"Nothing Left to Lose"

I recently got a Hammond SKX.  It has more accordion sounds than I could probably ever use, and/so I felt that the first thing I record with it should use an accordion sound.

Here's the accordion solo in "Nothing Left to Lose."  I used the A-120 accordion sound, with the |:| symbol.  To give it some context, I played the bass part on the lower manual (using the SKX's Fender Piano Bass sound).  I'm fairly confident in the accuracy of the part itself and my notation, but I may have something wrong.

To-day's also Eric Woolfson's birthday.

"Light of the World"

I recently ran across a reference to "You are the light of the world" from Matthew 5:14.  Later, it occurred to me that the phrase "light of the world" is also in an Alan Parsons Project song (the title phrase, even).

When I lookt at the lyrics, I noticed the line "I am just a stranger in a promised land," and I realized that this bears some resemblance to part of Exodus 2:22:  "I have been a stranger in a strange land."  "Strange land" from Exodus has just been replaced with "promised land," which also has Biblical connotations.

"What Goes Up"

Yester-day, I came across the maxim "what goes up must come down" in a book I'm reading.  Of course, this reminded me of "What Goes Up," and I realized that the caesura in title line (the small break between "what goes up" and "must come down") creates a bit of suspense as the listener waits for the line to be completed.

"I Don't Wanna Go Home"

Last night, I was thinking about "I Don't Wanna Go Home," specifically a line at the end of the first verse:  "You should have stayed on the outside (Lookin' in)."  As the parentheses indicate, the "lookin' in" is sung by a different voice.  Because there are two different vocal parts here, there's a sense of separation (which the narrator is retrospectively wishing for).

"Breakdown"

Last week, I figured out the chords for "Breakdown."  I think they're something like:

|: A major | G major | F major | A major :|

|: D minor | C major | A major :|

|: G major | A major :|

And during the guitar solo and the coda:

|: A major | G major | A major :|

Nominally, this is in A major, but aside from A major itself, all of these chords have at least one accidental.  To some degree, these accidentals indicate the sentiments in the song:  "I breakdown in the middle and lose my thread... Nothing I try to do can work the same way."

"The Gold Bug"

I listened to The Turn of a Friendly Card yester-day (on vinyl), and then I learned a section of the saxophone part in "The Gold Bug" (roughly from ~1:34 to ~2:06).  I'd previously figured out some of the bass part, so I felt it merited a recording:

I used the Mellotron saxophone sound on my keyboard; it's the best I could do.

"P-Q3"

I listened to The Sicilican Defence this morning and noticed a particular synthesizer phrase in "P-Q3."  It starts at ~2:36 and is something like:

There's a ritardando beginning around the seventh measure, and I'm not sure of the note value of that last F.

Some of the phrases in this melody (measures one, three, and five) alternate between progressively lower notes and notes of a fixed pitch.  I think this is a feature from baroque music, although the only specific piece that I know has this is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565.  Here it is (alternating with both descending and ascending notes) in the pedal part:

[source]

"Pyramania"

In the line "You can grow a hedge that is vertically straight over ten feet high" in "Pyramania," the phrase "ten feet high" is sung to a group of ascending notes (B C D), musically giving a sense of this height.

"What Goes Up"

I listened to Pyramid (on vinyl) yester-day and noticed a couple small things.

In "What Goes Up," there's alliteration in the line "How can you be so sure?"  This repetition illustrates the firmness of that certainty.

"The Cask of Amontillado"

While searching for an easy part to figure out yester-day, I noticed two small features in "The Cask of Amontillado," specifically in the line "When you're chained in the dark all alone."  "All alone" alliterates, and because there's only one initial sound, there's an illustration of that singularity.  "Alone" is sung with a melisma (Eb C D C Bb), musically giving a sense of degree (for "all").

Vulture Culture

I learned the word Ouroboros to-day.  It's "a circular symbol that depicts a snake or dragon devouring its own tail and that is used especially to represent the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth."  Of course, this made me think of the cover of Vulture Culture, which shows a variation of this symbol (with a vulture instead of a snake or dragon):

I'm not sure if "the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth" really applies to the album's concept though.  The liner notes of the CD re-issue describe the concept as "man's inhumanity to man."

"Stereotomy"

I was going through some old notes last night, and I found one about "Stereotomy" from 7 March that I'd forgotten about.  Almost all of the "Turn me to stone" lines are sung to a single pitch:  the first two (at ~1:35) are sung to F notes, and the later two (at ~5:10) are sung to A notes.  (The last two [at ~5:37] are both sung to more than one pitch).  This constancy of pitch musically represents the immobility of being a stone.