Sunday, March 31, 2019

"Since the Last Goodbye"

I listened to Ammonia Avenue (with bonus tracks) yester-day and discovered something about "Since the Last Goodbye."  In the version with Eric Woolfson's guide vocal, "fly" in the line "The hours, the minutes seem to fly" is sung with a melisma (D# C# A#), musically giving a sense of the passage of time.  In the final version, however, this feature isn't present.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

"Damned If I Do"

I figured out a couple parts from "Damned If I Do" this afternoon.  One of them was a guitar part from ~0:29 to ~0:37, which I don't think I'd even realized was there before.  In any case, the first three notes are the same as the famous phrase from Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (albeit adjusted for key).

Here's the guitar phrase (which I believe is played with harmonics and which I might have notated in the wrong octave):


The phrase from Also Sprach Zarathustra is C G C' in C major; this is G D G' in G minor.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

"You Lie Down with Dogs"

On Jeopardy! yester-day there was a clue stating that "He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas" is among "Ben Franklin's wisdom" in Poor Richard's Almanac.  The clue made it seem that Franklin coined this phrase, but according to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, it's a proverb dating from the late sixteenth century.  In any case, it got me thinking about "You Lie Down with Dogs" from Eve, and this morning I realized something about the line "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas," which occurs at the end of each chorus.

Generally, the melody to which "you lie down with dogs" is sung descends (aside from regularly dropping down to an F, it's a conjunct descent from Eb to Bb), and there's ascending interval of an octave at the end to represent the "get[ting] up with fleas."  I think it's something like:


(I'm not very confident in my accuracy of the rhythm, but I am pretty sure about the notes, which is what's relevant here.)