I’ve been meaning to get around to a great song, ‘One More Robot’, from a favorite album of mine, ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’, by Flaming Lips. It’s the unexpectedly moving story of a robot in the future who begins to have feelings. Not your typical stuff.
It’s a beautiful song (as are many on the album) but the production adds so much subtext that it’s easy to miss how interesting the song itself is. For example, the way the melody is harmonized has a lot more going on than you notice at first. As usual, I encourage you to play and sing it.
Also unusual for a song that’s in some sort of rock vein (Flaming Lips are always very difficult to categorize), it’s almost as modal as it is chordal. Until it modulates, both the melody and the bass both stay in one mode – E Lydian (E, F#, G#, A#, B, C#, D#, E). But it hits the mode from so many different starting points, between the melody and the bass line, that you could name it differently (Ab harmonic minor, Bmajor…). And even after it modulates the melody stays in this mode for a while.
And that weirdly funky bass line! It makes it difficult to name the chords because it rarely stops moving, almost seeming to work against the chords at times. To get the chords of a song, I usually start by listening to the bass notes. Here that didn’t help much! Again, for a song in this vein, it’s extremely uncommon to have the bass line hop around in such an agitated, almost unhinged – but effective – way.
The lyric for the 1st Verse and Pre-Chorus:
Unit three thousand twenty one is warming
Makes a humming sound
When its circuits duplicate emotions
And a sense of coldness detaches
As it tries to comfort your sadness
In One More Robot words and music bear equal weight in carrying the song’s story. The parts that in the words are touched on lightly are fleshed out in the arrangement.
In the Verse, while the vocal and melody cavort modally, as describe above, there’s a relatively simple chord pattern. The Pre-Chorus introduces a chromatic note, out of the mode, in the melody – a G, which necessitates the Eb7 underneath. (By then the song needed a break from just the single mode.)
Here are the 1st Verse and Pre-Chorus chords:
||4/4 Abminor Abminor7 | Dbminor/E Dbsus/E | Abminor Abminor7 | Dbminor/E Dbsus/E |
| Abminor Abminor7 | Dbminor/E Dbsus/E | Abminor Abminor7 | Dbminor/E Dbsus/E ||
||4/4 Dbminor/Ab Eb7 |2/4 Abminor7 |4/4 Dbminor |
| Dbminor/Ab Eb7 | 2/4 Abminor7 |4/4 Dbminor | Dbminor ||
The Chorus lyric (not as eloquent as the previous sections but it sings great and, along with the music, gets the job done):
One more robot learns to be
Something more than a machine
When it tries the way it does
Make it seem like it can love
Cause it’s hard to say what’s real
When you know the way you feel
Is it wrong to think it’s love
When it tries the way it does
The Chorus chords move to another key while, interestingly, its first half still only uses notes (four of them) from that same Verse/Pre-Chorus mode. So although the chords modulate, the melody really doesn’t! The chords rise up in whole steps, using that Lydian raised 4th in another way.
Then in the second half of the Chorus the melody stays basically the same – except that now it’s up a whole step, and against a very different chord progression (starting with the Bbminor).
||4/4 Amajor7 | B | C# | B/D# | E | F# | Absus4 | Absus4 |
| Bbminor | Ab6 | Fminor | Bbminor | Ebminor | Ab6 | Bbminor | Bbminor ||
Like other Flaming Lips songs, One More Robot is touching in a strange way – sentimental, demented, a little schizzy, imaginative, emotional, gentle and disturbing at the same time. A lot going on.
(Songwriters: Dave Fridmann / Michael Ivins / Steven Drozd / Wayne Coyne)
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