The Byrds' "Mind Gardens"

Yester-day I listened to the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday, and I noticed a small thing about "Mind Gardens."  The "walls all down" part of the line "I tore the walls all down" is sung to a descending phrase (E D C#), so there's a musical representation of the walls' coming down.

Just for the sake of making this post a bit more than just "hey, there's significance to this descending phrase," I was going to note the origin of the phrase "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," which occurs earlier in the song, but in doing so, I actually found something I hadn't realized before.  I've known for years that this is a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  It's actually in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  He asks himself "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them." (III.i.65-68).  But I hadn't realized that both Hamlet and David Crosby's song are talking about minds.  Hamlet specifically mentions "in the mind," where Crosby seems to use a garden as a metaphor for a mind.

The Byrds' "Thoughts and Words" and "Don't Make Waves"

This morning I listened to the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday.  I found an interesting structural thing in "Thoughts and Words."  There are harmony vocals during the third verse, but the lyrics for those harmony vocals are different from the lyrics for the lead vocals.  The lead vocal line is "One day you came into my mind, and everything looked as though it was all mine," and the harmony vocal is "One day you came into my mind, and everything, it was all mine."  This happens for the other line in that verse too, but I can't make out all of the harmony vocals.

I've written a few posts about this sort of thing already, but I'm still always really excited when I find something like it.  The lead vocals and the harmony vocals are saying different things even though they're saying (singing, technically) almost the exact same words.  Here, the lead vocals say that "everything looked as though it was all mine" (although it should be "everything looked as though it were all mine" since it's in the subjunctive mood).  The lead vocals realize that what it seems like isn't what it is, but the harmony vocals are more taken by whoever came into his mind, saying that "everything, it was all mine."

Also, a very minor point about "Don't Make Waves," which is a bonus track: I found an instance of internal rhyme in the line "Malibu is calling you, her days and nights so warm."