"Devil in Her Heart"

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Collection Audit:

Earlier to-day I listened to the Beatles' With the Beatles, and I noticed something about "Devil in Her Heart" that should have been glaringly obvious.  The "apart" in the recurring line "She's gonna tear your heart apart" is sung with a melisma (I think it's A A B G A, but I'm not sure).  Breaking up "apart" into multiple syllables and various pitches both emphasizes and demonstrates the "tear[ing]."

"I Saw Her Standing There"

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Like I mentioned at the end of this post, I figured out how to play (most of) the bass part for "I Saw Her Standing There" after I read that Paul McCartney based the musical figure on that in Chuck Berry's "I'm Talking about You."  I'm still having some problems with the rhythm during the guitar solo, so this is the bass part up until that point.  At some point, I'm going to notate what I know of this (I already notated Berry's "I'm Talking about You," so it should be pretty easy), and I'll write a post about the figures (which - indeed - are the same).

They're in different keys though.  "I'm Talking about You" is in C major, and "I Saw Her Standing There" is in E major.  The Beatles recorded a cover of "I'm Talking about You" on the BBC (it's on the second Live at the BBC album), and they changed the key from C major to E major, so the figures in their cover and in "I Saw Her Standing There" match exactly.

"I Saw Her Standing There"

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Last month, I was thinking about Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie," and I realized that it has a few similarities with the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There."

Just from what I remembered, I knew that the two songs both mention a seventeen-year-old girl standing around.  "Little Queenie" has "There she is again, standin' over by the record machine" and "She's too cute to be a minute over seventeen."  "I Saw Her Standing There" has "Well, she was just seventeen" and the titular "So how could I dance with another, ooh / When I saw her standin' there?"

When I compared the lyrics, I also found lines that talk about the girls' looks.  "Little Queenie" looks like "a model on the cover of a magazine," and the girl in "I Saw Her Standing There" looks "way beyond compare."

The entirety of "Little Queenie" has the speaker/singer admiring the girl and merely thinking about asking her to dance, where those same elements comprise only the first stanza of "I Saw Her Standing There."  The Beatles' singer/speaker actually takes his chance, and the third and fourth verses describe how they "danced through the night."  To some degree, it's like the Beatles wrote what happens next.

I don't know if the Beatles were familiar with "Little Queenie," but Chuck Berry is certainly an acknowledged influence, and the Beatles recorded at least half a dozen of his other songs (only two are on their records ["Roll over Beethoven" on With the Beatles and "Rock and Roll Music" on Beatles for Sale], but there are a lot more on the Live at the BBC albums).  My argument for this specific influence is just conjecture, but I do think "Little Queenie" was floating around in Lennon and McCartney's heads (even if subconsciously) while they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There."

(Of course, only after I wrote all of that, I skimmed the Wikipedia article for "I Saw Her Standing There," and it seems to cast some doubt on what I've written.  However, there is a quote from McCartney about how he used the bass part from Berry's "I'm Talking about You," so there is some of Berry's influence.  Because I know the bass part for "I'm Talking about You" [I even notated it a couple weeks ago], it was pretty easy to figure out the bass part for "I Saw Her Standing There.")

"Misery"

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A couple days ago, I was thinking about the piano part in "Misery" (in referencing the recording, I discovered that there's a rolled F major chord at the beginning, which I hadn't noticed before).  I realized that there are some musical/lyrical connections with the piano parts in the bridges.

After the line "I'll remember all the little things we've done" (it's the same in both iterations of the bridge), there's a diatonic descent in C major from the G above middle C to the G below middle C and then up a whole-step to an A.  (I think it might be doubled an octave higher too.)  That whole phrase seems to represent "all the little things."

The next two lines in the bridge are different in each instance, but the musical representation for each is the same.  First, there's "Can't she see she'll always be the only one / Only one," and second there's "She'll remember, and she'll miss her only one / Lonely one."  After each of those "one"s, there's a single G note as a representation of that singularity.