Monday, July 26, 2021

"Cubist Town"

In the line "I go outside where darkness sets me free" in "Cubist Town," "free" is sung with a melisma (C Db C Bb C, I think).  Since the word isn't constrained to a single pitch, there's a sense of its meaning.

In the line "But music filled my mind, and they passed by," "by" is sung with a melisma (C A F), musically giving a sense of movement.

Monday, July 19, 2021

"Each and Every Day"

The line "Daytime, nighttime" in "Each and Every Day" is a merism.

There are some more interesting features in this section, however:
Got a feelin' goin' for each other, yeah
I could never leave her for another girl
Always miles away, we're in another world
And I love her, yes, I love her
In the same way that the narrator doesn't need or want "another girl," the word "girl" here isn't really necessary.  "Another" rhymes with "other" from the previous line, so there's a poetic completion, and no sense would be lost if this line were simply "I could never leave her for another."  The Mellotron brass part literally underscores how that "girl" is out of place here.  Until that point, it plays on the downbeats, but coinciding with "girl," it switches and plays on the upbeat.

The same feature is also present in the next line:  "Always miles away, we're in another world."  Here, the Mellotron brass part switches to the upbeat on the word "world," and that change in the rhythm illustrates the "otherness."

Monday, July 12, 2021

"The Vicar's Daughter"

Although it doesn't affect the meaning very much, there's a grammatical ambiguity in the line "And I can see her smiling as I caught her" in "The Vicar's Daughter."  "Her smiling" could be parsed either as a possessive adjective modifying a gerund or a pronoun modified by a participle.

Monday, July 5, 2021

"Happy Families (with Ed. Garvey & the Trio)"

At the beginning of "Happy Families (with Ed. Garvey & the Trio)," the announcer who introduces the band mentions "the Omar Khayyam room."  I don't know if this is an actual place, but Omar Khayyam was a real person.  He was a Persian poet and astronomer who lived from 1048 to 1131.