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:
“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)
“When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither increases nor diminishes. But as it is certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea which we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)