One of the many things that remains mystifying to me about music is just how much tasty riffs can either add to or detract from a song. This is I think of particular interest because when you read books about songwriting, even ones such as the doorstop Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, the focus is on the underlying theory explaining the basic chord changes and progression of the vocal melody through those changes. But from this perspective the riffs (think the opening guitar part in Paperback Writer or the notes around the opening chords of I Feel Fine) are completely superfluous.
One of the thing that I’ve just now started to appreciate is how much melodically inessential riffs can contribute to a song. If you just heard, for example the Violent Femmes Add It Up or Pink Floyd’s Time, you’d assume that each song would scan with just one acoustic and a vocalist. But without Brian Ritchie’s manic bass lines Add It Up falls apart (it’s just an A and B chord for the whole song with three equally simple alternating vocal melodies) and Time sounds like junk without all of David Gilmour’s little seemingly superfluous fills, which work as connective tissue. It’s strange because neither part contributes to the melody of the song, nor harmony as usually understood. But the actual notes they play are not arbitrary, so it’s not merely a matter of timbre.
I’m sure there are just as clear examples in the opposite direction, where too much instrumentation ruins a great song. Emily hates the little harp sounds in Lana Del Rey’s Video Games. . . Some of the non-Lennon Beatles hated the strings that Phil Spector added to some of the tracks on Let It Be, though if I remember right Lennon claimed that the songs so ruined were already crappy without the strings. I should listen to Let It Be. . . Naked to see who was right. I don’t know. Maybe Britney Spears “Oops I Did it Again”? Richard Thompson’s acoustic version maybe reveals it to be a great song? Maybe one of the great late era Johnny Cash covers? Maybe some of the covers from Nirvana’s acoustic set? Maybe Bryan Ferry covers of Dylan? It’s actually much harder to find an example in the opposite direction because, except for the Beatles example, the covers are not just removing frills but also changing the instrumentation.
There’s one more permutation, where the stripped down version actually reveals the vacuity of the original. When Lenny Kravitz played the same slide riff over and over again in lieu of a solo on the MTV Unplugged version of Are You Gonna Go My Way and the audience hooted louder each time, something profound about the lack of profundity in the original became more manifest.
I think sometimes there is an indeterminacy between what is revealed by a stripped down version. Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl (what is it with acoustic versions of songs that start with “Are You Gonna”?) is so incredibly bad, but I can’t decide whether this shows that the instrumentation on the original is necessary to its greatness or that the original was after all crap. I don’t know. I suspect the latter. Thinking about Jet in this regard has convinced me not to go looking for any acoustic versions of songs by the Fratellis.