Composition
"Oceans" was performed in open D tuning. The song is musically and texturally different from the rest of the album. Ament said, "When we were picking songs for Ten we thought it was important to pick the weirder moments, like "Oceans", because we wanted to be able to explore those areas down the line."
Gossard on the song:
I love "Oceans". That probably sums up why I get excited about song writing. It's like open D tuning where the first chord's just straight across and it's just two fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing and then it moves down one position and it moves back up. It has a tiny little change in it but it's also got three big movements. What I love about music is aesthetic chords; the simpler the better and then another set that does something to those original chords. It's a really simple arrangement.
Read more about this topic: Oceans (Pearl Jam Song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)