Overtime (KNOWER)
Date Written: September 3, 2022<a href = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnEmD17kYsE">YouTube (Live Sesh)</a> | <a href = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVJigvTWpWA">YouTube</a> | <a href = "https://open.spotify.com/track/2CVWc2gNM8YCTMdFXJI8Wg?si=7fff33678cc0401b">Spotify</a> | <a href = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uRW0pA1Ayc">Transcription</a>
There’s a little bit of a story to how I found this song. The summer I turned 21, two of my good friends (one of which was my roommate!) and I spent a good week or so taking it easy, watching movies, and sharing good music nearly every day. It was a really good way to take a break from all the stress from school and life and everything else around us. Now that I’ve written it down, it’s not much of a story, but it was still something really special to me.
We had just listened to and watched Clown Core’s visual album Van (it grows on you the way mold grows in damp corners of your shower). Apparently, the drummer/keybassist of Clown Core is a musical genius named Louis Cole, and we started listening to his more palatable music. Not long after, we got to this song.
KNOWER is a duo formed by Louis Cole himself and a singer named Genevieve Artadi, and every now and again they do live seshes with a bunch of other crazy talented musicians. The YouTube link above is the live sesh version of “Overtime”, which unfortunately isn’t on Spotify. I like the live version a bit more, I think.
“Overtime” is crawling with anxious energy, and I think what drives a lot of that energy forward is the synth, played by Rai Thistlethwayte. I think it’s the first thing that I noticed — right at the start, it plays a floaty chromatic progression with a funny, ambiguous rhythm that doesn’t quite fit with into what the drums or vocals are doing. This chromatic progression serves as a motif throughout the whole song, but I’m not gonna focus on that bit too much.
I tried paying more attention to the rhythm, and it’s not clear what it is right off the bat. The synth repeats itself every eight beats, and it plays a total of ten notes during that time. There’s a short rest between the eighth and ninth notes, and the other ten notes are held for the same amount of time. Many of the notes are played off the beat, though the very first note is played on the down beat.
After much deliberation, I think the synth plays dotted eighths and has an eighth-note rest between the eighth and ninth notes. My interpretation is that for the first six beats, it plays a 4/3 polyrhythm. You can’t keep that polyrhythm for the last two beats and still have the first note fall on the downbeat, so there’s a half-beat pause (two-thirds of a dotted eighth!) to “catch back up”.
1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . .
Drums: x . . x . . x . . x . . x . . x . . x . . x . .
Synth: x x x x x x x x x x
The resulting effect is that there’s a block of 10 evenly spaced chords from the synth competing with the vocals and the drums for the pace, as they’re essentially playing at different speeds. The synth then has to “catch up” again because it doesn’t want to “fall behind”, creating a jumpy, unpredictable, and anxious energy that backs up the song.
After the chorus, the synth continues this rhythmic motif, and very subtly the vocals now half follow the synth’s rhythm. Genevieve sings a swinging melody that sounds like its subdivided into triplets.
1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . .
Synth: x x x x x x x x x x
Voice: X x X x X X x X X X
If you want my heart, if you want my trust,
don't play with my heart, give me all your love.
While the chorus sounded like it was in 4/4, this verse sounds a lot more like 8/8, as the drums play every eighth note. The voice now subdivides the first measure into 3-3-2 and the second into 3-2-3 (if you group the last two notes together). Notice that the voice lags behind the synth by a 16th note during the second measure, but hangs onto the second-to-last note for an extra 16th note to line back up with the synth. What!
To reiterate, the rhythms of the synth and voice clashed heavily during the chorus, but they are much more closely aligned here (albeit not completely). I think that’s reflected in the feeling of the music. In my opinion, although it’s livelier, this part of the verse (or is it technically part of the chorus? chorus 2??) doesn’t have the same rhythmic tension that the introduction did. That said, it still uses (I think) the same chord progression, and the way the subdivisions alternate between 3-3-2 and 3-2-3 continue to imbue the song with a lot of nervous energy and unpredictability.
Okay, let’s talk chords. What’s unusual about the chords is that they’re incredibly tense and don’t seem to resolve anywhere. I can’t pick out precisely what chords they are, but I believe most of them are suspended, and the less ambiguous chords are instead used to transition between the suspended chords! I believe the first two measures use Esus2 D C#sus4, and the second two measures add an extra Bsus2 at the end. Again, the D chord is used to transition between the Esus2 and C#sus4: the shared F# between each chord keeps everything anchored.
In the second half of the chorus, however, the chord progression is much more decisive: G#sus4 G#5/D G# (I have no clue how to notate a tritone). Furthermore, this progression repeats every measure rather than every two measures, building up a bit of momentum. Together with the chords, I think the music and the lyrics display the type of confidence that’s propelled by nervous energy, the exact type of energy I get when I wonder if someone I’m talking to likes me back.
Rhythmically, the voice and synth both stay closer to the beat, and the time signature feels more like 4/4 again. I won’t transcribe the rhythms this time because the keyboard adds a lot of juicy embellishments and the voice varies with the lyrics quite a bit, so take my word for it. (:
There’s a lot more to say about this that I’m honestly not qualified to talk about. Sam Wilkes goes nuts on the bass, Sam Gendel plays with so much restraint on the sax but pops the hell off during his solo. Speaking of solos, everybody’s solos in the song carry so much raw energy with them, and I wouldn’t be able to do them justice. Additionally, I don’t think the song uses a typical scale; I’m pretty certain that they’re messing around with an exotic (yet super dope) mode that I’m nowhere near qualified to talk about.
All of the musical components of the song add up to produce this anxious, energetic, and even excited mood that’s mirrored by the lyrics. I think it captures the energy of your heart toyed with, knowingly or not. I know I’ve flipped between being depserately worried and nervously confident, just like how “Overtime” goes back and forth between the tense and jumpy chorus and the forward yet jittery verses.
Thanks for reading all that! This wraps up my thoughts on “Overtime”. Go listen to it if you’ve just been reading this in the silence (nerd!), and listen to it again otherwise.