This morning I listened to Another Side of Bob Dylan, and I noticed something about the melody of "All I Really Wanna Do," the opening track.
As Dylan (or, rather, his narrator) lists the things that he doesn't want to do ("I ain't lookin' to compete with you / Beat or cheat or mistreat you...") the melody is descending by scale degrees. It's (roughly) the same descending phrase (D, C#, B, A); he just switches octaves between each line. When he gets to the "All I really wanna do / Is, baby, be friends with you," the melody ascends, and the intervals are usually larger than just a half-step or whole-step. It's something like E, F#, A, A', A, C#, B, A, C#, A (that doesn't include repeated notes).
There's a relationship between what the narrator says he does or doesn't want to do and the way in which he sings them. The things he doesn't want to do are sung to a descending melody that - while not exactly boring - isn't very interesting because it's built on those scale degrees. The thing he does want to do is ascending and melodically sounds more interesting because it has those larger intervals.
