"One Good Reason"

I ran across the phrase "one good reason" yester-day, which reminded me of the Alan Parsons Project song.  This morning, I figured out the chord progression in order to confirm a suspicion I had.  Unless I'm mistaken, the chords for the verses are something like this (with vertical lines dividing the measures):

C major | C major | C major | C major

C major | C major | C major | C major

Eb major | Eb major | F major | F major

Ab major | F major | C major | C major

C major occurs far more frequently than any other chord, and it's the only chord for the first two lines, where it's held for eight sequential measures.  Because the songs stays on just one chord for so long, there's a sense of the singularity of "one good reason."  Alternatively, there's a sense of the stalled nature of the exchange, with the narrator refusing to do anything until he receives this "one good reason."

This same sort of feature is also present in the coda, where the phrase "one good reason" is repeated over a C major chord.

Pyramid

I was thinking about Pyramid yester-day and realized that it (and "Pyramania" in particular) has an appropriate theme for the Alan Parsons Project's third album since pyramids have three edges (when viewed from the side, at least).

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

I listened to The Turn of a Friendly Card yester-day to mark Eric Woolfson's eightieth birthday, and I noticed some significance in the structure of the lyrics in the title tracks (part one and part two), specifically in the lines "But the game never ends when your whole world depends / On the turn of a friendly card."  The sense is spread across the line break, so the listener is left waiting for the line "On the turn of a friendly card" to complement "depends" and finish the meaning.  To some degree, this structure (with the second line necessary to make sense of the first) matches the "depend[ency]" in the lyrics.