"Harry the One-Man-Band"

In the line "Anywhere the people are, Harry's sure to go" in "Harry the One-Man-Band," "go" is sung with a melisma (A G F), musically giving a sense of movement.

"Ha! Ha! Said the Clown"

In "Ha! Ha! Said the Clown," there's a particular sound under "this" in the line "In a while, run a mile, I'm regrettin' all this."  I'm pretty sure this is a Mellotron cello.  It seems that Mann pressed a key so that the note started, and then he turned the pitch knob so that the note goes up in pitch.  Whatever it is, this glissando-type effect illustrates the entirety of the "all" in "all this."

"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.

"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."

"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.

"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.

"It's So Easy Falling"

The repeated line "Falling in love with you" in the choruses of "It's So Easy Falling" is sung to a descending melody spanning an octave:  A G F F C Bb A ("love" is sung with a melisma [F C], and "you" is sung with a melisma the first time only [instead of the final A above, it's A Bb A G A]).  While "falling" is used metaphorically here, there's a sense of its meaning because of that descent.

"Run" in the line "I say that I can't take no more; I've said it more than once before, and I never run" is also sung with a melisma (D Bb C, I think), so while it's negated, there's a sense of movement.

"Country Dancing"

In the line "We'll make love through to the break of day" in "Country Dancing," "day" is sung with a melisma (C Bb Ab), so while it's used metaphorically, there is a representation of that "break[ing]."

"Everyday Another Hair Turns Grey"

At ~1:36 in "Everyday Another Hair Turns Grey," the last bit of "Ring around the Rosie" ("We all fall down") can be heard among the noises of children.

Side note:  the title should really read "Every Day Another Hair Turns Grey."  "Every day" functions adverbially; "everyday" is an adjective.  On this blog, however, I'm going to follow what's printed on the CD case and the original record sleeve.

"No Better No Worse"

I noticed a couple small features in "No Better No Worse."

In the line "Need I tell ya, they'll say you've broken ev'ry law," "law" is sung with a melisma (although the two pitches are the same:  Db).  Musically, then, there's a sense of being "broken."

In the chorus, the repeated "any man" is sung by a few different voices, and its syllables are all sung to different pitches (C B G).  Both of these features give a sense of the breadth of possibility of "any."

"Happy Families (with Eddie 'Fingers' Garvey)"

In the first iteration of "Happy Families" (with Eddie "Fingers" Garvey), some of the "family"s in the repeated phrase "one big happy family," are sung with various melismas, giving a sense of size (for "big").

Mighty Garvey!

I've had Mighty Garvey! for about a year now, and since I've become fairly familiar with the album, I'm going to write some posts about things I've noticed.  I wanted to write a more general post before going song by song, however.  I noticed a couple features on the album that - whether intentionally or coincidentally - are similar to elements on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I wanted to put all of these into a single post.

Like Billy Shears at the beginning of "With a Little Help from my Friends" and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band itself, Garvey is a figure that Manfred Mann can hide behind, and through his different personas, the band can try different styles.

Mighty Garvey! and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band also begin and end in similar manners.  At the beginning of the first song on each, there are sound effects to give the impression of a live performance, and at the end of each album, there's a loop of repeated sound.  According to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (entry for 21 April 1967, p. 109), the Beatles' "gibberish" was placed in the concentric run-out groove of the record.  Lewisohn writes that "People with automatic players would hear a quick burst of it before their pick-up arm returned to base, people without such luxurious equipment would find the noise in the concentric playing on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the arm was manually lifted off."  I don't know if the voices at the end of Mighty Garvey! are actually looped on the recording or whether - like the Beatles' gibberish - it's merely an apparent loop because of where the sound is placed on the record.  On the CD re-issues of the albums, however, the effect comes across as the same.