"Day Tripper" and "Lady Madonna"

Two days ago, I remembered something that I noticed about a year ago:  the guitar figures in "Day Tripper" and "Lady Madonna" have a certain similarity, not so much in terms of rhythm, but in the intervals.  It might be easier to illustrate this with tabs than with notation.

The guitar phrase in "Day Tripper" starts like:

D|---------2-0---4---0-2-|

A|-------2-----2---2-----|

E|-0-3-4-----------------|

And that in "Lady Madonna":

G|-----------------2-|

D|---------0-0-2~4---|

A|-0-0-3-4-----------|

Both figures start with the tonic note, followed by the minor third and then the major third.  In the tabs above, this appears as |-0-3-4-|.

"Baby It's You"

I listened to Please Please Me this morning and noticed a couple small features in "Baby It's You," both in the line "Don't leave me all alone."  "All alone" alliterates, and since there's only one initial sound, there's a representation of that singularity.  "Alone" is also sung with a melisma (D E D E, I think), musically giving a sense of degree (for "all").

In the Shirelles' version, the line is simply "Don't leave me alone."

"Sun King"

I listened to Abbey Road this morning and noticed a small feature in "Sun King."  In the lines "Ev'rybody's laughing / Ev'rybody's happy," the four syllables of "Ev'rybody's" are all sung to different pitches (D C B A both times).  Musically, this gives a sense of the entirety of "ev'rybody."

Writing about "Sun King" also gives me the opportunity to note something that I didn't think merited its own post:  near the beginning of take 20 (included on the 50th anniversary edition of the album), John Lennon sings the first few notes of the melody from the Shadows' "Man of Mystery."

The White Album

This is more of a tangential issue, but I'm writing about it anyway.  Two days ago, I read the entry for "album" in Merriam-Webster's dictionary.  The etymology notes that it comes from albus, the Latin word for "white."  The first definition explains that originally an album was "a book with blank pages used for making a collection (as of autographs, stamps, or photographs)."  Although since the sense of "album" later changed to include "one more more recordings (as on tape or disc) produced as a single unit," going by the original etymology, "The White Album" is a redundant moniker.

Beatles for Sale

Yester-day, I learned the solo in "What You're Doing" (I'd forgotten that I learned it before, but I never wrote it down; compared to my old recording, what I have now is more accurate, anyway).  In the first half, I think there's a glissando'd double stop:  A+C# slid down to G+B.  Provided I have the parts figured out correctly, this same figure (played an octave higher) is also in the choruses in "Every Little Thing."

The songs are in different keys ("What You're Doing" is in D major, and "Every Little Thing" is in A major), but using this same figure in both gives some cohesion to Beatles for Sale.