Keep On Growing

Keep On Growing 

(Eric Clapton and Bobby Whitlock)

From the Derek & the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

The tuning is between A and Bb. Likely the band recorded in A, but afterwards decided it was too slow, so they sped up the tape a little, thus increasing the pitch. The song begins with a short intro.

"Keep On Growing" highlights several important aspects of Carl Radle's style. His line on the chorus is a very simple and repetitive arpeggiation of an A-D chord progression. He seldom makes any variations on this pattern. Even when the band vamps on this two-chord groove for the last two minutes of the song, Radle sticks to this line with a few extra ghost notes as his only embellishments.

The chord progression in the verse is also A-D, but here each chord is a full measure instead of a half-measure. Again, Radle sets up a one-measure groove and sticks to it, not even altering it when the chord changes. Thus, the bass line acts as a sort of pedal point.  The repetition of the line against the changing harmony creates a lot of tension which is (temporarily) released in the fourth bar with the G-D-A cadence.

During the bridge, Radle helps the song “open up” by playing longer phrases that move through the changes melodically. The contrast between the moving line of the bridge and the short repetitive patterns in the rest of the song creates a large-scale tension/release that mirrors the tension/release that occurs every four measures within each verse.