The Mamas & the Papas' "No Salt on Her Tail"

Last night I listened to the Mamas & the Papas eponymous second album, and I noticed a couple things about "No Salt on Her Tail."  During the first instance of the "This little bird..." section, the "away" in the line "She can fly away" has a melisma.  It's sung to an F, F, D, C phrase.  That's more than the two syllables with which "away" is normally pronounced, so it gives a sense of the movement in the bird's flight.

In that section "away" is rhymed with "stay" (the lines are "She can fly away" and "No cage to make her stay").  The "make her stay" is all sung to the same note (an F), so again there's a mirroring of the lyrics in the music.  Where "away" is sung to multiple notes and suggests movement, the phrase in this line about being stationary is sung to a single note.

This section is repeated near the end of the song (raised a half-step, which I hadn't realized until figuring out the vocal melody), but not all of these features are still in place there.

The Mamas & the Papas' "Words of Love"

I'm currently listening to the first disc of The Mamas & the Papas' Gold album.  I have all of their albums, but I haven't transcribed any of their songs (I've become kind of obsessed with lyric transcription since last time I did this project), so I've been working on those as I listen, and I found something interesting about "Words of Love," from The Mamas & the Papas.

The first line is "Words of love, so soft and tender, won't win a girl's heart anymore," but every other instance of this line is missing the "so."  It becomes just "Words of love, soft and tender, won't win a girl's heart anymore."  In the same way that the adverb goes missing (so words that used to be "so soft and tender" are now only "soft and tender"), the "words of love" themselves aren't as effective as they used to be.

The Mamas & the Papas' Deliver

This morning I listened to The Mamas & the Papas' Deliver and found a few things.  None of them are that significant though, so I'm putting them all together in one post.

"Dedicated to the One I Love"

There's a fairly large interval between the two syllables of "away" in the first line ("While I'm far away from you, my baby"), which helps to demonstrate the distance.  It's a fourth (D to G).

"Free Advice"

The "ground" in the line "And keep your ear to the ground" has a melisma, and the later notes have lower pitches (F to E to D), so as the word it sung, it goes lower, just like the line itself says to do.

"Look through My Window"

I actually didn't notice this until transcribing the song to look at what I had discovered, but the end of line "To the street below" descends, as if looking down on the street.  "Street below" is sung to a F Db Ab phrase.

What I noticed when I listened to the song this morning is that the "go" in the line "Someplace to go" has a melisma, suggesting the movement that stated plainly in the line itself.  It's actually the same descent as the "ground" in "Free Advice," although there's also a C# at the end.