"The Raven"

I figured out the melody for the vocoder part in the first two verses of "The Raven" to-day* and noticed a motif.  I thought I'd mentioned this before, but I couldn't find it in any old posts: in the first verse the bass part has a three-note figure (usually A notes), which is apparently supposed to represent the three syllables of the raven's "Nevermore."  There are also three-note figures of the same pitch in the vocoder melody.

I might have the notes' positions within the measures wrong, but the first verse is something like:

The first measures in the second and fourth lines have three C notes and three A notes respectively.  Like the bass part, these three-note figures seem to represent (or maybe even foreshadow) the three-syllables of "Nevermore."  Additionally, that this vocoder melody and the bass part both have three-note figures of the same pitch gives the song some cohesion.

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*It wasn't until drafting this post that I discovered that I'd already figured it out once.  I'd forgotten it and hadn't written it down though, so it was like learning it from scratch.

"The Raven" and "Breakdown"

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Recently, I remembered something that I probably should have written about a few months ago.  Back in September, Alan Parsons posted a picture of a set list:

I noticed that he has "Breakdown/Raven."  I'm assuming that the slash indicates a transition from one to the other (like a medley), so it seems like he's aware that the same bass phrase is in both.  I figured this out and wrote about it last year, although where I was then just sort of suspicious that I had other sections wrong, now I'm pretty sure some of it's wrong.

"(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"

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This post contains some spoilers for the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

The other thing I noticed when I listened to Tales of Mystery and Imagination a few days ago is in "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."  I'd previously noted that the melody from "The Raven" appears near the end, but it wasn't until now that I realized the implications of its reappearance.

It's not really revealed in the APP song (although looking at the lyrics just now, I noticed that the line "At the far end of your tether" Spoonerizes "Tarr" and "Fether" to "far" and "tether" [albeit missing an R]), but in the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," the narrator comes across a party in a house, and he later discovers that the house is an asylum and that the party-goers are the inmates who have escaped their cells (I read it about two years ago, so I might have a few things wrong, but that's the basic story).

The significance here is that "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" involves an asylum.  Since the melody from "The Raven" reappears at the end of the APP song, it indicates either that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" was so overcome by the bird that he's now in the asylum or - based only on the APP lyrics and disregarding Poe's story - the titular system is something that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" is trying to benefit by.  Of course, it could be both too (or neither).

"Breakdown"

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After I learned the bass part for "The Raven" (part of it, anyway), I discovered a phrase in it that sounded familiar.  And eventually I realized that the same figure starts (and frequently recurs in) "Breakdown."  There are some parts in my recording that aren't very accurate, but most of it is pretty close.  Really, I just wanted to record a version to point out that phrase:

(I'm still not very good at reading music, but I think that's the right notation.)

What's interesting is that the bass parts for "The Raven" and "Breakdown" were played by different musicians.  Joe Puerta played bass on "The Raven," and David Paton played bass on "Breakdown."

"The Raven"

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I learned the bass part for the first section of "The Raven."  Some of the notes I'm not too sure about, and I think there's one phrase I'm missing completely (it's not as loud as the rest, so it's harder to figure out).  I also figured out a bit of the electric piano part.  While it follows the melody for most of this, there are some other notes to it that I haven't figured out yet (maybe parallel thirds?).

The rhythms sound a bit off in some places, but that's probably my fault.

I used the version from The Essential Alan Parsons Project as a template for this.  It differs slightly from the version on Tales of Mystery and Imagination in that there's a longer lead-in with the bass part.  On Tales of Mystery and Imagination, that bass part bridges "A Dream within a Dream" and "The Raven."