ok so i know im definitely not the only person who feels so strongly about this track from yoshi's island.
yoshi's island, a 1995 game for the super nintendo, has always existed for me (i was born in 97). my childhood game console was mostly the gameboy advance, which yoshi's island was ported to. i spent quite a lot of time as a young person playing this game, and when i was young person, i was quite bad at videogames. all of the long-form videogames i played, yoshi's island, minish cap, super mario world, final fantasy 1&2.. these games felt essentially infinite to me. i made a habit of replaying the same levels over and over again. by doing this, i got really familiar with a lot of the music in these games, especially the songs played in the early stages.
yoshi's island i think is quite inherently nostalgic. the game deals a lot with themes of youth: mario and luigi are babies, it takes place in the undeveloped wilderness of the mushroom kingdom.. even the gameplay reflects a desire to be more accessible to younger people, incorporating a moveset that makes precise jumps easier, and the lack of timelimits incentivize more thoughtful exploration of the stages. on just these merits, i think yoshi's island and its soundtrack are intuitively nostalgic-- one of the core themes is nostalgia.
none of the rest of the soundtrack really makes me feel quite the same as 'flower garden', though. and for the longest time, i wasnt really sure why.
i think there is something pretty potent you can learn about composition here. compositional ideas are often analyzed in isolation. you could analyze the harmony here and figure that its use of chromaticism is the key piece of the puzzle responsible for the thoroughly wistful feeling that a familiar re-listening of this song gives you.
figure 1: the A section of 'flower garden', transcribed
to me though, i think that type of analysis is kind of missing the forest for the trees. yes, its use of chromaticism does lend a very specific color to this track. but i think it's more about how the technique is used and why, rather than just what the chords are. this is a very simple and common looping progression, a variation on 1 - 6 - 2 - 5, with the 2 chord substituted for its relative major, the 4 chord. there's nothing terribly novel about this progression. the melody is interesting, though. it cycles between two anchor points, the G on top of the staff, and the G towards the bottom (figure 1, marked in red). G, the 5th in the key of C, is a very natural resting point, and fits very naturally into every chord in the progression.
the progression breaks as we get to a very classic turnaround. instead of going back to I, we go to iii instead, and set up a very strong chord movement through the circle of 4ths (iii - vi - ii - V - I). when we use this dominant-tonic cycle, we can write very strong voice leadings very easily. in this case, they're descending. the chromatic chords here, the Eb7 and the later Db7 can be described as tritone susbtitutions of A7 and G7 respectively. kondo uses this to create a very strong descending pattern, with an especially powerful chromatically descending bassline:
figure 2: some simple descending voice leadings based on the turnaround.
very satisfying. but this isn't all that crazy or novel. these kinds of chord movements are really common in jazz. what's so special about its use here?
i think the answer lies in the most basic musical idea, that of tension and release. here, kondo writes a very strong turnaround that leads to G7, and the melody directs our ears to a clean perfect cadence resolving to C. but the interesting thing is, it doesn't...? the melody resolves on C (figure 1, marked in yellow), but the turnaround repeats instead! rather than giving a satisfying release of tension, we do the opposite. we repeat the phrase that was explicitly set up to build tension, and the resolution by way of returning to the top is a much weaker one than the one we were expecting. there's no strong melody that guides us there the way it did during the turnaround.
i feel like this decision really perfectly communicates that bittersweet feeling of nostalgia that this track is known for. its a feeling of going back to a place you were the happiest you'd ever been, only to find an overwhelming sense of longing instead. it's a feeling of looking back on all the peaks and valleys of your youth (figure 1, marked in red) but being stuck somewhere between (figure 1, marked in yellow), where you can't seem to recapture the same feelings from before. how poetic is that...?
i think the thing to learn from this, more than harmonic theory or melodic techniques, is about song structure. the harmonic decision kondo makes here doesn't really do anything on its own. the nuanced emotion communicated comes more from its place in the complete track, juxtaposed against the simple and carefree progression and melody from before.
tension and release seems like a really simple concept, but you can take it so much further than just cadences and looping progressions and satisfyingly constructed melodies. here, the release of tension is purposely set up and denied, which to a lot of people communicates an extraordinarily complex feeling of nostalgia. if you're mindful, there's any number of ways you can use this technique to communicate what You want say. with a little help from a parallel piece of media, you have the ability to be very deliberate about your feelings, and your audience will appreciate the nuance in your message.
