The Ultimate In the 1970s Psychology of ME – Paul Anka: “(You’re) Having My Baby” – Deterministic Tempo Analysis with Graphics and YouTube demonstration
It was all about Paul Anka and Odea Coates! It would be illegal to give out all the lyrics to the song, but when Paul repeats, “Having my baby/what a lovely way of showing how much you love me!/Having my baby/What a lovely way of showing what you’re thinking of me!” where Odea Coates’ response is “I’m a woman in love love what it’s doing to me,” again, it is not about the bay, it is about Odea’s sexual lust for Anka, indeed, one of the 150 sexiest men in Atlantic City as voted in NEW JERSEY magazine.
These are some some I’ve done before on a comparison graph. As you can see, songs of laid back confident grace, as in Daniel Powter’s Bad Day where he joyfully sings: You’ve had a bad day? Just sing a SAD song to turn it around. I bring this up to reiterate that the expression of the performer will not necessarily effect you in the way same performance is expressing! As Sting has always said, when depressed, a happy song just makes you more depressed!
PAUL ANKA - YOU'RE HAVING MY BABY - meanspeed music school bpm graph = complete, contiguous, accurate, unlike FRAUDMEISTER, oops, MIXMEISTER
The most interesting rhyme in this song, that was a #1 song in 1975, is rhyming ‘through’ with ‘do’ as the couple boldly recaps their decision not to have an abortion. Paul sings, “You didn’t have to keep it/wouldn’t put you through it/you could could have swept it from your life but you wouldn’t do it/No you wouldn’t do it!”
So this song, proudly sung with comfort, composure and poise only spikes up to the asymptotic meanspeed line of √3/5 second (77.459…bpm with .77459…seconds per beat), *during* the recount of what they could have done: “swept” it from their lives. Here the word “swept” is highly charged in that most know that a vacuum method is used for abortions at certain points of fetal development. Really pounds that visual into you (me, anyway).
As noted, since the average tempo is 75 1/2 beats per minute, it falls in the range of songs that have a strong tendency towards grace: LET IT BE, A WHITER SHADE OF PALE, FIRE & RAIN. Paul has the song that is the ULTIMATE meanspeed song, “Times of Your Life,” where any sound wave analysis shows that the Kodak song was recorded right down the middle at 77.5 bpm. The difference, which is counter-intuitive, is that the faster the song, by just that 2 beats per minute *increase* in speed marks the Too Long Goodbye/Trying Not To Cry/Homesick feeling of bittersweetness. Hence “Times of Your Life” is ‘laughter/tears, gather moments/while you may’ – a song that if the U.S. Army would play on a loop at Guantanamo would end all wars – is sweet with a bitter aftertaste.
(YOU’RE) HAVING MY BABY, by contrast, is a fun and graceful song, the emotive quality exposed simply by the slower speed. I’d love to hear a version of this at 82 beats per minute, and the new technology, now affordable, will let us all try that. I would imagine that as violently dated as the song sounds at 75 1/2 beats per minute, 82 bpm might be very kitsch and VERY FUNNY! If anyone tries this with success please let me know at meanspeed@gmail.com where I can check it out.
bpm graph - HAVING MY BABY - Paul Anka - ®/© 2009 meanspeed music school - unlike FRAUDMEISTER/MIXMEISTER
Meanspeed-Spencer Summary
song title=(YOU’RE) HAVING MY BABY
performer=Paul Anka, Odea Coates
album=The Best of the United Artists Years (1973-1977)
intellectual property=Capitol Records, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Kind=Purchased AAC audio
Size=5.2 MB
Bit Rate=256 kbps
Sample Rate=44.100 kHz
Profile=Low Complexity
Channels=Stereo
File Type=m4a
beats calibrated, total=1,620
beats per trial=180
time elapsed, total=1,288.67 seconds
time, average beat=0.7955 seconds
mean speed/average standard tempo=75.5 beats per minute
mean emotion/emotive category according to the meanspeed music conjecture=grace
/Ian Andrew Schneider/
June 2, 2009
