"The Same Old Sun"

Yester-day, I was thinking about the vocal melody in "The Same Old Sun" and noticed a small but significant contrast between different sections.

The first section ("Tell me what to do / Now the light in my life is gone from me...") is sung to a melody something like this:

The following section ("Taking my life / One day at a time / Cause I can't think what else to do...") is sung to a melody something like this:

The first section has a considerable number of sixteenth notes, but the following section includes longer note values, the longest of which are half notes tied to eighth notes.  This increase in note duration musically demonstrates "Taking some time / To make up my mind."

When I did the notation, I noticed that the melody is slightly different when this section is repeated:

There's a longer pause between "Taking some time" and "To make up my mind" (in the fifth measure), and this also illustrates the meaning of those lyrics.

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For what it's worth:  I wrote about a different aspect of the vocal melody in "The Same Old Sun" back in May.

"Hawkeye"

About five years ago, I had a vague feeling that some of the saxophone part in "Hawkeye" was similar to a part in a Paul McCartney song.  I listened to Vulture Culture a few days ago and finally placed what I was thinking of.

At ~2:20 in "Hawkeye," the saxophone starts playing something like this, which repeats until the end of the song:

There are some similarities between this and the vocal chant ("Ho hey ho / Ho hey ho...") in Paul McCartney & Wings' "Mrs. Vandebilt" on Band on the Run:

(This also appears near the end of "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)," albeit a whole step lower.)

Each is an eight-measure section, and at the end of (almost) every other bar, there's a pair of descending eighth notes (always a fifth in "Hawkeye," but alternating between fourths and fifths in "Mrs. Vandebilt").

While there's a similarity between these two parts, I don't know if this is just coincidental or if it's an indication of Paul McCartney's influence (whether conscious or not).

One of the bonus tracks on the Vulture Culture CD is a demo version of "Hawkeye," and in the liner notes, Alan Parsons comments, "This is one of my demos," so I'm assuming he had more to do with this particular track than Eric Woolfson did.  Of course, Parsons workt with McCartney in the Beatles on Let It Be and Abbey Road and also on McCartney's Red Rose Speedway (the album before Band on the Run), and in this interview (in the section beginning ~21:04), he mentions being impressed with McCartney's musical ability (with particular reference to the Moog solo in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer").

"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]."