There is a statement and a question in Chris Klepac’s contemplative “Rinse and Repeat” that are timeless for people like me (these days, there seem to be lot more of you than ever before) and, if one thinks about it, hide the answer as cold, hard truth within. But I don’t want to think about it just yet, so let’s talk about Klepac’s mastery of key and the type of arrangement that builds a monument on three primary notes that are used in motif, melody, and progression.
“Rinse and Repeat” hangs out mostly in my favorite mode of C Major: G Mixolydian. This one is always fun for me to hear because the G chord in standard guitar tuning sounds so full and rich; I’m a fan of F and C in their basic positions, too, but centering things around G often “feels right.” Except that, for all intents and purposes, Klepac undercuts that rightness with self-frustrated (yet accepting and willfully so) messages. Like many of my favorite tunes, “Rinse and Repeat” counters up (arrangement) with down (message).
Part of the song’s strength lies in those three notes I mentioned. They form the synth riff that opens and carries the song on its back. Two of them represent the roots of the chords that open the verses and chorus and the third is the dominant of this mode, the fifth of that beautiful G chord, and in the melody that sneaks in post-chorus and during the excellent break, those notes carry the listener aloft and stable while the ground beneath alternates between different terrains.
Okay, I’ve avoided completing my opening thought for as long as I could, so let’s get to facing up to the facts, fellow procrastinators. When people like you and I lament the speediness with which our lives pass, a favored phrase is, “Where does the time go?” Klepac makes this the point of each chorus. But he answers his (and our) question with his very first words and they cut that much deeper when they’re so accurate: to paraphrase, we’ve wasted it. The harsher truth is found in the metaphor of the song’s title in that we’ll continue to waste it into the future.