Aside from the artistic resemblances (detailed below), the album has a number of Beatle connections: Badfinger were signed to Apple Corp; Paul McCartney wrote and produced "Come and Get It" and - according to the liner notes - arranged for three Badfinger songs ("Come and Get It," "Carry on Till Tomorrow," and "Rock of All Ages") to be used in the film The Magic Christian, starring Ringo Starr; and about half of the album's tracks were produced by the Beatles' roadie Mal Evans.
"Come and Get It"
I learned most of the bass part for "Come and Get It" in February, and I discovered that it has some similarity with the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There," although more in tonality than melody (if that makes sense). For the first half of the verses, the bass plays just tonic (Eb), subdominant (Ab), and dominant (Bb) notes, but at the beginning of the line "Did I hear you say that there must be a catch," it goes up a half-step to B natural, an accidental in Eb major. "I Saw Her Standing There" does the same thing with the same accidental (a half-step above the dominant). The bass part there consists of phrases that more or less arpeggiate the tonic (E major), subdominant (A major), and dominant (B major) chords (more on that here), but there's a C natural (an accidental in E major) to accompany the "woo"s. Paul McCartney wrote "Come and Get It" and co-wrote "I Saw Her Standing There," so this tonal similarity seems more than coincidental. McCartney's demo version of "Come and Get It" on the Beatles' Anthology 3 is even in E major, the same key as "I Saw Her Standing There."
"Dear Angie"
I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but "Dear Angie" seems cast in the same mold as the Beatles' "P.S. I Love You." They're both epistolary songs (both refer to themselves as "this letter"), and both end with "I love you." The phrase "P.S. I love you" shows up more than once in that song, but the "I love you" in "Dear Angie" shows up only at the end. The last section is
Dear Angie
The writing's on the wall
Dear Angie
I love you; you're my all
Guess that's all
Incidentally, the phrase "the writing's on the wall" originally referred to Daniel 5 in the Bible, although it's since acquired a more widespread use.
"I'm in Love"
Again with the probable Beatle connections, I think "I'm in Love" took some inspiration from "When I'm Sixty-Four." The second verse has the lines "Say you will / Love me still / When I'm gray and ninety-three," which bear some resemblance to "Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I'm sixty-four." There's a rhyming couplet followed by a line that mentions a specific age.
"Angelique"
The verses of "Angelique" have a steadily strummed guitar and (in later verses) harpsichord arpeggios with notes of equal value. Musically, this is contrasted with an-other section (which I suppose is a bridge) in which the guitar is pluckt, the harpsichord breaks out of its supporting rôle a bit, and there are a number of accidentals. This musical contrast mirrors the contrast in the lyrics. Each verse praises the titular Angelique, ending with "And you're mine / Angelique," but this odd section reveals that the speaker/singer actually isn't in a relationship with Angelique at all:
I'll never be with you
Never, ever touch your hand
So I'll just dream of you
Lonely in my wonderland
Each of the verses represents part of the "wonderland." Because the speaker/singer is imagining a relationship with the incomparable Angelique, those sections have a musical stability, almost a perfection. When the daydream is revealed for what it really is, the music breaks down into accidentals and more erratic rhythms.
I wrote out the notation for the harpsichord part, which might illustrate this better than text alone. I also wrote in the guitar chords. As I mentioned above, the chords aren't strummed during the bridge, so what I have there is extrapolated from the pluckt parts. And - as always - there's the disclaimer I might have something wrong (I'm suspicious that some of the harpsichord part is doubled an octave higher or lower).
I wrote out the notation for the harpsichord part, which might illustrate this better than text alone. I also wrote in the guitar chords. As I mentioned above, the chords aren't strummed during the bridge, so what I have there is extrapolated from the pluckt parts. And - as always - there's the disclaimer I might have something wrong (I'm suspicious that some of the harpsichord part is doubled an octave higher or lower).
"Knocking Down Our Home"
The first line after the introductory section is "I heard the news today," which is the same line (with an "oh boy" at the end) that starts the Beatles' "A Day in the Life." This by itself doesn't seem that strong of a connection, but I think it's likely considering the album's other Beatle connections.
