Commentary by poojalooba_cow on the album Emissions Test __________ On the Album in General __________ First off, I'd like to apologize for turning what was supposed to be a simple commentary on my songs into an enormous, rambling, story about everything. For me, though, writing words is like writing music: I just have to let all my thoughts and ideas drain, otherwise I feel as if I'm going to explode for not sharing all the things I wanted to. Accordingly, this has turned out to be a very very very very long commentary. Settle back with a blanket and something to eat, because it's going to be a while before you're done. Some of the stuff I discuss in great detail will be random things that only people who really care (like me) will actually be interested in reading, and some of it is interesting enough for everyone. I'll try not to lecture or monologue, but I guarantee there will be a certain amount of me geeking out about different kinds of things. If you don't like it or find it boring, don't read it. It's as simple as that. The inspiration for creating an album and composing music came when I was listening to some of my favorite songs (Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, I think it was) one day in December 2007. As if in a sudden blinding insight, I realized how big of a role music played in my life; whether it was playing it in band, jazz band, or on my own piano or guitar; or listening to music and discovering new favorites while learning things and hearing new things on old favorites; or even trying my hand at creating my own musical compositions. I suddenly had a very intense want to be good at music and to live with music as one of the main focuses in my life. I don't care if I get signed to a record label, become a famous guitarist (or pianist) in a band, or continue making solo albums with a Horrible Quality Recorder (from here on, that's what my computer microphone will be referred to as) sitting in front of me at my desk forever. I don't even care if nobody likes any of the songs I compose. I just want to be almost completely and totally immersed in music. Technology and computers and electronics are still my passion and my planned career, but if that doesn't work out I most definitely want to turn to music, and even if it does I will still continue with my musical journey. The majority of the content on this album was composed in front of my piano and guitars in my room, while consuming large amounts of root beer and cream soda (poojalooba_cow endorses Jones Brand Pure Cane Soda!). Sometimes I would be doing other things and riffs or lyrics would hit me, but most of the time I had to force myself to be creative. I really wanted to compose music, but most days I just didn't feel creative enough to do anything. I had to sit down in front of the piano and think away from chords and into the realms of melody, or force myself to sling my guitar around my neck and come up with one new riff or chord progression. Lots of the time it was very tough - song ideas come flooding into my head all the time, but when I start writing the song, it's another story entirely. Over the years I've collected a mix of musical instruments and musical abilities and musical influences. In my room right now I have a digital keyboard, a trumpet, a trombone, two harmonicas, an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar, an ukulele, and lots of quirky percussion-style things like coconut halves and a hollow wooden frog. I'm good at the piano and the trombone, decent at the guitar and the trumpet, and a novice at the harmonica and ukulele. Unfortunately, I don't play any reed instruments like the saxophone, but that's what my keyboard is for! My musical influences include alternative geek rock bands like Weezer, funk rock like Red Hot Chili Peppers, folk rock like Flogging Molly, acoustic rock like Coldplay, classic rock like Journey and The Cars, piano solo music like Jon Schmidt, subgroups of jazz like swing and blues, and of course, classical music from the masters like Mozart and Bach and Debussy and Beethoven. Thus, I have a wide range of different styles of music to draw from and quite a few different ways I can incorporate different genres and ideas together. This album is my first attempt at letting musical ideas drain from my head onto paper, and I hope that I've been able to create an interesting, unique sound that people might possibly like. I've never had any formal lessons on how to compose music, but I've had practice over the years and I have over one thousand five hundred songs in my media library to draw inspiration from, and I had an hour-long session with one of my music idols, Jon Schmidt (a local solo pianist. He's AWESOME) on composing music and how to get more out of music. I think I did okay on this album, and I tried really hard not to be too repetitive or predictable and I tried not to stick to one genre, because there are so many different and great kinds of music out there. I realize the Horrible Quality Recorder puts a small dent into the range and possibilities available in my recordings, plus not having a drum set and not having professional mixing equipment is a problem for experimenting too heavily into certain genres. Also, me being by myself playing every single track and part by itself sometimes causes problems in tempo or balance and blend. I have a metronome running through headphones while I'm