Ellie Goulding x Diplo feat. Swae Lee - Close To Me

Recently I've been fascinated with breaking songs down, particularly those that I look back fondly on a piece by piece fashion. Like, if you listen purely to this one section of the song, is that all you're really after? Or is this other part completely bereft of ideas and just filling in time. Mainly because I see nowadays that a lot of popular songs are getting shorter and shorter, which you could see dismissively as an attention span thing, or you could look at it another way in terms of efficiency. "Mr. Brightside" is a nearly 4 minute song but a good chunk of it is just a verse & chorus that only slightly change the second time through. You could trim it down to around two and a half minutes (if not shorter) and not lose much. There's a lot of talk about songs with great bridges, that extra passage where a new memorable moment comes out and sends things off nicely, but think of the opposite, how many songs have bridges that just pad out time, completely bereft of ideas?

What I'm saying here is that "Close To Me" is a song that I think back on relatively fondly but in reality I'm mostly just fascinated by how little it has going for it. Ellie & Swae Lee are both perfectly fine on it, and the production is perfectly suitable, but the whole thing is just a persistent tension builder until the chorus releases with a flourish. That one chord shift when the title drop comes through. It's accentuated too by the vocal melody which shifts dramatically from short notes to one big, emphasized one. Sometimes one good idea is all it takes.