I’ll Resolve to a Clear Tonic When I’m Dead

When viewed in comparison to the polish of his later work, “I’ll Be Mellow When I’m Dead” looks like one of Weird Al’s misfires - a youthful indiscretion if you will. Even Nathan Rabin describes the song as “feel[ing] off.” Weird Al wrote the song when he was 23 at the oldest, so it’s understandable if he hadn’t found his authentic voice as a musician just yet. But what isn’t off about the song is how much it represents angst and rebellion commonly heard in Rock ‘N Roll. So, it is no surprise that Rabin has since found a new appreciation for the song.

The song is both lyrically and musically aggressive. The lyrical content is obviously channelling youthful rejection of all the new-agey trends of early 1980’s California. References to jacuzzis, cosmic cowboys, and Joni Mitchell pepper the lyrics as Weird Al goes through all the stuff your parents probably talked about in their shag-carpeted, wood-paneled basements while sipping whiskey highballs and trying to reclaim their youths. Add stingers like “‘Cause I’ll have lots of time to be laid back when I’m six feet underground” and you have a youth slogan akin to The Who’s “I hope I die before I get old.” This aggressiveness and angst, of which the rock zeitgeist is comprised, is present in both the rhythmic drives and harmonic progression of the song, showing that, even early in his music writing, Yankovic could legitimately channel a wide range of emotions through his music, including rock-inspired angst.

Musically, the song begins with this short asymmetric rhythmic pattern meant to give the listener a general feeling of unease:

The groupings of three gives a sense of initial intensity to the listener, similar to how the Dropkick Murphy’s use repeated triplets to drive a song’s forward momentum. When the drums begin playing the more typical, common time, rock-style after this pattern repeats twice, we’re off to the races. After the accordion repeats the pattern one more time and the musicians ease back into a straight-forward rock song, the surprisingly acerbic and raspy vocals begin. The pattern returns after the more laid-back bridge to bring us immediately back to the main theme of the song.

This use of rhythmic legerdemain exemplifies Weird Al’s ability to utilize common rock tropes in a masterful way to convey the angst of a young person among an older person’s world. The heavy accordion pattern returns during the transition from the light, ukulele-backed bridge to the third verse, which takes a deft ear and understanding of rock music to jar the listener without being too jarring. The shift in tone is meant to be humorous because what could be more mellow than some barbershop luau music? By reusing the opening riff, Weird Al contrasts he two sections while still giving the listener something familiar to grasp.

Harmonically, “I’ll Be Mellow When I’m Dead” is ambiguous. It dances back and forth between D major and d minor (parallel minors) while taking an occasional jaunt into D Blues. Rock music, being a child of The Blues, often has flattened 3rds and 7ths, so the F and C naturals are not much of a harmonic jolt. But strangely, any D chord in the song is Major, with chords like Bb and F major obscuring the tonic. Even the relative major to d minor (F major) is obscured by treating the F major chords as a non-traditional dominants instead of alternate tonicizations, like during the lyric mentioning Joni Mitchell 8-tracks. Most notably, harmonic angst happens on b minor and Bb major chords, which both share the tonic note of D, but operate harmonically differently in D major and d minor.

The first example below illustrates how the Bb maj chord is used as a kind of bVI dominant for D maj, despite the root only naturally occurring in the key of d minor. This pattern can be heard under the lyrics “I’d rather kick and jump and bite and scratch and scream until I’m blue!” The second shows the use of b minor during the eponymous line repeated during the chorus. For clarity purposes, ignore the half note rhythms and just follow the notes.

Unlike the progression featuring the Bb major chord, which spelled in Roman Numerals would be IV - bVI - I (an odd cadence using a major six chord instead of V), b minor is used in a more traditional way. Beginning on and returning to the dominant A chord, the progression goes V - vi - V - IV - V - I, which cements the listener to the tonic of D major and makes a lot of musical sense given that this progression happens at the very end of the song.

All the rhythmic angst and harmonic ambiguity happen early in the song, suggesting that whatever antipathy Weird Al feels toward being mellow resolves with the harmony as he repeats the mantra at the very end of the song. Fortunately/unfortunately, the comfort of a clear tonic occurs when the song’s finally “laid out on the slab.”