The Beatles' "Sea of Monsters"

I just listened to the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.  The second half of this is the soundtrack to the Yellow Submarine movie, which I've never seen, and I think this is only the second time I've listened to it, but I still found something to say about it.

At about 2:22 in the track "Sea of Monsters," there's a fairly lengthy quotation of the opening of the second movement of Bach's third orchestral suite (BWV 1068).  It lasts until about 2:36.  Judging by the recording I have of the third orchestral suite (by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields directed by Neville Marriner), the quotation is pretty accurate too.  The only major differences I can find are that the accompaniment in "Sea of Monsters" is pizzicato where in the original it's done with the bow and that there are a few extra notes in the descending melody in "Sea of Monsters" before the quotation ends.

Because I haven't seen the movie, I don't know how or if that Bach quotation relates to it, but now I'm curious.

Belle & Sebastian's "The Ghost of Rockschool"

I just listened to Belle & Sebastian's Write About Love.  I'd never noticed that in "The Ghost of Rockschool" after the line "Every clock in the hall is bending slowly," there's a bent note in the guitar part, ostensibly to portray that bending musically.  However, there's also a bent note just before "Everything hums as the blue heart turns," which doesn't seem to have any lyrical connections to bent notes.

Jefferson Airplane's "Good Shepherd"

I just listened to The Worst of Jefferson Airplane.  Throughout the repetitions of the chorus of "Good Shepherd," I realized that there are three sheep mentioned:

One for Paul
One for Silas
One for to make my heart rejoice

The Good Shepherd, Paul, and Silas are all figures from Christianity, in which three is a significant number.  In the song, that significance is shown in the three sheep mentioned in the chorus.

Interestingly, the chorus itself appears in the song three times, and there are three things to be avoided:  "the blood-stained bandit," "the long-tongued liar," and "the gun-shot devil" (at least those are as I heard them).  So there are multiple instances of groups of three.

The Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

I'm currently listening to a compilation album of the Smiths titled The World Won't Listen.  I've listened to a lot of these songs on other Smiths albums this year, but it wasn't until now that I realized the weird conditional phrases in "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out."  Specifically:

And if a double-decker bus crashes into us
To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us
To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Because of the structure, grammatically, dying "by your side" is only "a pleasure," a "privilege," and "a heavenly way to die" if the method of that death is a collision with a "double-decker bus" or "ten-ton truck."

That might be splitting grammatical hairs, but I think it's an important distinction that indicates something about the singer/speaker's outlook: dying is positive only if it occurs in the manner that he's described.

Additionally, until I transcribed the lyrics, I hadn't really noticed how parallel those lines are.  "And if a double-decker bus crashes into us" parallels with "And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us."  And "To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die" with "To die by your side, the pleasure, the privilege is mine."  But there's even parallelism in the alliterative hyphenated adjectives: "double-decker" and "ten-ton."

Punch Brothers' "No Concern of Yours"

This morning I listened to Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?  I'd forgotten that there was whistling near the end of "No Concern of Yours."  It doubles the melody during the "When your name is on his building" part (at least I think that's what the lyrics are).  The whistling itself took me a few listenings to discover, if I remember correctly.

But rediscovering it now, I realized that it's sort of related to the lyrics.  The actual concern in the song isn't really defined since the speaker/singer is trying to avoid talking about it, but his insistence to not talk about it suggests that it's important.  (At least, that's my understanding.)  And I think the whistling helps to indicate that.  It's the same sort of thing as in old movies and television shows where people start whistling to disguise the fact that they're nervous about something.

She & Him's "Silver Bells"

This morning I listened to She & Him's A Very She & Him Christmas.  (I'm not one of those overly-enthusiastic-for-holidays people; I'm going alphabetically and just happen to be in the Vs.  Although, coincidentally, the album was released to-day three years ago.)

In any case, I found some interesting structural things in "Silver Bells," which I don't think is limited to just She & Him's version.  In the first line of each stanza, there's a repeated word that appears in similar phrases - sidewalks in the first stanza ("City sidewalks, busy sidewalks") and lights in the second ("City street lights, even stop lights").  And then in the third line, there's the same structure, but instead of the same word, there's a pair of words that rhyme (or almost rhyme) - "Children laughing, people passing" in the first stanza and "Hear the snow crunch, see the kids bunch" in the third.

