Talk:Turn It On Again

Time Signatures

OK, time signatures are kinda somewhat subjecive, and while 24.13.74.254 probably changed 13/4 to 12/4 in good faith, this section is definately not 12/4 (count it out) and is either 13/4 or 6/4+7/4, very probably the latter. So, i'm reverting what we're indentifying what we're calling the time signature for time being. 24.205.51.130 07:34, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the article on the Duke album where the song appears has a citation from a syndicated radio show interview, in which the band actually cites the song as being in 13. Locrian 07:49, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Just a curious addition here: the published sheet music has it alternating 4/4 - 2/4 - 4/4 - 3/4

MFNickster (talk) 08:06, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Is this really pop rock?

It may have been a hit single but I don't feel it sounds overly poppy the way Misunderstanding or a later song like Invisible Touch sounds. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:8B83:4860:58D:190C:D4F2:3950 (talk) 02:35, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Turn It On Again. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120414211811/http://50.6.195.142/archives/80s_files/19801011.html to http://50.6.195.142/archives/80s_files/19801011.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 18:43, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

¹³
₈ -> ¹³
₄ change

I'm certainly no Genesis expert, and I don't have access to the Songbook DVD reference so it's possible there's some context here I'm not aware of, but I think it's pretty unlikely that ¹³
₈ is a better label than ¹³
₄. In the sections in question, there are clearly thirteen full quarter notes per "loop". A time signature of ¹³
₈ would imply that those 26 eighth notes should be grouped into two sets of six quarter notes and one eighth note (2+2+2+2+2+2+1 + 2+2+2+2+2+2+1). You can of course group a bar of ¹³
₈ more irregularly than this, but not in ways that would make sense in the context of this song (and, again, I argue that not even this simple grouping makes sense). If it WAS in ¹³
₈, then to preserve the very clear and regular quarter note feel present in these sections, the final eighth note in the first bar of each pair would have to be tied across the bar line to another lone eighth note, offsetting every remaining quarter note in the second bar by an eighth note. There is no practical or analytical benefit gained by adding such complexity, IMO.

The only way I think it could reasonably be called ¹³
₈ would be if the eighth note gets the beat, rather than the quarter note. That would put the snare on every other eighth note, and the hi-hat on every sixteenth note. There technically would be nothing problematic about this; it just isn't conventional at all. In modern western popular music, we're heavily biased toward assigning the value of a quarter note to whatever pulse we feel as "the beat". We like to orient ourselves around the quarter note and derive all other values from it. In simpler terms: no one would write it that way (with the eighth note on the beat).

Furthermore, even if Collins said "¹³
₈" in the scene on the DVD, that doesn't mean he's correct. Maybe he intended to say "¹³
₄" and misspoke. Maybe he does conceptualize it as being in ¹³
₈; if so, great! It clearly worked for him and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. As explained in my previous paragraph though, most modern popular musicians would not conceptualize it this way, so for anyone other than Phil Collins, it is not in ¹³
₈. And with something fairly subjective such as how music "feels", when you're outvoted 1,000,000 to 1, you're as close to objectively wrong as is relevant for this discussion.

As a final note: Even if you disagree with/aren't sure about all of that, at the very least it doesn't make sense to say "⁶
₄ + ⁷
₄ (¹³
₈)". One bar of ¹³
₈ is not equivalent to one bar of ⁶
₄ (12 eighth notes) plus one bar of ⁷
₄ (14 eighth notes). It would have to read "⁶
₄ + ⁷
₄ (²⁶
₈)" to be mathematically correct, and then we've lost the "13" Collins mentioned, so that isn't likely to be the solution either.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. I'd prefer to learn what I'm missing/overlooking if I'm incorrect! Orphaeus (talk) 01:27, 22 October 2025 (UTC)