recording, and I usually sample volumes and dynamics before the final track recording, but there are still slip-ups and problems occasionally. Still, hopefully I have been able to create something that at least a few people will think it is worth listening to. I'll listen to it, at least, and that's the main reason why I created this album - for my own listening enjoyment. This album was originally called "Horrible Quality Recordings And Other Garbage" (that's where calling my microphone the "Horrible Quality Recorder" comes from), but over time I realized that it didn't quite sound good and it was kind of lame. Plus, there's no "Other Garbage" on the album, it's just all Horrible Quality Recordings. So, I switched the two albums I had around. "Emissions Test" was an album full of random recordings (not even good enough to get on the main album, and that's saying a lot) and songs that I had remixed/filtered by other artists (Red Hot Chili Peppers' Snow ((Hey Oh)) kicked up an octave? Pure hilarity). I liked the name "Emissions Test" a lot better, so "Horrible Quality Recordings And Other Garbage" became the album where I put my junk recordings, and vice-versa. The name Emissions Test comes from the idea that I'm going to try to get away with as much crap on this album as possible without causing people to mob me and light my house on fire because of its horrible musical quality. I realize I shouldn't be putting my own musical compositions down like this, but it's so easy to, because I know how much effort went into them, and I know how much they're all alike, and I know how cheesy the lyrics are, et cetera. I can hear every single thing that went wrong in the recordings, and I tend to dwell on the negative when it comes to my own work. I'll try to keep the self-depreciation out of at least the rest of this commentary. Equipment __________ I used a variety of different things in my recordings, but these are the main elements of my music: -Alvarez RD20S Acoustic Guitar -Elixir medium polyweb strings -A mix of Johnson, Dunlop, and Clayton guitar picks of varying thickness (I like the .88mm Dunlop Tortex "wings"-style picks) -Ibanez JTK3-ROM Electric Guitar -GHS Boomers, light (.010 - .046) -Crate VTX15 Guitar Amp -Homemade "Fuzz Face" effects board -Homemade "Ghetto" talkbox -Optimus MD-1150 MIDI Keyboard -Vincent Bach Stradivarius Model 37 Trumpet -Conn Trigger Trombone -Yamaha Upright Piano -Imperial Reed Harmonica -Mahalo U-30RD ukulele -Two halves of a coconut shell -Taiwanese hollow wooden shell of a frog -Shaker with rice/beans -Hohner drum/tamborine combo Plus, the equipment that was equally important, but had no part in the actual music performance: -Audacity, the open-source music mixing program (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) -Finale NotePad 2007 (the music software that I stored digital copies of my riffs on so that I could call them up if I forgot them [http://finalemusic.com]) -Dell Dimension E310 (the computer I used to mix and record my music on, as well as being used for the Photoshop jobs and the writing of commentary) -Philips SHE2650 earbuds -KORG Guitar/Bass Tuner GA-30 (I used it to tune many instruments other than just my guitars) -Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone -The Horrible Quality Recorder (consisting of an old telephone microphone in a computer microphone shell, connected to the computer with a spliced headphone jack [the original jack had a short]) -Later versions of the Horrible Quality Recorder featured a higher-quality small condenser microphone from RadioShack and a gold-plated soldered 1/8" jack, but recordings made on the early Horrible Quality Recorder still exist on the album) 1. RPG __________ RPG is so named because as I was playing around with its chord progression, it struck me that it sounded just like something that you would hear in one of those early-90's RPG's like Final Fantasy III. It has a nice, peaceful, flowing sound to it and I think it wouldn't feel out of place when you're in some peaceful field in a video game. It's simple in structure, but has elements of different styles in it. It's a piano-driven ballad-type song, but the melody in the piano and the trumpet does some experimentation and deviation like it would in slow swing or soft jazz. The inspiration for the song came from me experimenting with all the pre-built rhythms available on my keyboard. One was called Rock Waltz and had nice piano-built chords and a nice solid 3/4 feel. I played random chords for a while, but eventually the chord progression for RPG came out and I immediately thought "That sounds like it would fit perfectly in an early Final Fantasy game". This is the first piece I recorded for the Emissions Test album, but I had recorded a few other songs on the Horrible Quality Recorder before, including covers of Jon Schmidt's "Bumblebee Tuna" song and Richard Berry's "Louie, Louie." I had also recorded a very early version of (Not Un) Titled before then, with very quiet chord parts and no melody. So, technically, this is really the first song I ever wrote. This was my first serious endeavor with my guitar. I had worked out the chords on the piano and when I transposed them to guitar, they turned out fairly easy to play. I wasn't very fast with the chord changes and some of my fingers were a little behind the others in changing chords, but the chords for this song were easy enough and