"Yellow Submarine"

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I listened to "Yellow Submarine" to-day so I could compare the spoken background parts to ELO's "New World Rising/Ocean Breakup Reprise," and I found some other things about "Yellow Submarine" itself.

The third verse is a line shorter than the other verses.  They're all four lines, but the third verse has only three:

And our friends are all aboard
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play

Of course, in lieu of that missing line, there's the brass band playing.

"As we live a life of ease / Every one of us has all we need" could be taken in two different ways.  It could be "Because we live a life of ease…" or "While we live a life of ease…".  It could be causal or temporal.

I think I noticed this one other time, but I certainly haven't written about it:  the last lines in the last verse form a progression of colors:  "Sky of blue and sea of green / In our yellow submarine."  Blue to green to yellow.

"Any Time at All"

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Early in this project, I started wondering why Paul McCartney sings the second "Any time at all" in "Any Time at All."  It seemed incongruous because John Lennon sings the whole song except for those lines.

Listening to it this time though, I remembered something that I read in The Beatles Anthology (or at least I think it was in The Beatles Anthology).  I can't seem to find it again (and I don't really want to re-read large sections in an effort to find it), but it was John Lennon's explaining that Paul McCartney sings the "When I'm home" sections in "A Hard Day's Night" because he (McCartney) has a higher voice.  I'm pretty sure that the McCartney-sung "Any time at all" is even higher, so that switch might be just because of the register.

"Tomorrow Never Knows"

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Over the past few months, I've been (slowly) re-reading The Beatles Anthology.  On Sunday, I read the part about "Tomorrow Never Knows" (p. 210), which got me thinking about the lyrical structure.  I just listened to it and transcribed the lyrics (checking them against those in The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook).  I was sort of right in what I was thinking.  Aside from the last, each verse ends with lines that have the same structure; they're all "It is" or "It is not" completed with a gerund and then repeated:

It is not dying
It is shining
It is being
It is knowing
It is believing
It is not living

There's also a mirrored sort of structure as far as when the "not"s are present.

In the last verse, there's "Of the beginning," which somewhat holds to the established paradigm in that it ends with a gerund.

"And I Love Her"

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I spent the last week or so figuring out the bass part to "And I Love Her."

There's a really interesting part transitioning from the second verse into the bridge (just before "A love like ours / Could never die").  At that point in the bass part, there's the same phrase that - on guitar - opens the song (B, E, D#, C#).  Without having learned the parts, I doubt I ever would have noticed that.

I'm still missing the arpeggiations in the guitar part, but I have learned two of them.  I'm still working on the others, but I think I'm pretty close.  Also, I might rush a note or two in the solo, and I think one or more of my instruments is slightly out-of-tune.