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

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When I listened to The Turn of a Friendly Card two days ago, I got to wondering about the "wheel in perpetual motion" that's mentioned in "The Turn of a Friendly Card (Part One)" and "The Turn of a Friendly Card (Part Two)."

It's in the first verses of both songs.  Verse one of Part One:

There are unsmiling faces and bright plastic chains
And a wheel in perpetual motion
And they follow the races and pay out the gains
With no show of an outward emotion

Verse one of Part Two:

There are unsmiling faces in fetters and chains
On a wheel in perpetual motion
Who belong to all races and answer all names
With no show of an outward emotion

Since the whole album is about gambling and casinos, I thought at first that that "wheel in perpetual motion" was a roulette wheel.  But then I realized that it could also be the wheel of fortune.  I first learned about this in my Shakespeare class when we were going over tragedies.  The idea is that people are on a wheel that's turned by fortune, so at one point, someone might be on the top of the wheel and in good fortune, but then the wheel would turn, and he'd be somewhere else is worse fortune.

Judging by the context in "The Turn of a Friendly Card (Part Two)," specifically the "faces in fetters and chains / On a wheel," the wheel of fortune makes more sense than a roulette wheel.  The song itself deals with luck and chance (fortune) more than roulette.  Cards are mentioned in the lines "your whole world depends / On the turn of a friendly card," and while I don't really know anything about roulette, I do know that cards aren't used.

Still, within just that line, the "wheel in perpetual motion" is an ambiguous image that could be a roulette wheel or the wheel of fortune.

"Games People Play"

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Yester-day, I listened to The Turn of a Friendly Card.  I listened for parts I thought would be easy to figure out, and I think I just sussed out the phrase that cycles throughout "Games People Play."  Because of the speed at which it's played, I'm pretty sure it's a loop.  I don't think a person could play it at that speed and not mess up (which is why I'm not even going to attempt to record an example).  I'm fairly certain it's the same four notes (B, D, F#, B') for the whole song (except for when the loop is faded out in the middle).

"I'd Rather Be a Man"

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I listened to Eve to-day, and I found what I think is a self-referential line in "I'd Rather Be a Man."

According to the APP website, the last line is "I'd rather be a man cause I wouldn't wanna be like you," which has the same phrase that recurs in "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" from I Robot.

"Breakdown"

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While listening to I Robot yester-day, I remembered something I'd noticed earlier about "Breakdown."

The second verse starts with the lines "Any time it happened I'd get over it / With a little help from all my friends," which is either a pretty obvious reference to some lines from the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends" ("I get by with a little help from my friends") or an incredible coincidence.  Since Alan Parsons had some experience working with the Beatles (as a tape operator during Let It Be and Abbey Road), I'd have more confidence in the former.

Pyramid

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I've been listening to one of the albums every Tuesday (going in chronological order and starting over with Tales of Mystery and Imagination after Gaudi), but I just got Pyramid on CD yester-day (I'd had it only as a record), so I'm switching this week (which was supposed to be I Robot) with next week.

"A Dream within a Dream"

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Listening to Tales of Mystery and Imagination earlier this week, I thought the recorder part in "A Dream within a Dream" sounded like it would be pretty easy to figure out, so I figured it out yester-day.

I actually have a recorder, but it doesn't sound like it should (I think there's dust in the fipple, and I'm either going to have it fixed or just get an-other one), so I did this with the fake recorder setting on my keyboard.  At some point though, I'm going to re-learn recorder and do it right.  This is only four notes, so it should be a pretty simple thing to start with.

"(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).

"The Tell-Tale Heart"

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I listened to Tales of Mystery and Imagination this morning, and I noticed that the bass part during the third part of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has a rhythm that evokes the heartbeat that the narrator of Poe's story and the singer of the song hear.  (This is not the most interesting audio example; it's pretty much just a minute of C notes, but the rhythm is the salient point.)

Last May, while doing a different project, I noted how the ABA form of the piece goes well with the mental states of the speaker/singer, but including that heartbeat rhythm makes it even better.  This isn't the only instance of a lyrically-conscious bass part on the album either; the bass part in "The Raven" has a three-note phrase that's apparently meant to resemble the three syllables of "nevermore."

Gaudi

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While listening to Gaudi earlier this week, I noticed a few lyrical/musical connections.

In "Standing on Higher Ground," some (but - interestingly - not all) of the "standing on higher ground" lines go upwards at the end.  "Ground" has a melisma, and the second syllable is higher, apparently to reflect the difference in elevation.  I actually didn't notice this until I tried to record a version of it yester-day.

In "Money Talks," after the line "You roll the dice," there are rapid hammer-ons and pull-offs in the guitar part, apparently to reflect the tumbling of the dice.

"Standing on Higher Ground"

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Like the crosses inscribed in the guitar part in "Too Late," I'd thought I'd found an-other hidden religious element in "Standing on Higher Ground."  I'd thought that the synth bass part was just three notes (three is an important number in Christianity), but then I learned that part and discovered that it's more than three notes.  So while I was wrong, I still learned part of "Standing on Higher Ground."

However, when I tried recording a version, it ended up sounding terrible.  I couldn't match the tone of the synth, plus I had to play it manually instead of programming it (I have yet to learn how to program things), so the tempo varied a bit.

So I know that synth bass part, the two four-note phrases, and the chords, but until I become more experienced with synthesizers, I won't have a recording to prove it.

"Too Late"

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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."

"No Answers Only Questions"

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This morning, I listened to Vulture Culture.  I have the version with bonus tracks, including "No Answers Only Questions."  I noticed something interesting in this verse:

Why do we fight?
Why do we fall?
Why do we stand there, backs against the wall?
Why don't we change?
Why don't we try?
Why don't we turn round, help the other guy?

These are the lyrics as they're rendered on the APP website, but because of homophones, that third line could also be written as "Why do we stand their backs against the wall?"  "There" changes to "their," and "stand" becomes transitive where before it was intransitive, along with other shifts in syntactical function.

I think that - rendered that second way - it still makes sense within the song.  Instead of asking "Why are we disengaged?" (or "inactive" or "passive" or whatever other word you want to use) it asks, "Why are we scrutinizing others?" which seems to be only a shade away from the first line in the verse ("Why do we fight?").