The Kingston Trio's "'Round about the Mountain"

For my Collection Audit project, I recently listened to the two-disc compilation album I have by the Kingston Trio.  When I listened to it last September, a line in "'Round about the Mountain" (written by Louis Gottlieb) sounded familiar to me.  I finally finished my transcription, so now I can write about the song.

One of the verses is:

If you can't pray like Peter
If you can't preach like Paul
Go home and tell your neighbor
That He died to save us all

I'm pretty sure that for this verse Gottlieb took some inspiration from the hymn "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" (text by David Marsh, music by Joseph Barnby).  Apparently, there are alternate verses, but in the version I'm familiar with (#318 in the Lutheran Worship hymnal), the second verse is:

If you cannot speak like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus; you can say He died for all.
If you cannot rouse the wicked with the judgement's dread alarms,
You can lead the little children to the Savior's waiting arms.

The clause "If you can't preach like Paul" in Gottlieb's song is identical to Marsh's "if you cannot preach like Paul" (save for the contraction), which is the initial similarity I noticed.  Additionally, Gottlieb's "tell your neighbor / That He died to save us all" is quite similar to Marsh's "You can tell the love of Jesus; you can say He died for all."

After transcribing "'Round about the Mountain" and comparing it to "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" I found some more similarities.  These two verses - aside from the specific examples of Paul's preaching and telling of Christ's redemption - have the same general idea: even if you don't have the eloquence of angels or saints, you can still proclaim the message of Christ.  As Marsh puts it in a later verse: "Let none hear you idly saying, 'There is nothing I can do.'"

The last line of the Marsh verse quoted in full above might have inspired a recurring line in Gottlieb's song.  There are two repeated sections in "'Round about the Mountain":

'Round about the mountain
'Round about the mountain
My God is waiting
You can rise in His arms

and

The Lord loves a sinner
The Lord loves a sinner, man
The Lord loves a sinner
Who will rise in His arms

Both end with "ris[ing] in His arms," which isn't dissimilar to the image in Marsh's phrase "the Savior's waiting arms" (from Matthew 19:13-15).

Gottlieb's use of the phrase "If you can't preach like Paul" is the more irrefutable indication of the influence that "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" probably had on him, but there might be something to these others too.

Simon & Garfunkel's "America"

Last December I thought I realized something about Simon & Garfunkel's "America," but I wanted to listen to it again before I wrote about it.  A couple weeks ago, I listened to Bookends for my Collection Audit project and took that opportunity to transcribe most of the song.  What I was thinking in December is valid, although it's only a small point about the line "'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though I knew she was sleeping."

What I realized is the importance behind the singer/speaker's admission that he "knew she was sleeping."  He knew Kathy was sleeping, but he told that he's lost anyway, which reveals something about him.  He wants to tell someone that he feels lost, but he also doesn't really want that feeling to be known.  That's why - when he does tell someone that he feels lost - he makes sure that it's at a time when it won't be heard, namely when Kathy's asleep.

"As Time Goes By"

Last week, I started thinking about "As Time Goes By."  I think it's most famous from the movie Casablanca (which I watched for the first time only a few days ago, mostly to hear the song), but the version I'm most familiar with is Cliff Richard's.  In any case, I noticed some things about the first verse:

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply as time goes by

There's assonance (with "i") in the second line - "A kiss is still a kiss."  There's an insistence and prevalence of that "i" sound, which emphasizes the constancy inherent in the meaning of "still."

Furthermore, that same "i" sound is in the "this" from the previous line.  The whole line "A kiss is still a kiss" is linked to "this" grammatically ("A kiss is still a kiss" is part of what "You must remember"), but they're also linked through that assonance.  There's the "i" in "this," and it's widespread in the line "A kiss is still a kiss."

The third line is interesting in its lack of that insistent assonance.  In "A sigh is just a sigh," that "i" sound is present only in the verb ("is").  In the two nouns ("sigh"), it's changed from a short "i" to a long "i," and there's a complete lack of any "i" (short or long) in the adverb ("just").  Because this line doesn't have the same repeated vowel sounds as the previous line (or any consistently repeated vowel sounds at all), it's slightly disappointing, so - compared to the kiss that "is still a kiss" - this line has the same unimpressive quality as a sigh, which is "just a sigh."

I should note that in the movie Casablanca, it's sung as "A kiss is just a kiss," which decreases the strength of the assonance-linking present in "A kiss is still a kiss."  I lookt up the lyrics for some other versions, and it seems like some have "A kiss is still a kiss" and some have "A kiss is just a kiss."

Punch Brothers' "Another New World"

Last month (the last day of the year, actually), I listened to Punch Brothers' Ahoy! EP.  I'd listened to it only a few times before, so listening to it then was the first time I really caught the name "Annabel Lee" in "Another New World."  The only other "Annabel Lee" I know of is the Edgar Allan Poe poem, so when I listened to Ahoy! a few weeks ago for my Collection Audit project, I transcribed the lyrics and compared them to the Poe poem.  The situations in each poem are different, but there are enough similarities to make me think that the song (written by Josh Ritter) took at least some inspiration from Poe.

In Poe's poem, there's the recurring line "In this kingdom by the sea," and "Another New World" is about maritime exploration.  There are lines about "set[ting] the course north" and "study[ing] the charts" to find "another new world at the top of the world."  In the song, Annabel Lee is a ship, and in the poem, she's "a maiden," but the connection between an Annabel Lee and the sea is a significant one in both works.

The speaker in the poem mentions the "love that was more than love" that he had with Annabel Lee, and the same sort of thing seems to be in the song.  The singer/speaker calls the Annabel Lee "the most beautiful ship in the sea."  Together, they're "happy to think back on all we had done," and he stays in "the loving embrace of her hold."

