James Taylor and HIS OWN James Taylor Speed/"Something In The Way She Moves" /meanemotion=grace, meanspeed=75.0 pulses per minute

These are speed graphs of the song "Something In The Way She Moves" by the singer-songwriter-performer James Taylor


Lyrical and Musical Expression of Song—well, the song has a frequency at exactly the speed of sexual peek/orgasm, and the first line is “There’s something in the way she moves…that seems to leave this troubled world behind.” Enough said about lyrical content. Well, in fact, there is a line in the song about how James’ love is so strong and overpowering that he loves to hear everything his lover is saying—then again, her words are so beautiful he doesn’t “much matter what they mean.” This is a performer in the throes of unconditional yet calm ecstasy over romantic love. Musically, it features lush vocals, slide guitar, mellow rock drums, multi-tracked vocal harmonies, and signature James Taylor “make it sound easy even though it is not” guitar work.
I always thought this song expressed grace in the ultimate expression of beatific, if indulgent, polished elegance. Second, I always thought James, whose work has helped me with this work to an immeasurable degree, got the short end of the stick when people generally thought that George Harrison written Beatles song “Something” was borrowed by James to write this. In fact, it was George Harrison who was so impressed by this song that he wrote a song based on it. Also, another song for me that reminds me of the Sting quote “happy songs make me miserable.” This is another of those songs where James Taylor sounds to me like he is in such a mellowed yet ecstatic state.
Although the first 20 seconds or so of the song come from the top speeds found within, about 78 bpms, the song, like the Beatles’ Let It Be follows a fairly pronounced linear trend in a decelerating manner, small section by small section. Deceleration percentage: about 6-8%--fairly steep, especially as it is axiomatic human physiology for people to accelerate at about 3-5% during the course of a song, Again, we see the familiar 73-78 bpm outside range, with no threat of the bitterness of the meanspeed despite the flirtations with the border and even playing a few measures inside of the Bittersweet category.


Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
song="Something In The Way She Moves"
composer=James Taylor
performer=James Taylor
mean speed/average velocity/median tempo=75.0 beats per minute.
mean-emotion according to the meanspeed music conjecture=grace
average beat=800 milliseconds.
mean slow phase=1.250 cycles per second.
corresponding pitch=320.000 Hertz, 51 cents above D#4/Eb4=311.127 Hertz, 49 cents below E4=329.628 Hertz.

Ian Schneider
3 October 2006
NYC