the tempo was slow enough that I wasn't too pressured. There are still mistakes, however. If you listen closely to the single-note guitar improvisation in the background, I occasionally buzz or the note is deadened because my fingers weren't there on time. In the intro where only the guitar is playing there's one buzz and one deadened note, but they're not too noticeable and it sounds okay anyway. I had the chord changes down pretty well when I recorded the rhythm guitar (It took me about ten times over multiple days to get the improv guitar to where I liked it, and it took me only a few tries [three, I think] to get the rhythm guitar). Most of the tracks on this song were recorded with the Horrible Quality Recorder as close to the sound output as possible (I wish I had a MIDI interface cable so that I could dump the pure music signal from the keyboard straight into the mix instead of having to record it), be it sound hole of the guitar or speaker on the keyboard. However, brass instruments cause a crazy amount of staticy feedback when played straight into low-range condenser microphones, so I experimented with many different positionings of the trumpet and the Horrible Quality Recorder. I tried putting a straight mute in the trumpet and turning away, I tried it from across the room, I tried playing as quietly as possible, I tried playing facing towards the ground, et cetera. I finally ended up liking the sound produced when I covered the Horrible Quality Recorder with a fleece blanket and played the trumpet about five feet away facing toward the Horrible Quality Recorder. It's not a great quality sound, but it fits right along with the title of the album, and it sounded a whole lot better than anything else I tried. I play too loud at some points and not nearly loud enough in others, but I like to think that those dynamic changes were all planned. Truth is, I was too lazy to re-record it, and my lips couldn't handle any more trumpet for the day (I had a really awesome octave-jumping part planned out but I had to get rid of it because my lips couldn't take it when it came time to record. I also didn't have enough verse repeats to put in the even cooler alternate melody, so I put the alternate in and got rid of the octave-jumping that didn't sound quite right anyway). 2. The Cliché Song __________ This is the first time people will be really hearing my voice on this album, and I'm apprehensive and self-conscious about that, of course. I'm not a singer - I'd much rather sit behind my instruments and let them do the talking - but singing can add amazing elements to songs, and they can intensify emotions or themes in the song, so I figured I'd have to sing on at least a few of my songs. I've never had any singing lessons or anything, but I know how to sing and I can sing parts and I'm quite good at singing harmony along with my favorite songs, and I don't think I did too horribly with the singing on this album. I'm a bass, obviously, and my range is from low E to about the E above Middle C (I can hit a little higher than that, but only for a very short period of time). I'm okay with my two-octave range, and I do go falsetto a few times in this album, notably on "The Newspaper" and "Rocking Really Hard". With the singing of lyrics comes the extra challenge of writing the lyrics. Hooray. Poetry and singing, two of the things that I'm most self-conscious about, rolled into one little package of stress and anxiety. Of course, I tried hard to write clever lyrics and tell a story without sticking to stupid rhymes, but sometimes they just don't come and you get stuck. It's not like chords where you have maybe ten or twenty different things to try that might sound good, because there are millions of words in the English language and millions of ways to string them together. I hope my lyrics aren't too pathetic or too plain (I can't go into the deep metaphorical lyric styles, because I can barely string together the simple rhyming stories), and I hope people don't wince at my singing voice. Unfortunately, this is once more something that is left up to the masses to decide, so I will stop worrying/complaining about it for now. I really tried hard to make the melodies and choruses and lyrics in this song catchy, because I quite like it and I want other people to like it as well. I originally had called it "The Cliché Song", but when I started into the lyrics I realized that most of the "clichés" were actually idioms and I changed it. I struggled between "The Idiom Song" and "The Cliché Song" for quite some time, but eventually I realized that I liked the sound of "The Cliché Song" much better. Most of our favorite clichés are idioms, so either one would have probably worked, though. I considered making the music itself a cliché, such as a I - IV - V- IV progression like Richard Berry's Louie Louie or Weezer's Beverly Hills or so many other songs that use it, but in the end I decided that original, catchy music with lyrics mocking a lifestyle overrun with weird idioms and clichés is what I was looking for more than an easy song to compose. 