Monday, August 17, 2020

"Questions"

A couple months ago, I figured out and wrote down the bass part for "Questions."  Of course, there's the disclaimer that I may have something wrong:

Monday, August 10, 2020

"L.S.D."

About two months ago, I got a box set of the first seven Manfred Mann EPs.  On the back cover of the seventh EP (As Was), there's a description of how the band formed.  One of the sentences is "And it happened that they came one day upon the house of John the Burgess [their producer] who with soft words converted them to the cult of Elessdee."  At first, I thought this referred to the drug (L.S.D.), but then I remembered Brian Matthew's comment about the song "L.S.D." on the first Live at the BBC album:  "a cynical song about love of money, or as we call it, 'L.S.D.'"

Because of that added context (and because I happened to have read about British money around that time), I realized what "L.S.D." means.  Those letters are the abbreviations for "pounds," "shillings," and "pence."  They come from the Latin words libra, solidus, and denarius.

Monday, August 3, 2020

"Just Like a Woman"

In the lines "Ev'rybody knows that baby's got new clothes" in "Just Like a Woman," each of the four syllables of "Ev'rybody" is sung to a different pitch (C B A G), musically giving a sense of breadth.

While referencing the song in order to find those specific pitches, I also noticed that "fallen" in the lines "But lately I see her ribbons and her bows / Have fallen from her curls" is sung to two notes that form a fairly large descending interval (a fourth: E B), musically giving a sense of the word's meaning.

Both of these features are also present in Bob Dylan's version.