Napoleon Sheds His Skin - Red Rider

Before I do my first song post, a word about what I'm actually trying to accomplish here. First, I am an amateur musician but I am not an expert on pop music or music history. For all of the bands I talk about here, there are people who know far more than I do. And there are usually fan web sites and Wikipedia pages for the bands (which is actually where I get a lot of my information). This blog is not really about being a fan of particular bands. It's about the songs.

For each of the songs I will talk about, there are particular musical reasons, often fine details or a combination of them, which are why I like the song a lot. What I'm interested in is defining what makes good pop and rock music, to my ears, and maybe to yours as well. Now, onto the song...

The reason why I chose a Red Rider song for my first song post is that Red Rider was the first band I saw live - with the Romantics (the headliners) and a one hit wonder metal-ish band called Orion the Hunter, around July 4, 1984 at Silver Stadium in Rochester, NY. Red Rider was a straightahead rock band from Canada. Their only hit (not counting hits by their later incarnation Tom Cochrane and Red Rider and later solo stuff by lead singer Tom Cochrane) on US radio was the fairly hard rock song Lunatic Fringe . Their signature sounds at the time were Cochrane's somewhat edgy vocal qualities, tight bass lines, and the use of a pedal steel guitar, with (apparently) distortion and other effects, for solos. This last element is rare outside of country music and the sound Red Rider achieved with the instrument was unique and extremely powerful. In the Youtube link above for Lunatic Fringe, you can see the pedal steel in action.

Napoleon Sheds His Skin, on their third album, Neruda , achieves the apex of the pedal steel sound, with a long solo at the end, which is absolutely amazing. (Unfortunately I can't find any samples of this song on the web and the Itunes store only has As Far as Siam , the previous Red Rider album), so you'll just have to buy the disc or borrow it from a friend with good taste in music! ;-)

The song itself (lyrics here ) is a rumination on Napoleon's exile on Elba Island, providing a grim and lonely atmosphere. The song is mid-downtempo and opens with its A part, a sad piano riff falling into pulsating strings which back the verse section. The chorus has a few more chord changes that follow the rhythm of the lyrics "Napolean sheds his skin in the summer when the sun is high. He never knew when to quit, when to stop, or when to say die." The song structure is a standard verse chorus formula with a bridge after the second chorus. The bridge introduces two new sections, one guitar driven, then leading to a quieter string driven progression with a high piano line flitting in and out, which sets the stage for the most powerful section of the lyrics. This is followed by the third chorus, which is doubled with a new stanza. Then there is some vocal vamping on the title line and we hear the pedal steel for the first time, first coming in on chords and then soloing out with the pulsating strings and simplified intro-like bass changes in the background. This solo takes the song to a tremendous crescendo of emotion. Every time you think that the instrument has peaked out in pitch, it goes higher, and never without power. After the steel solo digs back down into the chord progression, the song fades out on the solo, which is the best possible way it could end. I've always liked fadeouts in songs because it seems like the song still goes on forever, it just moved over the horizon.

So there you have it: Napoleon Sheds His Skin by Red Rider. One of my favorite songs of all time. I like it because of the atmosphere, the complex bridge, and the amazing use of pedal steel guitar. I actually don't remember whether Red Rider played this song when I saw them live (they were then supporting their next album Breaking Curfew ). They probably did. I would not discover their music in full until my college years, 1985-1989, during which I listened to all of the above albums (and some of the later Cochrane and Red Rider stuff) quite a bit. Definitely in my top 10 of bands that I listen to, as well as those that have inspired my own music. But that list is a subject for another post...