I enjoyed your analysis, its complete and informative. Please post more songs from the record, it would be awesome if we can figure out (technically speaking)the rest of it!

Cheers!

Along with “pitchy” (which Ellen soon jumped on as her cool “cred” term for her alleged contributions), Randy is the first i’ve heard use the term “runs” which means “melisma.” Melismatic singing in Pop music (multiple pitches for each syllable) was innovated by Stevie Wonder and also a bit by Aretha Franklin, and I sure wish it would have stayed there!
Whitney Houston then came along and just took it over the top, adding much much more “improvement” to a melody.
Then came the younger newer singers (Mariah, Christina) with the mentality “oh, i get it! more is better!” and they took melisma to a whole new level of nausea.
Check out Diana Ross’ voice on Endless Love, followed by what Mariah did; adding a thousand notes to a couple dozen syllables as a way of making it “even better” in her little musical mind, albeit a gorgeous voice.
Check out the National Anthem sung by most anyone in the last decade.
I guess the risk of being pitchy is reduced when long held melody notes are a thing of the past. There’s just too many other available little notes to throw in there, pitchy or not.

The classification of Locrian came much later – interestingly when the dominant 7 chord became more acceptable in Western music (in Rennaissance music you rarely find dominant 7the as the dissonance of the tritone and 7th was very jarring to Medieval and early Renaissance ears, usually diminished chords were more allowable)

Note in relation BarNavi’s response, using the third degree of the scale as a dominant for some modes was common to avoid either the tritone or avoid B as a dominant area.

Finally, when I wrote my own short choral piece in Locrian I realize months afterwards I gravitated to the 4th and 7th degrees of the Locrian scale I used – thereby unconsciously writing at times in Hypophyrgian.

Continue the great work.