Sunday, March 2, 2025

"Chains"

Yester-day, I listened to the first disc of On Air - Live at the BBC, Vol. 2 and noticed a small feature in "Chains."  George Harrison sings the line "But I can't break away from all of these" by himself, but the following "Chains"* is sung by multiple voices.  Because there are more voices here, there's a sense of the abundance of "all of these."

While referencing the version on Please Please Me to verify that this feature is there, too, I also noticed that in the line "Can't run around," "around" is sung with a melisma (D C Bb), giving a sense of either breadth or movement.

---
*Logically, it has to be "chains," but I think the Beatles actually sing just the singular "chain."  In his book Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, Geoff Emerick explains that on early tracks such as "Misery" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the Beatles sang initial S sounds as SH, partially because "it removed any kind of potential 'de-essing' problems, where if there was too much top end (treble), the sound on vinyl would distort" (p. 60).  I think the S is left off "chains" here for a similar purpose.