Additionally, the last lines of both stanzas are sort of similar in structure ("And on every street corner you’ll hear" and "And above all the bustle you’ll hear"), specifically with regard to every and all.  Both lines have to lead into the chorus ("Silver bells / Silver bells..."), so it's not too surprising that they're similar, but it's not something I'd paid attention to earlier.

The Coasters' "Little Egypt"

I already wrote a post about the Coasters compilation album I listened to this morning, but I found enough to say about "Little Egypt" that I felt I should make it a separate post.

At first, all I was going to say was that Leiber and Stoller use the phrase "one thin dime" again.  ("Just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar, step right up, folks")  It also appears in "On Broadway."  ("One thin dime won't even shine your shoes.")

I actually don't know much about "On Broadway," but according to internet research, it was written by Leiber and Stoller along with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.  It's possible that Mann and Weil came up with the line while writing "On Broadway," and then Leiber and Stoller later used it in "Little Egypt."  I don't know how the chronology fits into this either.  ("Little Egypt" was released in April 1961.)

But because I'm transcribing the lyrics for the songs whose lyrics I comment on, I found some other interesting things:

There's some opposites in the line "They pulled the curtain up and when they turned a spotlight way down low."

There's a fair amount of alliteration in some lines:  "Little Egypt came out strutting, wearing nothing but a button and a bow," "She had a ruby on her tummy and a diamond big as Texas on her toe," and "When she did her special number on a zebra skin I thought she’d stop the show."

And, finally, there's some internal rhyme in a line in the last verse:  "She’s too busy mopping and a-takin’ care of shoppin’ at the store."

The Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9"

This morning I listened to a compilation album of The Coasters, which also includes two songs by The Robins (an earlier group that evolved into the Coasters).  I found "Riot in Cell Block #9" interesting because of the connections it has to Ritchie Valens' "Framed," which I listened to a few days ago on a compilation album of Valens (I'm in the midst of the The Very Best of albums).  While listening to "Framed," I noticed some musical similarity between it and "Riot in Cell Block #9" - specifically that both songs are built around a riff that separates each line of the verses.  Both also have repetitious choruses and feature verses that - aside from the punctuating riff - are unaccompanied by any instruments (or mostly unaccompanied, there's slight percussion throughout the verses in "Framed").  So I noticed that they were similar, but I didn't think any more about it.

But then I listen to "Riot in Cell Block #9," and the first line is "On July the 2nd, 1953."  That was pretty good evidence for the two songs' being related since "Framed" contains the line "He says, 'Where were you on the night of July 1953?'"  Both songs are musically similar, refer to July 1953, and mention law enforcement in one form or an-other.

But then I looked up the publication data and discovered that both were written by Leiber and Stoller, so the two songs are irrefutably related.  They both seem to have the same setting, although the singer/speaker couldn't be the same in both.

Judy Collins' "Farewell to Tarwathie"

Yester-day when I listened to that Judy Collins album, I noticed a small detail in "Farewell to Tarwathie."  The song starts and ends with the same stanza (although the ending stanza has "we" where the opening one has "I"), and the first two lines of that stanza exhibit structural parallelism:

Farewell to Tarwathie, adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimond, I bid you farewell

The first line shows this more than the second, but each section ("Farewell to Tarwathie," "Adieu Mormond Hill," and "The dear land of Crimond, I bid you farewell") says goodbye to a particular place, just using different ways of saying goodbye and - obviously - different places.

Judy Collins' "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)"

I just listened to a compilation album of Judy Collins.  While I'm more familiar with the Byrds' version of "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)," Judy Collins articulates some of the lines differently, which got me thinking about these lines:

A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

From hearing the Byrds' version, I'd always thought that these lines meant that there is a time when embracing is allowed and a time when it should be avoided, but because Collins articulates them differently (she emphasizes may), I realized that they could mean something else - that there's a time that you'll want to be a part of and a time that you won't want to be a part of.  In some ways, it's similar to the carpe diem idea.  There are some days where you'll want to seize the day and some days where you won't.

It's interesting how the articulation of the lyrics can draw out these different meanings.