I Say a Little Prayer was written in 1966 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick and went to number four in the Billboard 100. The following year it was released by Aretha Franklin and also became a top ten hit. It is Aretha’s version that has somehow become the classic that everyone remembers.
In case you need a reminder, have another listen, taking note of the rather unusual time signatures.
The song was recorded by Aretha in F#m. It has what seems to be a normal 4/4 time signature, moving at a fair pace of 132 bpm. However, it doesn’t stick rigidly to the 4/4 and this – at least for me – is one of the main things that makes the song stand out.
The verse has just one quirky piece of timing:
... the moment I / wake up … / … before I put / on my / make-up (make-up) I / say a little prayer for / you –
The forward slashes represent bars / measures. They are all four beats in the bar except the one with the lyric ‘on my’, which only has two. I bet the first time you heard that you were surprised by the shift in timing, although now, through repetition, it seems natural.
The chorus is much more radical:
For- / -ever and ever you’ll / stay in my heart and I will love you, for- / -ever and ever we / never will part, oh how I love you, to- / -gether, together that’s / how it must be, to live without you would / only mean heartbreak for / me
The chorus starts with one bar of 4/4 and then one much longer bar of 7/4, which seems to go on and on. This format repeats three times before the ‘only mean heartbreak’ bar which contains two sets of triplets (this could also be notated as a 6/8 bar).
Burt Bacharach is not a run-of-the-mill composer. He writes beautiful melodies which sound simple but are harmonically anything but. And in this case he writes a song which, once you get used to it, seems completely normal rhythmically but, as we can see, is anything but.
These days, it’s a real fiddle to write songs like this one using a typical Digital Audio Workstation because you have to keep resetting the time signature and nobody writes loops for bars with 7/4 time. But it’s worth the effort if you want to write a classic that’s still relevant nearly 60 years later.