3. Shadow Of The Mountain __________ 4. No Lyrics __________ A misnomer born from an absolute inability to find a name for this song, No Lyrics actually does have lyrics, but only in the last part of the song, and they explain the idea of expecting things in a song just from its title. The song now called (Not Un) Titled was my original plan for this song, but I came up with chords for a song, and decided they would fit under this song's name perfectly. So, not being very far along on the original No Lyrics, I traded them around. This is the first song that I ever composed and proceeded to record. I had composed a grand total of two songs before this: One arpeggio-based song called "Andante" (fitting its tempo) as an assignment for piano lessons, and one song that consisted of rapidly banging on the low F, E, D# and D keys repeatedly (I had watched a spider crawl into the piano in between D# and E, and I had to do something...). Other than those, this was my first true attempt at composing a song. The album version is very different from the first version I recorded on June 6, 2007 (the only reason I know that is because the original Audacity file remembered when it was created). The first version was essentially a blatant rip-off of what I could play by ear of the cool part in Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird, but I changed the chords and the structure around a bit, even though the same kind of rhythm is detectable at points throughout the song. The original inspiration for writing this song came from watching my buddy DBurn12 play Free Bird on the piano. I decided to try playing it, too, but it evolved into this instead and it's what got me started composing my own original music rather than just learning other peoples' music. I guess another inspiration for this song was the simple, piano-driven songs by The White Stripes, like "My Doorbell" and "The Denial Twist". I wanted to write some sweet piano stuff like that, and this came out a lot faster and a lot less concise than their stuff, but I still like it. I like the bad-quality piano intro. I used my wireless microphone on my upright piano upstairs, and since it's just an old modified cordless telephone, it cuts off the top and bottom of the waves in the audio signal so that it can send enough information quickly. The sound quality is a little bit lacking because of that, but it doesn't sound too bad, and the static actually lends a better feel to the beginning of the song. 5. New Toy __________ I wrote this song after buying an electric guitar on July 1st, 2008. Even though there are no lyrics in this song, it's supposed to be upbeat and happy while being totally awesome - like the feeling you get when you get something new to play with or do; whether it be in the childish years when you get a new Lego set; or in the teen years when you get new music or a new iPod or an electric guitar; or maybe even when you're an adult and you get a new car or (maybe, I haven't experienced this yet, obviously) when there's a new addition to your family. Wow, that was kind of deep. I didn't mean to wax philosophical or nostalgic or anything, but I was trying to be serious and reflective about the true meaning of this song. It's so hard when there aren't lyrics, but it's even harder (for me) to write lyrics, and it's scary (for lack of a better word) to have people listen to your voice, so that's why you don't hear my voice very much on this album. People listening to my skills on instruments or my chords is just fine, but singing for people is VERY tough for me. I'm also self-conscious about an inability to tell good stories while trying to make words rhyme and stuff. I realize that songs don't have to rhyme, but I like them to, because if they don't they sound dumb when you're writing them. I also realize that I've rambled on for way too long, so I'm now going to move on now. Currently, the version of this song does not fit the description I have listed above, and I am not happy and have no idea why I finished the song "New Toy" as is. I am currently in the process of re-writing this song, but until then, I will leave the "crappy" version of the song up. 6. The Newspaper __________ I absolutely love this song. It's possibly my favorite song on the album, even though it follows a simple I - IV - I - V progression in the key of C. I do experiment and shift the chord progression around a bit through accompaniment tracks and voicings, though. I'm sure there are some seventh chords and some minor overtones floating around in the mix somewhere. After hearing Weezer's version of the barbershop classic "My Evaline" I decided it'd be fun to do a barbershop quartet. I'm not sure that this quite qualifies as barbershop, but it's a four-part harmony at least. I think the parts divide into Soprano, Baritone 1(lead melody), Baritone 2, and Bass. The lyrics for this song were the easiest lyrics-writing job I ever had. I sat down one night at about 11:30 and decided "I'm going to write a song about the newspaper" and the lyrics just sort of flowed right out of me onto the page. In a little over an hour I had perfect, meaningful, funny, silly lyrics that worked so well I couldn't wait to record them the next day. Jman--8 and I decided on a whim that it'd be fun to make a music video for this song, so over the course of three days we filmed all the shots, and then Jman--8 spent an entire month working diligently at the editing, and I am very pleased with the outcome. You can watch the music video on YouTube (search for "The Newspaper Music Video") or you can watch it embedded directly into the song page on my website. 