"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.

---

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").