Unit 4+2's Singles As & Bs

For Christmas a few years ago, I got Unit 4+2's Singles As & Bs.  At the time, I knew only "Concrete and Clay" (I knew "You Ain't Going Nowhere" via the Byrds' version, but I hadn't heard Unit 4+2's), but the album quickly became one of my favorites over the course of the following year.  I started drafting a post about a year after I got it, but then I sort of forgot about it (the post).  I figured I'd finally finish it.

"When I Fall in Love"

The "fall in love" in the titular line is sung to a descending phrase (E D# B, I think), so there's a musical representation of the falling, even if it is only metaphorical.

When I originally transcribed the song, I rendered a pair of lines as "And too many moonlight kisses / Seem to cool in the warmth of the sun," but when I looked over my transcription a few weeks later, I realized that it could also be "And too many moonlight kisses / Seem too cool in the warmth of the sun."  In the first rendering, "to cool" is an infinitive; in the second, "too cool" is an adverb/adjective combination modifying the "kisses" from the previous line.  That second rendering is probably what's intended because then there's a parallelism between "too many" and "too cool."  Still, it's one of those great features that's ambiguous when heard but has to fall one way or the other when it's written out.

I also noticed something about the first two lines of the last verse:  "And the moment I can feel that / You feel that way too."  There's a caesura after the "that" in the second line, so even though the two "that"s function differently (the first is an indicator of an indirect statement and the second is a demonstrative adjective modifying "way"), because of that pause there, it briefly sounds like there's a parallelism between "I can feel that" and "You feel that."  There's a pairing there, which is appropriate for a song about falling in love.

"You've Got to Be Cruel to Be Kind"

The titular phrase - slightly altered - comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  In Act 3, Scene 4, Hamlet says, "I must be cruel, only to be kind" (III.iv.199).  The song doesn't really have anything to do with Hamlet, but that's the origin of that phrase.

"I Won't Let You Down"

The line "Hurtin' in my body and the sweat on my brow now" in the first and third verse (it's the same verse repeated) references Genesis 3, if only indirectly.  Because of the fall into sin, Adam has to work in the fields in order to eat, and in verse nineteen, God tells him, "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food."  It's basically the same as the phrase in the song, but since it's become a common phrase, I don't think it's really intended as a Biblical reference.

"3.30"

One of the verses has the lines "And again I try / Not to reason why."  Like the allusions I found in the other songs, I don't think this is intended as anything more than just the borrowing of a phrase, this time from Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."  In the third stanza, one of the lines is "Theirs not to reason why."

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For my Collection Audit project, I've also written about "I Will" (which quotes a Bach violin partita) and "A Place to Go" (which has a lyrically significant key change).