Carole King's "Way over Yonder"

Last night I listened to Carole King's Tapestry, and I think I discovered a Biblical allusion in "Way over Yonder" that I hadn't noticed before.  The lines "Maybe tomorrow I'll find my way / To the land where the honey runs in rivers each day" seem to reference the Promised Land.  In Exodus 3:8, God tells Moses, "I have come down to deliver them [the people of Israel] out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey."

For what it's worth, I'd previously noticed the "coat of many colors" in "Tapestry," which has some resemblance (at least nominally) to Joseph's robe in Genesis 37:3.

Arcade Fire's "Ready to Start"

A couple days ago I listened to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, and I noticed that some lines in "Ready to Start" are a reference to "The Emperor's New Clothes."  It's "All the kids have always known / That the emperor wears no clothes."  I dug out a copy of "The Emperor's New Clothes" (the nearest to hand was actually a German version from one of my college textbooks), and in it some weavers (who work with the most marvelous material) tell the king that whoever does bad work, isn't fit for his office, or is dumb or lazy can't see their material, but whoever is clever and hard-working and is fit  for his office can see their material.  They make a show of creating clothes for the emperor, and the emperor's ministers (and later the emperor himself) act as if they can see the material because they don't want to be considered unfit for their positions.  The emperor parades through the town supposedly wearing his new clothes but in reality wearing nothing, and the same thing happens with the people: the act like they can see his wonderful new clothes just so that they'll be considered clever, hard-working people.  But then a child says, "The king isn't wearing any clothes!" and the truth spreads through the crowd.

The Foundations' "Build Me up Buttercup"

I listened to some songs from compilation albums to-day, and I noticed something about the Foundations' "Build Me up Buttercup."  The line "I need you more than anyone, darling" can be parsed two different ways.  "Anyone" can be either nominative ("I need you more than anyone [else needs you]") or accusative ("I need you more than [I need] anyone [else]").  Each parsing provides different details, but both still express a paramount need.

Unit 4+2's "I Will"

I've been making my way through a box set of Bach works, and this afternoon I listened to some of the partitas for solo violin.  A section in one of the movements (BWV 1006: III.) sounded familiar to me, and - while I had to restart it a couple times - I eventually placed it as a song by Unit 4+2 (although - obviously - the Bach partita is older).  I had to reference a few songs before I found which one specifically though.  It's the introductory guitar figure in "I Will" (after about four measures of drums).

The phrase starts at measure twenty five in Partita No. 3 for Violin in E major, BWV 1006: III. Gavotte en Rondeau:

(notation found here)

(click the image to enlarge it)

"I Will" is in F major where this partita is in E major, and while the quotation isn't exact, it's certainly close enough to recognize.

The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 4/9/66" (from The SMiLE Sessions)

Lately I've been listening to The SMiLE Sessions box set.  I listened to the fifth disc this morning, and I noticed that in the second track ("Good Vibrations: Gold Star 4/9/66") at about 1:03 before the next take starts, a guitar plays part of the melody from George Gershwin's "Strike up the Band."  It's the melody to which is sung:

Let the drums roll out
Let the trumpet call
While the people shout
Strike up the band

The final note (for "band") either isn't played or isn't audible (there's some other noise that occurs at the same time that might obscure it), but I was still very excited to hear and recognize this.

Wilson's cited Gershwin as an influence, but I don't know if this quotation is anything more than just coincidence.

The Roulettes' "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"

I listened to the Roulettes' Stakes and Chips a couple days ago, but I was thinking about it again yester-day and realized a small thing about "Stubborn Kind of Fellow."  In what I guess is the bridge, the backing vocals have the repeated line "Gonna love you in every way."  The "every" there is pronounced with three syllables instead of the usual too.  That pronunciation emphasizes the multitude of ways in which the speaker/singer is going to love his girl.

After I thought all of that, I referenced the song and found some more things.  The three-syllable "every" there is contrasted with a couple two-syllable "every"s in the song ("ev'rybody" and "ev'ry time").

