Changes for 2016

I'm bringing this blog out of hibernation because I'll be doing Collection Audit again in 2016 (I've been doing it every other year since 2008).  I'm really glad I started writing posts about things I noticed while listening to my entire collection (even if some of those posts are now rather embarrassing and seem ignorant) because it's started something that I consistently do on my regular music blog.  Throughout 2015, I wrote at least a post a week about something musical.

Hopefully, through writing about music so much, I've gotten better at it, and there are a few things that I'm going to change about this project:

• I'm not going to mention alliteration, parallelism, et cetera unless it's significant.  It's tedious if I point them out just for the sake of pointing them out, but if they add to the lyrics in some way, then I'll be sure to mention it.
• I'm going to make individual posts for individual songs.  When I did this project last year, there were a few times where I had things to say about two songs on an album, and even though what I had to say about one song wasn't related to the other, I put them both in the same post.  It's not such a big deal on the tumblr version (because I didn't include titles there), but on the Blogger version, the titles could be misconstrued as a comparison of the two songs.  Essentially, I'm splitting up my posts so that the titles are easier to understand.

I might not have to do this, but I've come up with a plan of what to do if I don't make it through my entire collection (of which there's a greater possibility every year because I keep getting more music).  I'll still try to get as far as I can, but when the year ends, I'll end the project and then just continue where I left off the next time the project starts again.

Success!

I just listened to the last disc of the Zombies' Zombie Heaven, which is the last thing I have in my collection.  So I've finished this project for this year!

Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" and "Summertime"

For each of the past three days, I listened to a disc of a three-CD compilation of Sam Cooke titled You Send Me.  I found some interesting things in two of the songs.

"You Send Me" has some interesting articulation.  The "in-" in "infatuation" is stressed instead of the "fa," but I think that's just to make the meter of the line work.  In the same part, the "so" in the line "But, ooh, it’s lasted so long" is drawn out to three syllables, to sort of show how long it's lasted.  And when Cooke sings "marry you," the rest of the instrumentation drops out so that he sings the line almost a cappella, which could represent the seriousness or finality of marriage.

I also found some interesting stuff in his version of Gershwin's "Summertime."  Apparently Cooke recorded more than one version; "Summertime" is included on an-other Sam Cooke compilation album I have, but it's a different recording (the You Send Me set also contains a different take of "Win Your Love for Me," which is distinct in that there are no backing vocals and the bass is more prominent in the mix).  In any case, in the version of "Summertime" in the You Send Me set, Cooke takes some of the phrases from the first two verses and combines them in some phrases that he sticks between the second and third verses.  He takes "don't cry" from the end of the first verse and combines it with "they're standin' by" from the end of the second to get:

They’re standin’ by so don’t cry
They’re standin’ by; don’t cry

Not only does it tie the song together by strengthening the connection between those two verses, but it also points out the rhyme scheme used in the song.

"The Red Baron" from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.  I'd never noticed that in the piano part in "The Red Baron," there's a brief quotation of the song "Over There."  The only version of "Over There" I have is by Glenn Miller, but apparently it was written during and for World War I, so it does fit chronologically.

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."

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.