Wednesday, July 28, 2021

"It Won't Be Long"

I listened to With the Beatles a couple days ago and noticed a small thing in "It Won't Be Long":  there's a temporal merism in the lines "Ev'ry night the tears come down from my eye / Ev'ry day I've done nothin' but cry."

Monday, July 26, 2021

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"

I've written about this in a few other songs already, but yester-day I realized that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" also has an instance of "all alone" ("Late nights all alone with a test tube"), and since the initial sound of these two words is the same, there's a sense of that singularity.

Monday, July 5, 2021

"I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"

I listened to Beatles for Sale last week, and this morning, I was thinking about "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," specifically the recurring line "I still love her."  Even just semantically, there's some emphasis placed on this line.  In the first instance, it provides some resolution to the preceding dependent clause ("Though tonight she's made me sad / I still love her").

The note values for this line are much longer than anywhere else in the song, and this contrast provides a musical emphasis to mirror the emphasis that's in the meaning alone.  I think the vocal parts are something like this:


While referencing the song, I also noticed that "go" in the line "I don't want to spoil the party so I'll go" is sung with a melisma (I think Lennon sings it to the notes D C B but McCartney just holds a G below this), giving a sense of movement.