According to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Yellow Submarine was released on 17 January 1969. I listened to the album on the fiftieth anniversary of its release and remembered two small features I'd noticed in "It's All Too Much" back when I listened to the album in September.
The "much" at the end of each chorus ("For us to take, it's all too much," "So take a piece but not too much," "And what I do is all too much") is sung with a melisma (B A B). Because there's an extra syllable, there's a sense of the excess of "too much."
The "free" in the lines "Send me on a silver sun / Where I know that I'm free" is also sung with a melisma (B A D B). Here, the extra syllables give a sense of that freedom; the word isn't limited to the single syllable it has when spoken.
In looking at the song again in order to write this post, I noticed something else: one of the verses begins with the line "Floating down the stream of time," which bears some resemblance to part of the line "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" in "Tomorrow Never Knows."