7. (Not Un) Titled __________ This is the song that was originally called No Lyrics, before I decided I liked some other music under that title better. I suppose that gives an insight into the way I write music, which is maybe not the best way to approach thigs. I had my tracklists down long before I had written all of the music for this album. I had the names of everything I wanted to be on the album. I had a few riffs and chords. I would write music and decide "Oh, that would fit well under this name" and assign that song title to the music I had written. I also tried writing lyrics to the song titles (I had ideas on what I wanted the songs to be about, also), and once I had lyrics, melody lines popped into my head pretty easily, but it was really hard to write lyrics in the first place. The title of this song comes from fighting clichés (I'm obviously pretty focused on that, although I'm not entirely sure I achieved that with all the music on the album). You can find billions of songs out there that are called "Untitled" but how many can you find that are called "Titled"? I'm not the best at giving names to songs (especially instrumental songs), but I didn't want to go cliché and just call it "Untitled" so I called it "Titled". I added the parenthesized "(Not Un)" to help get rid of some of the confusion around the song being called just "Titled". I really like the intro to this song. Even though it's just going up arpeggio-style to some chords, I really like how each measure has its own rhythm and how they seem to cleverly work off of and complement the rhythm of the measure before them. It took me FOREVER to get the first guitar chorus part to a point where I liked it. I sat in front of my microphone for three hours just recording over and over and over until I finally got it (almost) right. It's a kind of tricky chord progression, and it requires a bar across the first three strings with the index finger, plus there's a slide from E to F# twice, and I had to slide with my ring finger in order to fit my index finger over the bar for F#m in time. I also had to make sure I was pushing hard enough, because slides are hard on an acoustic guitar and it's easy to make them sound bad or not sound at all. The tempo is fast and I wasn't very experienced with the guitar at this point, but I finally got it down to where I liked it and to where the piano could cover up for most of my small mistakes, but I couldn't feel the fingers on my left hand for quite a while. I guess it was good practice for me, and I had this odd feeling of total awesomeness when I would watch my left hand fingers move around the strings, but I hope I never have to spend that much time recording and re-recording a single part again. I never used the recording that took me so long to perfect, as by the time I got around to writing the rest of this song, I had become quite a good guitar player and could play the chord progression easily. 8. Copyright Infringement __________ 9. Stupid Rhymes __________ This song is about my disdain for pop stars of our day and the idea that just because they can pretend to hold a guitar and can write crummy lyrics and kind of sing means they can be famous. I'm not going to name any names for fear of being labeled as libel, but certain television-network-backed young pop stars really do not deserve any amount of the attention they receive. This song is "making fun of" songs with dumb rhymes that don't tell a story and are a waste of time to listen to. I really tried hard to make the rhymes sound stupid but to have clever hidden meanings, but it's kinda tough, so I stuck with the bat/cat/rat/fat/splat/mat/hat/etc. thing a lot. I really really like the music for this song. It's not quite Hawaiian slack-key style and it's not quite Caribbean reggae, but it's definitely got that warm-blue-ocean-and-bright-yellow-sun-and-beautiful-white-beaches feel to it. At first I came up with the progression for the verse and then had a cliché I - IV - I - V progression for the chorus (I use this on progression on The Newspaper as well, but the focus there is not the music, but the lyrics). I didn't really like it, and it didn't click. On a whim, I muted the chorus and messed around with other chords instead, and I found a much cooler one with add4 and maj7 stylings and it instantly clicked and I loved the song. The tips-of-the-fingers ukulele strumming and the finger-picked ukulele solos and the simple percussion really adds to the texture of the song and for a while I considered leaving it as an instrumental song because I liked it so much. 10. The Underground Monkey Railroad __________ I promised my friend Bobaloo that I'd write a song with this title. It's a weird, kind of lame title, but I like the song, so it's on the album. This song came from one of the first times I tried the come-up-with-a-sweet-riff style of writing. Everything before this song was written based on chords with other stuff on top of them, but this is the first time I tried a riff and then filled in chords underneath it. I like how it's way dissonant and doesn't fit into any specific traditional form. 11. Photoshop® __________ This song is pretty obviously about the wonders of modern technology and how you can make anything to appear real. Part of the inspiration for the intro came from Weezer's song No Other One, which has a bunch of dissonant guitar noises and Rivers Cuomo (Weezer's frontman) doing a spine-tingling yell with some sweet drums in the background. I also kind of wanted to just record some out-of tune guitar sounds, with me twisting the tuning keys and picking the string at the same time. I've got really out-of-tune chords, really bad riffs, and some awful-sounding strings in the act of being de-tuned. I love it, especially when it bleeds right into good-sounding notes so perfectly. 