I realized a lot more about that bridge section too.  The lead vocals are "I wanna love you / In every way."  As in the backing vocals, that "every" is pronounced with three syllables, but the lead vocals also have various melismas on "way" (they differ when the line is repeated), which also hint at a multitude of ways.  Furthermore, while the lead vocals are "I wanna love you," the backing vocals are "Gonna love you."  The difference there hints at the speaker/singer's determination or, as the title has it, his stubbornness.

The Kinks' "Afternoon Tea"

Last night I listened to Something Else by the Kinks, and I think I found a couple allusions in "Afternoon Tea."

The first two lines are "Tea time won't be the same without my Donna / At night I lie awake and dream of Donna."  I hadn't realized this before, but I think these lines' mentioning an absent Donna is an allusion to Ritchie Valens' "Donna."  The first verse of Valens' "Donna" starts with the lines "I had a girl; Donna was her name / Since she left me, I never been the same."  While one song describes the effect on the speaker/singer and one describes the effect on tea time, neither is "the same" because Donna is gone.

The next two lines in "Afternoon Tea" are "I think about that small café / That’s where we used to meet each day," and I think this alludes to Buddy Holly's "That's My Desire," specifically the second verse:

To meet where gypsies play
Down in some small café
And dance 'til break of day
That's my desire

Both have a "small café" that's rhymed with "day."  The next line in "That's My Desire" (which is the first line of the bridge) is "We'll sip a little glass of wine," so there's drinking involved there too, except it's wine instead of tea.

Both "Donna" and "That's My Desire" pre-date "Afternoon Tea" by about a decade, so these allusions are possible from a chronological point of view, but I don't know enough about Ray Davies' influences to be certain that these are intentional references.

The Royal Guardsmen's "Airplane Song (My Airplane)"

Earlier I listened to two albums by the Royal Guardsmen (Snoopy vs. the Red Baron and Snoopy and His Friends) re-issued on a single disc.  I noticed something about the melody of a line in "Airplane Song (My Airplane)" on Snoopy and His Friends.  For "I can go up," the melody ascends (E E G# B E') with a melisma on "go" to further emphasize it, and for "I can get down," the melody descends (E' F# E' C# A).  There's a parallelism not only in the structure of the two clauses in that line but also in the ascending and descending melodies and the melismas on the verbs "go" and "get."

The Yardbirds' "Pounds and Stomps"

This morning I listened to the second disc of a two-disc compilation album of the Yardbirds (titled Smokestack Lightning), and "Pounds and Stomps" sounded very familiar to me.  I just figured out how to play part of it, and now I've confirmed that it's pretty much the same song as "He's Always There" from Roger the Engineer (which I wrote about three weeks ago).

Both songs start with a introductory drum figure that's almost a full two measures.  Then there's a descending chromatic phrase played eight times that constitutes a verse.  In "He's Always There," it's just single notes on guitar and bass (G F# F E), but in "Pounds and Stomps," the guitar plays chords based on those same notes (G major F# major F major E major).  In the second and fourth verses, after that E note, the bass adds a quick E B E phrase.

Then, there's the chorus section.  In "He's Always There," the bass doubles the vocal melody ("I'd like to get to know you, sure...") while the guitar doubles select notes.  The first phrase is A B E; the second is A B D; and the third is A B E again.  In "Pounds and Stomps," those three-note guitar phrases are in the bass, and the guitar plays major chords with those notes as the roots.  At the end, the bass plays a string of E notes that leads back into the verse.

