Power's Out by Nicole Scherzinger ft. Sting

Title: Power's Out
Artist: Nicole Scherzinger ft. Sting
Album: Her Name is Nicole
Released: 2008
Genre: Ballad
Length: 4:09 (full version - will verify)
Lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nicolescherzinger/powersout.html



Note: I am having limited resources now, with only limited time. So I am guessing will turn out to be quite limited compared to my previous reviews.

I have only heard of this song around mid or late last year on Magic 89.9 Boys Night Out. This would always be played every night on BNO. The first time I heard this song, I immediately found it very touching. Without even looking for the lyrics of this song, I didn't have the hard time to understand the story of the song.

The lyrics can basically hold two meanings - the direct one and the metaphorical one. So let's deal with the direct one first.

A guy and a girl, in the process of offering their places to each other in the event of a power outage, whatever the cause is. To add a bit of a spice to the story, try to imagine, it's night time and it's raining hard outside. It's not really clear who among the two is offering the place to who at the instance of the song when it was written, or maybe it was intended to be written that way to show that the story is ultimately interchangeable.

Trying to go deeper to its meaning abit, I am guessing the two people involved in the song are somewhat "more than friends, but less than lovers." You know, the kind of best friends thing that they know they're special to each other but somehow they just couldn't say that they want to get hitched. This potentially momentous event for them could be actually one of the few chances they got to try to open their hearts up to each other, in a way that suggests that they can be submissive to the other.

Now let's go to the music. I am not sure how many people in the world who can recognize Nicole and Sting as world class modern singers would have thought they would do a duet, and they would sound really great together. But I sure didn't think it would happen. And here, they made a song together and they sound really great with Nicole's powerful but very sincere voice and Sting's "specially stinging" voice.

The rhythm and the melody, if you try to listen to them individually, are something that I would consider a bit opposites in the musical way. The rhythm is quite minimalistic, messing only with a few chords in the key of C (Am, Em, F, C, /Bb), with Bb the only note off the scale, and making the variation of Dm, C, G, while the melody is very dynamic, using eight notes and half notes in one series, and even more dynamic making use of series of staccato notes (not sure if this can also be used in vocals) then connecting to quarter notes in legato (in the line "The world is just a super sized merry go round..."). But listening to the rhythm and the melody as a whole is just a creative way of composing music.

Vocal ranges demonstrated for both singers in this song are quite high, with Sting peaking at A4 and Nicole at D5 using only their normal voices. The peak notes may not be as highlighting as other songs (e.g. Arnel Pineda's long portamento from B4 up to E5 using his normal voice in the ending of Separate Ways - not sure if Steve Perry was able to do this before, but I'm sure he was very well able to do it in his prime), but the highlight to this song is the mesh of Sting and Nicole's voice. And moreover, the message along with the rhythm of the song would not need such power delivered from high notes. Also, what Nicole did in the song, was pretty much what Sting did too. If my ears (and now with limited resources to verify) serves me right, they are both messing with more or less the same octave (fourth octave), with Nicole just needing to go a few semitones up for the duet parts.

Replicating the song wouldn't be much of a problem for the instrumentalists. I wouldn't go much further on that. The vocalists may have a bit of an obstacle here, but I am guessing this will still be not much of a problem. Mental note of the peak notes I have mentioned above: A4 for the male, D5 for the female. That is honestly relatively easy to do, even for singers with only two octave range. But remember that A4 is just a few semitones down from the highest note a tenor singer can normally sing without utilizing falsetto, while D5 is just a few semitones higher from the middle part of the vocal range of a soprano or even a mezzo-soprano. Meaning, at the peak notes, a tenor with only a two-octave range (say C3 to C5) may already be exerting much effort than the soprano with a two-octave range (say C4 to C6).

Of all the years in my life listening to a lot of music, I have decided that this song is definitely one of the best duets for all time. And to think this is a collaboration of two singers a few musical generations away (Sting is 58 years old; Nicole is 31 years old), they sure made a hell of a song. This would have been very fit in the Manila scene way back in 1993-1994 when typhoons were really coming here in a regular basis temporarily losing electricity, and just experiencing power outage, eventhough there were no typhoons. Nonetheless, I consider this song one of my top favorites.