"Blue Jay Way"

Last week, I was thinking about the lines "Ask a p'liceman on the street / There's so many there to meet" in "Blue Jay Way" and had a small realization about the melody to which they're sung, something like this:

(I'm not sure what key the song is in, so I just left the notation in C major.)

The first syllable of "many" is sung with a shorter note value (a sixteenth note) than the surrounding notes, so temporally (if not spatially in the notation), there's a denser concentration of notes here, lending a sense of this abundance.

"Blue Jay Way"

This morning I was thinking about something I noticed in "Blue Jay Way" about a year ago but which I never wrote about (I was reminded of it because I recently found a similar feature in Badfinger's "Suitcase," which George Harrison produced).  The specific technical explanation is beyond my skill level, but I think some change in the meter or in the syllabic stress causes the repeated "Don't be long" at the end to morph into "Don't belong."

"Blue Jay Way"

When I listened to Magical Mystery Tour yester-day I noticed a small thing about "Blue Jay Way."  The "long" in the line "Please don't you be very long" is sung with a melisma (B A B, I think).  Since the word is stretched over a number of notes, there's a musical representation of length.  Near the end, when "Don't be long" is repeated over and over, there's the same feature with different melismas (A G F# E and F# E)