The Beatles' Revolver

Apparently, 5 August was the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Revolver, so I skipped ahead in my listening (I'm currently in the midst of the albums that start with N) to listen to it on its release date.  I hadn't listened to it for over two years, and I found a lot of things to write about.

"I'm Only Sleeping"

The phrase "float upstream" is sung to an ascending phrase (Bb, Db, Gb), so there's a musical/lyrical mirroring there.  This might seem like a small point, but I'll get back to it.

"Love You To"

The first two verses end with a melisma'd "me" (the lines are "You don't get time to hang a sign on me" and "But what you've got means such a lot to me").  I'm not sure if this was intentional on George Harrison's part, but it recalls the melisma'd and line-ending "me" in "What You're Doing" from Beatles for Sale ("And should you need a love that's true / It's me").

"Here, There, and Everywhere"

The line "Running my hands through her hair" sounded familiar to me, and it wasn't too long before I placed it.  There's an identical line near the end of Colin Blunstone's "She Loves the Way They Love Her" (on One Year).  Both Blunstone and his former Zombies band mate Rod Argent (who wrote "She Loves the Way They Love Her") have listed the Beatles as an influence, and between that and both songs' rhyming "hair" with "there" ("There / Running my hands through her hair" in "Here, There, and Everywhere" and "Running my hands through her hair / And knowing she'll always be there" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her"), I think this is more than just a coincidence.  At best, it might be an instance of subconscious influence.

"And Your Bird Can Sing"

I was either only dimly aware of this or had forgotten, but it was very obvious to me as I listened to "And Your Bird Can Sing" this time that the line "You say you've seen seven wonders" is a reference to the Seven Wonders of the World.

"For No One"

I don't know how to play "For No One" (yet), so this isn't as precise as it could be, but I don't think the song resolves at the end.  There isn't a sense of completion, which (somewhat literally) underscores the disconnected feeling in lines such as "You stay home / She goes out" and "And in her eyes, you see nothing."

"I Want to Tell You"

I was working on transcribing this song as I listened to it, so the pleonasm in the line "All those words they seem to slip away" was especially evident.  Instead of the more fluid and more grammatically correct "All those words seem to slip away," there's a redundant "they" in the line.  The song itself is about problems in communicating, so that pleonastic "they" actually emphasizes that sentiment.

"Tomorrow Never Knows"

The phrase "float downstream" is sung to a descending phrase (E, C, G), so there's a musical/lyrical mirroring there.  Furthermore, there's a parallelism between the descending "float downstream" here and the ascending "float upstream" in "I'm Only Sleeping."  So while it's a rather simple feature, it's used to a greater effect because there's that parallelism.

Electric Light Orchestra's "Livin' Thing"

I'm halfway through a compilation album of Electric Light Orchestra (All over the World: The Best of Electric Light Orchestra).  After a post I wrote here two years ago (after listening to this same album), I started a project where I look into ELO's music in some depth (I haven't gotten that far yet), so I've been transcribing these too.

I noticed the line "Takin' a dive 'cause you can help but slide, floating downstream" in "Livin' Thing," and I think it's a small lyrical reference to the Beatles.  The "floating downstream" part is very similar to the first line of "Tomorrow Never Knows" - "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream."  In my project, I've found more than a few references to the Beatles, so I'm more confident that this is a reference rather than just a coincidental resemblance.

The Beatles' "Blue Jay Way"

I'm currently listening to the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour.  On "Blue Jay Way," George Harrison's vocals (and some of the backing vocals, too) are kind of wobbly, which I'd never noticed before.  I think they did the same thing they did with "Tomorrow Never Knows" from Revolver about a year earlier and put the vocals through a Leslie speaker.  "Blue Jay Way" also features organ, which was frequently (I might even say, "usually") put through a Leslie speaker, so it doesn't seem too unlikely that they'd use the same thing for the vocals.