"Too Late"

In "Too Late," one of the "late"s (at ~3:56) is sung with a melisma (A F#), musically giving a sense of degree (for "too").

"Too Late"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I listened to Gaudi this morning and discovered a few things.  I'm going to separate them into a few posts over the next couple of days.

The Gaudi album is about Antoni Gaudi, whom I don't really know anything about, but in skimming the Wikipedia article about him, I learned that he put religious images in his work.  The Alan Parsons Project did the same thing in at least one of the songs on Gaudi.

Last year, I read John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and learned that Bach inscribed crosses in one of his cantatas.  I tried scanning the page in Gardiner's book where he has the notation, but - while legible - it didn't turn out too well:

This same type of cross inscription is present in the recurring guitar phrase in "Too Late."

I had to squish the notation a bit in order to point it out, and since I did the notation myself, it's possible that I don't have the rhythms right.

I looked at the lyrics to see if there was anything that would confirm this (instead of its just being coincidental), and while I didn't find anything, I did notice an interesting bit of alliteration in the lines:

How do you feel when the tables have been turned?
What will you do now the bridges have been burned?

These lines take advantage of the alliteration in two common phrases: "the tables have turned" and "burning bridges."