What makes a great melody? Sometimes it’s more than the melody itself, and I’m reminded of Harold Arlen’s song “Come Rain or Come Shine.” The melody goes like this. The point here is the melody is literally just this.
It’s the chords moving around it that make it interesting, and when you combine that with the felt lyric, you find this amazing synergy because the song is about something that doesn’t change. It’s an amazing tune, but if you listen to it without the chords, you wouldn’t think it was a tune at all. Isn’t that cool?
