Odd time-signatures apreciation

No, it’s 4/4all the way through.

^I thought about that one too. Another huge hit is Here Comes the Sun. The middle part (where they sing Sun, sun, sun, here it comes) starts in 11/8 and continues in … I don’t remember, but something odd for sure! 

No problem! Another good example is All You Need is Love (7/4 in the verses, or rather 4+3).

Solsbury Hill is in 7/4.

Do you know any big commercial hit ( does not have to be from a prog band) which is played with an odd signature?

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I read about that in one of Robert Craft’s books, but I remember it a bit differently. It’s more like he broke up 5 into 2+3 or 3+2, if I’m not mistaken. I found this on the internet (Stravinsky revised the score many times, and though this passage is about his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, I think it applies to Rite …as well):

The implications are significant: Could it be that Stravinsky mellowed
out and “tweaked” his composition to reflect his current mood in 1947? Is it
possible Stravinsky strove to erase the effects of some of the dramatic
Russian period that still leaked over into his personal style in 1920, when
reorchestrating this piece in 1947?
 
 Looking at the scores, the macroscopic differences are as follows:
• Meter/time signature. Stravinsky rebarred and remetered the
composition, splitting 5/8 bars into their constituent 2+3 eighths in the
introduction, for example. More significant is the type of change such as at
1920-4 and 1947-6. Replacing 3/4 with 2/4 and 4/4 with 3/4 changes the
implied stresses within the phrases. This is clearly evidenced by the different
phrase marks on the flute melody in this section. The recording reveals
different breath placement.

The article is written by Jonathan Dimond. It’s a PDF, so I can’t link to it, but it’s easy to find.

There are a lot of odd signatures in Greek music. I recently went to a restaurant with live music, and some of the customers were dancing effortlessly to 7/8. When I asked one of them later, he didn’t even know what 7/8 was. A woman in his company understood what I meant and said that they called it the 12 steps dance. I have to try to count the steps next time I see it.

My point is that what we call "odd" signatures in Western culture don’t seem odd at all if you go to other cultures. Here you will frequently find songs in 5, 7 or 9 (grouped like 3/4+3/8 or 4/4+5/4 – for instance in the free solo dance called zeibekiko). (Looking at the Wiki article about zeibekiko, especially the discussion page, I realise that people don’t agree when it comes to the signature– some say it’s nearly always 9/4, others say 9/8. I guess the composers didn’t care anyway.)

I can't help but think that the 'odd' in this title's thread is erm....relative to yer culture e.g. Eastern European folk music (the songs that the peasants passed on orally from one generation to another) are often in time-signatures as diverse as 5/4, 7/8, 9/8 and (gulp) 22/16. These are unusual meters for western popular music certainly, but when you hear these songs they don't sound 'odd' because the time signature is sourced from the completely natural phrase length of the lyrics. I enjoy progressive music that deploys metric shifts as much as anyone, but it's probably the dumbing down of generic popular music as a means to appeal to the most lucrative markets that has elevated 'odd' time signatures to the mantle of western 'sophistication' (they originate from its antithesis innit?)

Anything by Blotted Science is always entertaining for the mind.

Klavierstruck IX by Karlheinz Stockhausen anybody? It's not rock, but there is a part of it supposedly in 142/8 time