"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."

"Baby It's You"

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Last night I decided to figure out the celeste part on Please Please Me (I'll admit that I had to look up what song it was used on; it's "Baby It's You").  After that, I got the chords too.  In what I recorded, I skipt the first verse entirely because I thought it'd be boring to listen to just chords.  So it starts with the second verse, and then there's the celeste part, which is (nearly) doubled on guitar (although the guitar is an octave or two lower).  There are three notes in the celeste part that aren't in the guitar part.

After I figured all of that out, I decided to see how the Shirelles' version compares.  The Beatles' version is in G major, and the Shirelles' is in Bb major, but otherwise the chords are the same (although they're not strummed on guitar in the Shirelles' version; in fact, I don't know if any instrument plays chords; they might just be implied).  What's doubled on celeste and guitar in the Beatles' version is played on organ in the Shirelles' version, and the melodies are more-or-less the same.  The major difference is that the Beatles repeat one section (the melody to which the "Sha la la la la" before the verses is sung), where it occurs only once in the solo in the Shirelles' version.

What I can't fathom, though, is why the Beatles didn't include the counterpoint that's in the solo in the Shirelles' version, especially if their solo is doubled on guitar and celeste.  You'd think it'd be easier to play a melody and a counterpoint on two instruments (which the Beatles don't do) than play a melody and a counterpoint on one instrument (like it is in the Shirelles' version).  George Harrison could have played the same guitar part with George Martin playing the counterpoint part on celeste (or even some other instrument).  Because I haven't figured out that counterpoint part yet (I'm not even sure if it's technically counterpoint), I haven't been able to record my own version where the guitar plays the main melody and the celeste plays the counterpoint, so I don't know how it sounds with that instrumentation, but it still seems like a missed opportunity.

"Baby It's You"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I just wrote a post about some songs by the Shirelles (mostly about implications of melismas), and since the Beatles covered some of their songs, I felt it'd be worth noting here that they do the same thing as the Shirelles in "Baby It's You."

The "apart" in the line "It's not the way you kiss that tears me apart" is broken up into syllables, so the way that it's sung reflects what the word means.