"Ask No Questions"

In "Ask No Questions," "ev'rything" in the line "In your eyes, I see ev'rything" is sung with a melisma (B C B A G), giving a sense of breadth.

"Avalanche"

I listened to Keats last week and noticed small features in a couple songs.

In "Avalanche," "more" in the line "And we'll be hurt by love some more" in the section starting at ~3:00 is sung with a melisma (D C Bb A), giving a sense of its meaning.

"Let's Talk about Me"

Yester-day, I ran across the word ouroboros, which reminded me of Vulture Culture.  As I was thinking about "Let's Talk about Me," I realized that there's significance to the moment at ~0:44 where almost all of the instruments and the "oral rendition" drop out, leaving only a piano and the lead vocal.  When these other elements are suddenly stripped away, the vocal becomes the focus, and this matches the sentiment in the lyrics there:  "Let's talk about me for a minute."

"One Good Reason"

I was thinking about "One Good Reason" yester-day and noticed a small feature in the bridge.  There's anaphora (the repeated "no") in the line "No win, no lose, no give, and no take," and this provides a sense of the sameness that's mentioned in the previous line:  "I keep making the same mistake."

"The Same Old Sun"

I was thinking about "The Same Old Sun" yester-day and realized that near the end of the lines "And the moon would rise way over my head" and "And the clouds will rise way over my head," the vocal part moves to a higher register, giving a sense of the height of "way over my head."

The lines are sung to phrases something like these (the pitches for both are the same, but the rhythm is slightly different the second time):

(I'm not completely sure on the key.)

While doing the notation, it also occurred to me that there are ascents in the melody corresponding to "moon would rise" and "clouds will rise" (D F Bb), musically illustrating that "ris[ing]."

"Secret Garden"

Last fall, I learned some parts for the middle section of "Secret Garden" (piano, Clavinet, and bass).  I kept either forgetting or not having enough time to record an example of what I'd learned, but I finally got around to it a couple days ago.

For the bass part, I referenced the rough mix that's included as a bonus track on the CD (because the bass part is much easier to hear there), but inexplicably, this middle section is eight measures longer in the final version.

I think the two hands in the Clavinet part play the same thing an octave apart, aside from a few notes that are tenths (at ~1:23 in my recording, ~3:23 in the actual track).

At some point, it also occurred to me that the structure of "Secret Garden" illustrates the title.  The middle section is slower and generally less involved than the bookending sections, and these differences hint at a sort of seclusion.  It's similar to what I wrote about in "The Tell-Tale Heart" a number of years ago, although here it's purely instrumental.

"Sirius"

A couple months ago, I watched this interview with Alan Parsons.  Starting at ~17:34, he briefly talks about how he wrote the riff in "Sirius" using a Clavinet sample on the Fairlight.  I think I figured out this part last night.  Much of it is characterized by the delay that Alan mentions, and I don't really have a way to duplicate this, so I'm not sure if what I have is the entirety of the part, but it's at least something like this:

Some of these intervals seemed familiar to me, and I realized that they're basically the same as those in "Day after Day (The Show Must Go On)," played on what the APP website calls "jangle piano."  It's also doubled with a synthesizer.  These phrases repeat through much of the verse:

The phrases in the two songs begin in different places and have a different number of notes, but each consists of a root note, the fourth, the fifth, and the octave.  In "Sirius," the order is fourth, fifth, octave, root (with the seventh substituted for the octave every other time); in "Day after Day," it's octave, fifth, fourth, root, fourth, fifth.  Obviously, the parts aren't the same, but they do have the same sort of musical vocabulary.

"Don't Answer Me"

Yester-day was the fortieth anniversary of the release of Ammonia Avenue.  I listened to the album and started wondering whether the three syllables of "ev'ryone" in the line "Run away and hide from ev'ryone" in "Don't Answer Me" are sung to all different pitches.  This turned out not to be the case (the pitches are G Ab G), but after looking into this, I had a different realization.  Under the lines "Run away and hide from ev'ryone / Can you change the things we've said and done?," the chord progression includes two Bb majors.  Since the song is in C major, the root of Bb major is an accidental, and this foreign tone provides something of a sense of the distance involved in "run[ning] away" and of that "chang[ing]."  In the vocal line above this, there are also some accidentals (Eb and Ab) that contribute to this effect.

"Don't Hold Back"

Recently, I learned the bass part for a section of "Don't Hold Back."  I'd already learned the chords, so I could put the two together and make a short recording.  This is the verse starting at ~2:31, the first half of which is the guitar solo.  The other verses are almost the same; the last two measures are all that's different.

"Damned If I Do"

I listened to Eve yester-day and noticed an interesting feature in "Damned If I Do":  after the line "But each time you walk away," there's a diatonically ascending phrase in the electric piano part (G A Bb C D Eb), and because it's step-wise, there's a musical sense of this "walk[ing]."

"Pyramania"

I listened to Pyramid yester-day and noticed an interesting feature in the verses of "Pyramania," particularly the second verse.  The meaning kind of spills over the line breaks, so I'm not sure about the best way to format it, but it's something like:

I've been told someone in the know can be sure that his luck is as

Good as gold, money in the bank, and you don't even pay for it

If you fold, a dollar in the shape of the pyramid that's printed on the back

There are a number of groups of three here.  The three-syllable clauses or phrases "I've been told," "Good as gold," and "If you fold" are each set apart from the rest of the line because they rhyme with each other and because they're sung with longer note values (usually two quarter notes and a half note, in contrast to the multiple eighth notes that follow).  Unique to the second verse, these three syllables are also three individual words, and, of course, there are also three lines in the verse (as I've formatted it, at least).

These various threes in the structure of the verses reflect the three sides of the pyramid, which is the theme of the song.

"The Turn of a Friendly Card (Part One)"

Recently, a clip from an interview with Sally Woolfson was posted on the Alan Parsons Project's social media accounts.  (Here are the links to Twitter and Instagram, and here are links to the first and second parts of the full interview [from 2020] on YouTube.)  "The Turn of a Friendly Card (Part One)" is used as background music in the clip, and while listening to it, I realized that in the lines "And not all the king's horses and all the king's men / Have prevented the fall of the unwise," the phrases "all the king's horses" and "all the king's men" are sung to notes of all different pitches (F E D C A and D C Bb A, respectively).  This provides a sense of the entirety and breadth of those "all"s.