1962-1966

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Because it's an even year, I'm attempting to listen to all of the music in my collection again.  I just listened to the Beatles' 1962-1966 and wrote about a few songs.  I'm going to add those to the queue, but for now, here are a few things I noticed that I didn't deem interesting enough for the Collection Audit project:

"I Want to Hold Your Hand"

This is actually something I noticed last August, but I never got around to transcribing the lyrics so I could accurately quote the lines.  In the bridge, there's "It's such a feeling that, my love / I can't hide."  The "my love" is sort of ambiguous; it could be in either the accusative case (as an object of the verb) and inverted or in the vocative case (someone to whom the speaker/singer is addressing himself).  So it could be either "It's such a feeling that I can't hide my love" or telling someone ("my love") that "It's such a feeling that I can't hide."

It's probably intended to be that second one (with "my love" as a vocative), but that inverted object is still valid, grammatically.

"All My Loving"

This would probably be more interesting as audio, but I discovered that there are actually three distinct vocal parts during the bridge:

All my lovin' I will send to you
All my lovin', darling, I'll be true

McCartney's singing the lead vocals, and Lennon and Harrison are singing the "ooh"s in the backing vocals.  I can't tell their voices apart here, but one sings an E note throughout, and the other sings a descending chromatic phrase: C#, C, B.

"A Hard Day's Night"

I just listened to this song every week for ten months, but it wasn't until now that I noticed the parallelism in the first verse:

It's been a hard day's night
And I've been workin' like a dog
It's been a hard day's night
I should be sleepin' like a log

specifically, the "been workin' like a dog" and "be sleepin' like a log."  There's a form of be, a verb (or, rather, verb form since "sleepin'" is actually a participle here), and then a simile.

"Drive My Car"

Each verse starts with an exchange between the speaker/singer and "that girl."

First verse:

Asked the girl what she wanted to be
She said, "Baby, can't you see?"

Second verse:

I told that girl that my prospects were good
And she said, "Baby, it's understood"

Third verse:

I told that girl I could start right away
And she said, "Listen, babe, I got something to say"

I don't really have anything else to say about that; I'd just never noticed that structure.