"Limelight"

Last week I learned the bass part* for "Limelight," but because that's the only part of the song I know, I didn't bother recording it.  I did notate it though.  The standard disclaimers that this isn't official and that I might be wrong apply:

While notating this, I found a few parts that connect to the lyrics.

For the line "Holding on isn't always easy" (later "Holding on wasn't always easy"), there are rests, almost as if the music can't hold on either:

For the second line in that couplet, "I ain't gonna change my mind" (later "Nothing can change my mind"), the bass plays only Bb notes.  There's a constancy of pitch, reflecting the determination in those sentiments:

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*There are actually two bass parts in "Limelight."  In the "credits" section on the APP website, there's the distinction between just "bass" (played by David Paton) and "fretless bass" (played by Ian Bairnson).  On the CD re-issue of Keats, there's a bonus track that's an interview with Bairnson, and in response to the interviewer's question about his bass playing, he says:

You do actually hear some of my bass playing from time to time, for example on "Limelight," an Alan Parsons track.  David played bass on that, but after he'd left and gone home, I was in doing [the] guitar solo and bits and pieces like that, and at the very end of the song "Limelight," there's that kind of piece where it, where the tempo disappears.  You know, it's just, just before the last line: "After all the years of waiting..." da di da di da.  That stuff.  And Alan said, "Oh, we need something in these gaps," so we hired a fretless bass, and I played the bass licks in between these bits.

I haven't learned that part yet; what I notated above is David Paton's bass track.

"Light of the World"

Earlier this evening, I learned the opening piano part and the bass and guitar parts for the verses of "Light of the World."  In my recording, I have just one verse of the bass and guitars, but I think the other verses are the same.  If anything, there are just some differences in the rhythm of the bass part.

While learning these parts, I found an-other reference I'd missed:  in the third verse, there's the line "I can fly so close to the sun, that I cannot see it rise."  It's a reference to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun so that the wax that held his wings together melted and he fell into the sea.  I think this phrase is all there is to the reference though; there doesn't seem to be anything else about Icarus in the song.

"In The Real World"

This morning I listened to Stereotomy, and I noticed the line "Too many windmills in my way" in "In the Real World."  I'm pretty sure this is a reference to Don Quixote.  It's been a few years since I read Don Quixote (and even then, it was just excerpts in a literature class), but the episode with the windmill is pretty widely known anyway (there's a whole Wikipedia page about it).  At the beginning of the story, Don Quixote reads too many old stories about knights.  He starts to think that he himself is a knight and goes on various imagined adventures.  During one of these adventures, he attacks a windmill, thinking it's a giant.

In "In the Real World," there's the recurring line "Don't wanna live my life in the real world," which sort of describes the same situation Don Quixote is in:  living in an imagined version of the real world, rather than the real world itself.  Although, if I remember aright, Don Quixote isn't aware that what he's imagining isn't real.

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In referencing the lyrics in the liner notes of the CD, I discovered that while the title is "In the Real World" on the back of the case and on the CD itself, in the liner notes, it appears as just "The Real World":

"May Be a Price to Pay"

 A couple weeks ago, I learned the opening brass part and most of the bass part (I haven't figured out all of the subtleties) for "May Be a Price to Pay."  (I was sort of dismayed to find that - if I have it right - the opening brass part has parallel fifths, which are generally frowned upon.)  However, I didn't record what I knew because those two parts don't overlap, and I decided that from now on, I'm not going to bother recording anything unless I know at least two simultaneous parts.  So yester-day, I figured out some more parts.  First I got the brass part in the middle, which is basically the same as some of the guitar and piano parts, and then I got a few more of the guitar and piano parts.  I think the guitar and piano parts during the verses play pairs of notes, of which I have only one, but it's a start.

Of the instrumental section, I know only the bass part, so that's not that interesting in my recording.  I think I flubbed a few notes there too, but when I tried to re-record that part, I was doing even worse than what I was trying to improve upon, so I just left it.  I had problems with matching the rhythm of the opening brass part too.  It's probably pretty obvious, but I used the fake trumpet setting on my keyboard.

Re-Establishment

About two years ago, I started a project in which the goal was to learn every part to every song by the Alan Parsons Project (later I added the side-project Keats too).  I don't think I ever thought I would actually achieve this (and I still don't), but I thought it a worthy objective all the same.

I started this project on tumblr, but recently I've started to feel dissatisfied with it.  I felt I should have a cleaner, more professional-looking platform.  (I found some aspects of tumblr's interface less than ideal too.)  Initially, I went with tumblr only because I could directly post audio files of my own recordings of the songs, as a way to demonstrate that I had in fact learned the parts I said I had.  But I can achieve the same thing just with embedded YouTube videos.

So essentially, I'm jumping ship.  I'm going to continue doing everything I would normally do for this project, just on Blogger rather than on tumblr.  I'll be going back and copying my old posts over to this blog, so I'll have the complete archive, but it'll take a while to transfer everything.

"Dancing on a Highwire"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Yester-day I learned the guitar arpeggios and the bass part for the introduction of "Dancing on a Highwire" (on Ammonia Avenue).  I tried figuring out these guitar arpeggios a few months ago without any luck, so it was good to finally get them.