Composition
"Sometimes" is a romantic teen pop song that draws influences from bubblegum pop, with a length of four minutes and four seconds. The song is composed in the key of B♭ major and is set in time signature of common time with a moderately slow tempo of 96 beats per minute. After the bridge, it transposes to B major. Spears' vocal range spans almost two octaves from the low note F3 to the high note E5. The song has a sequence of Cm11–F7sus–B♭–B♭(9)/D–F/A–F as its chord progression. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic noted "Sometimes" has "a catchy hook and endearing melody, with a reminiscent euro-dance rhythm."
Lyrically, the song is a "heartbroken ballad", where Spears declares on the introduction, "You tell me you're in love with me / That you can't take your pretty eyes away from me / It's not that I don't wanna stay / But every time you come too close I move away". According to musicologist Melanie Lowe, "Spears shows a different side of her personality than she does in her other songs." Both of them also commented the song "lacks rhythmic drive and the backing track is fuller, with smoother and rounder synthsized instruments", while describing Spears' vocals as more natural when compared to "...Baby One More Time" and "(You Drive Me) Crazy".
Read more about this topic: Sometimes (Britney Spears Song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“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)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)