Rap 0:35
- Slipknot 1:00
- Jeff Buckley 1:26
- Choral 1:51
- Aerosmith 2:17
- Nirvana 2:43
- Andrews Sisters 3:08
- Green Day 3:33
- Spoken word (heavily inspired by Elvis' "Are You Lonesome Tonight?") 4:06
- Bach 4:37, Beethoven 4:57
- Weezer 5:13
Read more about this topic: The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations On A Shaker Hymn)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)