12. Déjà Vu __________ I have not written this song yet. I have a few cool ideas, like five-on-three-on-two rhythm with each instrument playing in a different time signature that all mesh together, and I have a few lyrics lines, but that is all. 13. Trapped In An Epiphany __________ 14. The Microphone Was Upside Down __________ I dare you to reverse the audio file and figure out what I'm really saying. It's a backwards song about backmasking in songs, mentioning a few of the most infamous. The last lyric line is "Or were they worshipping There's?" because when you turn "There's" around backwards it sounds like "Satan", so either the last line of the song is forward with the last word backword, or the first word of the song is forward and the entire rest of the song is backward. This song has no real musical merit, being in the key of C and following simple pop chords, but it has some funny lyrics and I like the idea of turning an entire song around backwards. 15. We're Rocking Really Hard __________ 16. The Only Love Song On The Album __________ Ironically enough, I started writing this song on Weezer Day (Weezer formed on Valentine's Day in 1992). It was early in the morning (about 6:00 AM), and while I was showering, verses and verses of this song kept popping up in my head. I thought "Oh, yeah. That sounds good. I could use that..." even though I wasn't fully awake. By the time my shower was done, I had three decent verses for this song (they went through revisions later, but most of the base was kept), and I finally realized that it was Valentine's Day and the irony of what I had just done. I really like the "wandering" chord feel of this song. None of the verses have any kind of set-in-stone chord structure, and I like that. The chorus and the bridge both have set chord progressions, but in the verses, I played whatever fit the note in my head, and I played along with the lyrics (for example: On the line "I fear that I'll say something wrong" I switch to Am and Em, to musically demonstrate negativity and feeling bad about one's self. I really like that concept of play). Weezer's "Butterfly" or "Across the Sea" is what I would compare this to. I guess the Weezer theme of being in love, but being too geeky and insecure to do anything about it also had some impact on me when I was writing this. This song isn't too much of a self-portrait or a story of my love live, it's just the obligatory love song on the album (come on, all great albums have at least one song about love on them, and lots of the time more than just one, and most of the time all the songs are love songs). I figured it would be kinda cool to do a song like unto Weezer's insecure geek rock, and I think I did pretty well with this song overall. I guess the person I'm describing in the song fits fairly well with my own description of myself, but I try not to think about that too much. One thing I like a lot about this song is the bridge, with the short staccato guitar chords interspersed with heavy deadening. If you listen closely to the deadened notes and not the ringing chords, quite a cool little pattern appears. Try it. Ignore the notes and listen to the percussive strum pattern instead. The second time through the pattern, I lay off the deadening and let the chords resonate a little more, just to shake things up a bit, but the same strum pattern is still there. The guitar solo in this is the first time I actually "soloed" on the guitar - played notes outside of conventional chord shapes. The first part of the solo is the same as the vocal line, but I started experimenting with other notes and rhythms, and after about fifty takes (seriously. It took forever), the solo evolved into what it is on the final recording. When I was first playing around with going outside of chord shapes, for some reason, I felt amazingly good. It was so awesome to be playing seemingly random notes and to have them sound right. I got some wrong, and I had many false starts and messed up rhythms, but I eventually got it right, and I like it lots. I never sat down and orchestrated this solo, I just recorded it every time and played with what came out. Maybe I should try that method of composing some more. The solo was meant to be a harder-sounding solo, one that would fit with the heavy section right before it, but somehow it got turned into a peaceful, flowing solo, and it sounded so much better than what I had envisioned for the solo. I guess once I got into this song, I thought it needed to be a rockin' song, but it just needs to be a melodic song with cool parts, and I think the flowing solo brings it perfectly back down from its rock feel into a more thoughtful and quiet attitude, just in time for the last two verses and the last two choruses. All told, I must say that I think this song is wonderful, both in its sincerity, its meaning, its music, and the way the parts flow and mesh together. I hope other people feel the same way about it, but I honestly don't care if people disagree with me, because I love this song and am not changing my opinions (or the song itself) based on anything anyone else says.