Wednesday, January 24, 2018

"All You Need Is Love"

"All You Need Is Love" was an answer on Jeopardy! to-day* (I'll admit that I didn't get it right), so I thought I would finally look into something I've been wondering about: whether the quotation of Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" near the end is in the same key as the original.  I have three different CD sets of Glenn Miller, and each has a recording of "In the Mood," but I think there are only two different recordings.  In both, that opening phrase is in Ab major (although it has quite a few accidentals; there's a chromatic phrase near the end that goes from Eb to Bb).  The quotation in "All You Need Is Love" is slightly different at the end (the chromatic phrase breaks off earlier), but the part that's the same is transposed down a half step to G major.  Based on the other parts I know so far (a cello phrase and some of the bass part), "All You Need Is Love" is in G major, so changing the key of that phrase from "In the Mood" isn't too surprising.

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*The category was "'You' Tunes," where all of the answers were songs with "you" in the title.  The clue (for $2000):  "'Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time, it's easy' sang the Beatles in this hit."  Feeling I should know this and forgetting the hint in the category name, I impulsively guessed "Strawberry Fields," thinking instead of the line "It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out."

Sunday, January 21, 2018

"She's Leaving Home"

I was thinking about "She's Leaving Home" yester-day, and I realized that it's in 3/4.  I'm not sure if there's really anything to this, but there might be a connection between the time signature (three beats in each measure) and the three characters in the song: the titular "she" and her father and mother.  The song does also mention "a man from the motor trade," but he's not a main character and doesn't even do anything in the narrative.