2. “Break My Stride”, Matthew Wilder. (1984). Written by Matthew Wilder and Greg Prestopino.
Surprise again! You’d forgotten this one, hadn’t you? OK, then you’re welcome. Now go fall in love with it again! This little synthpop number may seem a lightweight, silly song, but that’s be-cause it’s effortlessly brilliant. Its effortlessness means it sneaks into amazing-song hall of fame essentially unnoticed, one of the most playfully inventive melodies you’ve ever heard. It’s so un-forced you may think you could sit down and write a melody like this anytime you wanted to. Well, nobody can do this at will. You have to get lucky to discover one of these, and Wilder him-self only won this lottery once. Melodies like this are rare precisely because they seem so easy and so obvious, and this one has that quality in verse, chorus and bridge. All flawless, and all connected thematically in just the right amounts to make the song cohere. “Last night I had the strangest dream/I sailed away to China/In a little rowboat to find ya” opens the verse. This triplet is a perfect setup and knockdown. When the verse repeats, the alteration is to drop the third phrase and replace with the quirky and perfectly transitional, “Now what does that mean”? And away we go into probably the most fun-to-sing chorus of the decade. What about the bridge? Highly inventive variations on already established themes make it great too. This song has sur-prise after surprise, with all of them fitting snugly into a thematic concept such that, at the end of the song, you see that nothing could have been different. So effortless!
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