Van Halen’s Right Now is a great tune with a musical experience that, for me, doesn’t diminish with repeated listenings. I enjoy it so much that last week I had decided to learn the first minute or two on my keyboard. While learning it I had quite the time wrestling with its ambiguous rhythm. When listening casually to the song, my ear naturally heard the left-hand bass as coming in on the 16th note before the downbeat of a bar, like so:
This made sense aurally to me because the G on the downbeat of the second measure above would then act like a suspension down to F, and suspensions typically happen on strong beats like 1 and 3. When I played it, however, I instead kept wanting hear the left-hand bass to be the downbeat of a measure, like so:
I had heard it that way because the first pitch sounded in the song is D4 in the right hand, which later also coincides with the left-hand bass. It wasn’t until discussing this with a friend of mine that he pointed out that neither of those interpretations were correct! The piece is arranged such that the left-hand bass comes in on the second 16th note of the bar, like so:
What? This really messed with my head until I sat down and actually played it with a metronome. It sounded great and incredibly interesting to perceive the rhythm phrased that way. Later on in the song Van Halen does a recapitulation of the piano intro which confirms that rhythm. Even more daring, lead singer Sammy Hagar injects an inversion of that syncopation while the keyboard concurrently plays the intro riff — he lands a strong vocal note on the 16th note before the downbeat. This completely de-emphasizes the downbeat by sandwiching it between two accented pitches on weak beats:
I like to think that the longevity of my interest in this song is owed at least in part due to the syncopated song writing. It’s fun to listen to it and a challenge to try and figure out where the real downbeat is!