The liner notes for this compilation aren't any help in trying to figure out the chronology.  For "Pounds and Stomps," it says only, "1983" with a P in a circle, which apparently means the song was first published only in 1983.  Its not being released at the time would seem to suggest it was a precursor to "He's Always There," which was released in 1966.  "Pounds and Stomps" is credited to Samwell-Smith and McCarty where all of the Roger the Engineer songs are credited to all of the Yardbirds, which would also suggest that "Pounds and Stomps" is a precursor to the more refined "He's Always There."  I should also note that "Pounds and Stomps" is instrumental where there are lyrics in "He's Always There."  Of course, this is all conjecture, but it seems unlikely that the two songs were meant to be distinct when they're so similar musically.

Unit 4+2's "A Place to Go"

This morning I listened to a collection of Unit 4+2 (Singles As & Bs).  I can't believe I hadn't noticed the significant key change near the end of "A Place to Go."  I didn't figure out any precise parts, but I'm pretty sure that it moves from D major to Eb major.  The chorus has the lines "I wanna move but I ain't got / A place to go," so while the singer/speaker can't physically move (in the sense of moving house), he can move musically via that key change.

Ron & Bill's "It"

Yester-day I listened to the second disc in a two-disc set of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles.  It includes their first two albums and some bonus tracks.  I noticed something about "It," one of the bonus tracks.  It's credited to Ron & Bill, whom the liner notes explain are Ronald White and Smokey Robinson.  The first verse seems to take a lot of inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."  It starts:

I was home last night tryin' to read a book
There was a knock on my door, so I took a look
But when I reached the door, there was no one there
Not on the porch or anywhere

The narrator of Poe's poem is also "ponder[ing]... / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" when "suddenly there came a tapping, / ... at my chamber door" (lines 1-4).  When he finally gets around to opening it, he finds "Darkness there, and nothing more" (line 23).

There aren't as many similarities in the rest of "It," but in the second verse the speaker/singer says that he "really wanted it for my pet," so it's clearly an animal and possibly a raven.  In the bridge, the "it" is rolled over and presumably killed by a train, yet in the third verse, it calls the speaker/singer on the telephone, and there's the same "Oh" phrase that marks its appearance in the first two verses.  There's some similarity between this and Poe's narrator's mentioning that the raven comes from "the Night's Plutonian shore" (lines 46 and 97).  Pluto is the god of the dead (in the Greek and Roman pantheons, as far as I can tell), so the raven's coming from the "Plutonian shore" seems to mean that it's come back from the dead, just like the "it" in Ron & Bill's song.

Sufjan Stevens' "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands"

Yester-day I also listened to Sufjan Stevens' Seven Swans.  It's just a minor point, but I noticed an interesting melisma in "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands."  The "away" in "And I am throwing all my thoughts away" is sung to the phrase G# F# E C#, so there's a musical representation of that throwing.

This morning when I drafted this post, the title sounded familiar to me, so I did some research and discovered that it's from Isaiah 55:12:  "For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

Johnny Rivers' "Last Train to Memphis"

Yester-day I listened to the second disc of a two-disc Johnny Rivers compilation album (Secret Agent Man: The Ultimate Johnny Rivers Anthology).  I noticed the lines "Guess I knew somewhere deep inside / That mystery train would take me for a ride someday" in "Last Train to Memphis," and I'm pretty sure this is a reference to Elvis Presley.  He lived in Memphis, and one of his songs is titled "Mystery Train" (although the phrase itself doesn't appear in the song and Rivers uses it in a different way).

The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

Yester-day I listened to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I noticed an interesting thing about the bass part in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."  During the "Newspaper taxis appear on the shore..." section, the bass part is almost entirely quarter notes (and a pair of eighth notes), so the single half note (second measure of the second line) sticks out:

(click the image for a larger view)
(A few comments on this notation.  First, I did it myself, so there's the standard disclaimer that I might have something wrong.  Second, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is partially in 3 / 4 and partially in 4 / 4, and at the end of this section, there's a transition from 3 / 4 time to 4 / 4 time, so it might be that the last measure should be in 4 / 4 instead of 3 / 4.)

That half note corresponds to "take" in the line "Waiting to take you away," so musically there's a pause to reflect the taxis' standing by.