"All My Loving"

Yester-day, I ran across my note about the similarity between "All My Loving" and Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," which I wrote about last month.  Just seeing the title of the Beatles' song made me realize that most instances of the phrase "all my lovin'" are sung to notes of all different pitches, providing a sense of this breadth or entirety.  In the last line of each verse ("And I'll send all my lovin' to you"), it's sung to the notes C# B A G#, and in the lines "All my lovin' I will send to you / All my lovin', darling, I'll be true," it's sung to the notes E D# C# G# (both times).

"All My Loving"

I recently listened to a compilation album of Buddy Holly and noticed the phrase "all your lovin'" in "That'll Be the Day" ("Well, you give me all your lovin' and your turtle-dovin' / All your hugs and kisses and your money, too").  Of course, this is very similar to the title phrase in "All My Loving."  In the immediate context, the sentiment in both songs is basically the same, too, just inverted, even structurally:  instead of "You give me all your lovin'," it's "All my lovin' I will send to you."

The Beatles were certainly familiar with "That'll Be the Day" (as the Quarry Men, they recorded a version of it in 1958), so this resemblance seems to be an indication of Holly's influence.

"All My Loving"

Yester-day, I learned a bit more of the bass part in "All My Loving," specifically the section during the guitar solo:

The top two lines (especially the first two measures) bear some resemblance to the boogie woogie bass part that seems to have been pretty common in 1950s rock and roll:  arpeggiating chords using the root, third, fifth, sixth, and flatted seventh.  Here, though, McCartney plays the octave instead of the flatted seventh and then reverses the order (octave, sixth, fifth, third, root) for the next arpeggiation.

"All My Loving"

I listened to the second disc of Live at the BBC this morning and noticed a small feature in "All My Loving" (which is also in the studio version).  In one of the "all my loving"s in the coda (at ~1:53 in the studio version), the "all" is sung with a melisma (G# E F#, I think), musically giving a sense of that entirety.  The melisma is slightly different in the live versions (I think it's G# F# E in the BBC version, just G# E in the Live at the Hollywood Bowl version, and - oddly - G F Eb in the live version on Anthology 1), but it's clearly written as a feature of the song.

"All My Loving"

I listened to the second disc of Live at the BBC yester-day and noticed a small thing in "All My Loving."  "Day" in the line "I'll write home ev'ry day" is sung with a melisma (C# G#), giving a sense of number, almost as if it's emphasizing that "ev'ry."

"All My Loving"

A couple days ago (31 March), I was thinking about the guitar strumming in "All My Loving."  The guitar is strummed in triplets, and I think this has significance with regard to the title line.  Triplets are "a group of three musical notes or tones performed in the time of two of the same value," so it's as if the totality of "all my loving" is crammed into each beat.

"All My Loving"

Last night, I learned the bass part for the first two verses and the first chorus of "All My Loving."  The bass part in the third verse isn't the same, and the second chorus transitions into an ending tag so that's not the same either.

I referenced The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook for the chords but only after I had a go at figuring them out myself.  Mostly, I just lookt at the book to confirm what I already had (although I disregarded the B7 the book has in favor of a regular B major).

1962-1966

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Because it's an even year, I'm attempting to listen to all of the music in my collection again.  I just listened to the Beatles' 1962-1966 and wrote about a few songs.  I'm going to add those to the queue, but for now, here are a few things I noticed that I didn't deem interesting enough for the Collection Audit project:

"I Want to Hold Your Hand"

This is actually something I noticed last August, but I never got around to transcribing the lyrics so I could accurately quote the lines.  In the bridge, there's "It's such a feeling that, my love / I can't hide."  The "my love" is sort of ambiguous; it could be in either the accusative case (as an object of the verb) and inverted or in the vocative case (someone to whom the speaker/singer is addressing himself).  So it could be either "It's such a feeling that I can't hide my love" or telling someone ("my love") that "It's such a feeling that I can't hide."

It's probably intended to be that second one (with "my love" as a vocative), but that inverted object is still valid, grammatically.

"All My Loving"

This would probably be more interesting as audio, but I discovered that there are actually three distinct vocal parts during the bridge:

All my lovin' I will send to you
All my lovin', darling, I'll be true

McCartney's singing the lead vocals, and Lennon and Harrison are singing the "ooh"s in the backing vocals.  I can't tell their voices apart here, but one sings an E note throughout, and the other sings a descending chromatic phrase: C#, C, B.

"A Hard Day's Night"

I just listened to this song every week for ten months, but it wasn't until now that I noticed the parallelism in the first verse:

It's been a hard day's night
And I've been workin' like a dog
It's been a hard day's night
I should be sleepin' like a log

specifically, the "been workin' like a dog" and "be sleepin' like a log."  There's a form of be, a verb (or, rather, verb form since "sleepin'" is actually a participle here), and then a simile.

"Drive My Car"

Each verse starts with an exchange between the speaker/singer and "that girl."

First verse:

Asked the girl what she wanted to be
She said, "Baby, can't you see?"

Second verse:

I told that girl that my prospects were good
And she said, "Baby, it's understood"

Third verse:

I told that girl I could start right away
And she said, "Listen, babe, I got something to say"

I don't really have anything else to say about that; I'd just never noticed that structure.