"All Together Now"

An-other thing I noticed when I listened to Yellow Submarine yester-day is that - as in "Yellow Submarine" - the repeated "All together now" in "All Together Now" is sung by a multitude of voices to represent that "all together."

"Yellow Submarine"

Recently I've been reading entries in Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions about songs that ended up on the Yellow Submarine album ("All Together Now" and "It's All Too Much" in particular).  This morning I listened to the album and noticed a handful of things.

In "Yellow Submarine," more voices join in for the choruses.  There's a harmony part, and I'm pretty sure the lead vocal is also supplemented by additional voices (it certainly is when the chorus is repeated at the end).  These additional voices provide a musical example of the "all" in "We all live in a yellow submarine."

"So How Come (No One Loves Me)"

I recently listened to a two-disc set of the Everly Brothers that includes "So How Come (No One Loves Me)."  Yester-day I was thinking about the song and realized something about it that also holds true for the version that the Beatles did live on the BBC.

Each verse is basically:

They say that ev'ryone
Needs someone
So how come no one
Needs me

with later iterations replacing "needs" with "wants" and then with "loves."  (Compared to the Everlys' version, the Beatles flip the order of the first two verses.  The Everlys sing "needs" and then "wants"; the Beatles sing "wants" and then "needs.")

There really isn't a rhyme scheme here; it's just "-one" rhymed with itself, which illustrates the speaker/singer's loneliness and solitude.  It's just "one," "one," "one."

"I'm Down"

The day after I wrote about the descending backing vocals in the chorus "I'm Down" and how they musically represent that "down," I realized that the lead vocals there do the same thing.  "I'm down" is sung to three different musical phrases, but they all descend: G C, D G, and D C.

"Hey Jude"

I got behind in writing about things I noticed when I listened to Past Masters, Volume 2 last month.  Here's a small thing about "Hey Jude."

The melody to which "don't let me down" is sung has a precipitous drop at the end (A C D G), so while it's "don't let me down," there's a musical feature (a falling fifth) to represent that "down."