Argent's "Pleasure"

I just listened to a compilation album of Argent (Greatest: The Singles Collection).  I'd previously noticed the melisma'd "rain" in the line "Falling rain to cool my aching face" in "Pleasure," but I'd failed to realize that - because the notes are descending (F# E D# C# B, I think) - the melisma helps to convey that the rain is falling.

Rod Argent's Classically Speaking

This morning I listened to some excerpts of Grieg's lyric pieces for piano.  I'm most familiar with the first piece of the first book (Op. 12: I. Arietta) via Rod Argent's recording on Classically Speaking.  Although this was an album entirely of Grieg pieces, after the Arietta, I expected to hear Chopin's Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12 because that's the second track on Argent's Classically Speaking.  I started wondering about the transition between the two pieces and thought there was something more to the relationship between them than just my familiarity with that particular sequencing.

I lookt up the notation for Grieg's Arietta and discovered that it's in Eb major.  As the title of the Chopin piece would suggest, it's in C minor.  C minor and Eb major are relative keys.  Their scales contain all the same notes; they just start in different places.  My expecting the Chopin piece after the Grieg piece revealed a clever bit of sequencing on Argent's part.  There's a relatively smooth transition between the two pieces because they have similar tonalities.

Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"

I'm currently listening to a compilation album of Chuck Berry (The Great Twenty-Eight).  Some of these songs are ones that I've started transcribing, so I'm making some progress on those.  I discovered something about a line in "Johnny B. Goode."  I'd always understood the last line of the first verse as "But he could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell," meaning that Johnny B. Goode could play guitar with the same ease with which anyone can play a bell, an extremely easy instrument to play.  However, in looking over my transcription, I realized that it could also be "But he could play a guitar just like a ring in a bell," meaning that he has an inherent ability.  Both are grammatically viable, but I think I actually like the second parsing better, since that inherent ability seems to be what the rest of the song is getting at.

The Lemon Pipers' "Through with You"

I just listened to an-other compilation album of the Lemon Pipers.  Because I wrote about "Through with You" back in February, I thought I should transcribe the lyrics, and in doing so, I found something else:  the melody (of both the lead and harmony vocals) for "My yellow sun has gone down, has gone down" descends:

(click here for a larger image)

Carpenters' "Maybe It's You"

I'm currently listening to the first disc of the Carpenters' Gold album.  I'm pretty familiar with this album, but I noticed something new about "Maybe It's You."  After the line "Couldn't we stay and watch the splashing rocks we throw" at about 1:20, there's an ascending phrase on what I think is electric piano, to represent the skipping rocks musically.  However, I don't think that element is present when that line is repeated at the end of the song.

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.

Mel Tormé's "A Foggy Day"

I'm still making my way through my ten-CD Gershwin set.  To-day, it's the penultimate disc, subtitled "Gershwin in Jazz."  I might have noticed something about Mel Tormé's "A Foggy Day," although I'm not quite sure about it.

At about 0:15, there's a woman's voice saying, "Cockles and mussels."  I think this is a reference to the folk song "Molly Malone," the chorus of which also involves "cockles and mussels."  Each verse of "Molly Malone" ends with some variation of "Through streets broad and narrow / Cryin', 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh,'" and the chorus is comprised of the same words:

'Alive, alive, oh
'Alive, alive, oh'
Cryin’, 'Cockles and mussels
'Alive, alive oh'

Leaving it at that, it seems to make sense, but the first line of "A Foggy Day" is "A foggy day in London town" (my emphasis), where "Molly Malone" is set in Ireland.  Since it's a folk song, there are different versions, but the two I know (one by the Countdown Singers and one by Pete Seeger) both start with something like "In Dublin's fair city / Where the girls are so pretty / I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone."  Were it not for that discrepancy of setting, I'd be more confident about this reference.

Ray LaMontagne's "Meg White"

This morning I also listened to Ray LaMontagne's Gossip in the Grain.  This is just a minor point (and I'm surprised I never noticed it earlier), but the "down"s in the recurring line "And watch the sun goin' down" is sung to two notes (F# to E), so - musically - it's descending just like the sun in the line.

Tim Buckley's "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain"

This morning I listened to Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello.  I think the last two or three times I listened to it, I felt that something was off in a verse of "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain," and this morning I finally figured out what it is.  There's a slant rhyme in the first two lines of the third verse:

She says your scoundrel father flies with a dancer called the queen
And with her stolen cards he plays and laughs but never wins

"Queen" and "wins" don't really rhyme, and that bit of jarring seems to help illustrate the "never win[ning]."

When I transcribed this, I noticed something else too:  the grammar in "And with her stolen cards he plays" could be parsed in two different ways.  Taking it out of the inversion helps distinguish them.  It could be either "He plays with her stolen cards" [pronoun][verb][preposition][possessive adjective][adjective][object of the preposition] or "He plays stolen cards with her" [pronoun][verb][adjective][object][preposition][object of the preposition].

Ben Selvin and His Orchestra's "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"

For the last week or so, I've been making my way through a 10-CD set of George Gershwin works.  To-day, it's disc 7, subtitled "The Later Broadway Musicals."  I'm actually not sure if I'd noticed this before or not, but I recognized a melodic phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" (performed by Ben Selvin and His Orchestra) that's also in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  After the initial "Oh gee! Oh gosh! Oh joy! Oh golly!," there's "Oh gee I'm happy 'cause my baby loves me."  The melody to which it's sung is something like this:

The same phrase (a half step higher) is in the Rhapsody in Blue.  In the recording I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's in the piano part at about 6:52.

I lookt up "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" in the index of Edward Jablonski's Gershwin: A Biography (which I actually haven't read yet) and found that it was written for Rosalie in late 1927.  The Rhapsody in Blue is from 1924, so it seems like Gershwin re-used that melody from the Rhapsody as an introductory phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"  Of course, there's also the possibility that this feature is unique to Selvin's version, but in either case, that melody came from the Rhapsody first.