Both speakers are eventually separated from their respective Annabel Lees by means that are somewhat similar.  In the poem, "the wind came out of the cloud by night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee," and in the song, the Annabel Lee is trapped in the ice and snow of the arctic.  The singer/speaker has to use "her mainsail for timber" and says he "burned her to keep me alive."  The cold is what does both of them in, either directly or because it leads to something worse.

Nevertheless, both speakers dream about Annabel Lee after her demise.  The speaker of the poem says that "the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee," and the singer/speaker of the song explains that "sometimes at night in my dreams comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird / And I smile in my sleep thinking Annabel Lee's finally made it to another new world."

Aside from the narrative, there are also some similarities in the poetic elements (although that doesn't really demonstrate Poe's influence in particular).  Both have some lines (or parts of lines) that have repetitive sounds.  There's alliteration with Gs in "So I said, 'All I got, all my guts, and my God'" in "Another New World," and in "Annabel Lee," there's some alliteration with Ls in "And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me" and "we loved with a love that was more than love."  There's some internal rhyme in "the waves that once lifted her sifted instead into drifts against Annabel's side" in "Another New World," and in "Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee" in "Annabel Lee."  I should note that I'm quoting from my own (possibly incorrect) transcription.  I did look up some other transcriptions, but I thought their accuracy questionable.

Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"

A couple months ago, I happened to think of the line "Strummin' with the rhythm that the drivers made" in Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."  A few lines before that, it's mentioned that Johnny used to "sit beneath the tree by the railroad track," so I'm assuming that the "drivers" there are steel drivers, hammering in the railroad spikes like John Henry did.

Then it occurred to me that what Johnny B. Goode is doing here is sort of the opposite of a sea shanty.  Sailors sang sea shanties to coordinate work; the rhythm of the song synchronized the workers.  Here, Johnny's taking the rhythm of the workers and - through extracting its rhythm - practicing his strumming.

Herman's Hermits' "The Most Beautiful Thing in My Life"

A couple months ago, I discovered some ambiguities in the lyrics of Herman's Hermits' "The Most Beautiful Thing in My Life," specifically the second half of the second verse:

She glows to me, arose to me
A shining star she is by far
The most beautiful thing in my life

Almost each one of these lines could be parsed a different way.  First, I found just "arose"/"a rose."  So either "she... arose to me" or "[She's] a rose to me," almost the same as the "A shining star she is by far" in the next line - listing metaphors for the girl.

But once I transcribed that part of the lyrics, I found something else.  The last two lines could have a break in two different places.  It could follow the line break: "A shining star she is by far / The most beautiful thing in my life," or it could be "A shining star" (either a metaphor like "a rose" or "A shining star arose to me" inverted as "Arose to me a shining star") and "She is by far the most beautiful thing in my life."

2016 Musical Projects

Most of my musical focus this year is going to be spent on doing Collection Audit again.  Every other year since 2008, I've attempted (and so far been successful) in listening to all of the music in my collection.  Since 2014, I've also been writing about things I notice while listening to everything.

The only new project I started is Lyres, Harps, and Cymbals.  Last year, I got a box set of Bach's complete sacred cantatas, and I started LHC mostly as a way just to write about them.  I'm also writing about other church music, and I revived the Hymnal Habitation project that I did from late 2012 to early 2015 (although it's not called Hymnal Habitation anymore).

The other projects I'm doing are just continuations of what I've already been doing:

• Cover projects - last year, I started a bunch of projects where I try to learn every part to every song by a particular band.  I'm well aware that I'll probably never finish (especially because this year I'll be more focused on Collection Audit than these projects), but even in just attempting to learn all of the parts, I've discovered some interesting things I probably would have been oblivious to otherwise.
• Verulam Cover Project - The Zombies and related bands (Argent, Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent)
• APP Stereotomy - The Alan Parsons Project and Keats
• Pendleton Sounds - The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and SMiLE (and maybe others eventually)
• 10538 Orchestra - Electric Light Orchestra
• Beatle Audit - The Beatles
• February Album Writing Month (FAWM) - the challenge to write a fourteen-song album in February, which I've participated in since 2010 (and completed in various degree every year, although I think I deserve credit only for the last four years, when I actually recorded fourteen songs).  Because it's Leap Year, the requirement might be fourteen and a half songs this time; that's what they did in 2012.
• 50/90 - the challenge to write fifty songs in ninety days (from 4 July to 1 October), which I've also participated in since 2010.  I've never actually finished, but I've still written some pretty good stuff for this project.  For the last two years, I've suddenly run out of momentum once July is over (I think I must get stuck in the FAWM mindset).

Because I'm doing Collection Audit, I've put the Classical Music Queue and the Cover Project Listening Schedule on hold.  Once I finish Collection Audit (or once the year is over, whichever comes first), I'll restart both of those.

I'm going to try to continue to have weekly posts here, but because I'm doing Collection Audit, that's where I'll be writing the most.  I do have some things that I noticed last year that I never got around to investigating, and if the schedule works out, I'll be able to listen to them for Collection Audit and write about them here.

Carpenters' Christmas Portrait

I didn't listen to the Carpenters' Christmas Portrait until later this year, so this post about a couple songs on it is going up after Christmas.

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

I heard this on the radio (which reminded me that I hadn't listened to the album yet this year), and I noticed three things that I wanted to write about, but after looking into them, only one turned out to be viable:  the "star" in "Hang your shining star above the highest bough" is just a half-step above the "bough," so pitch-wise, the "star" is "above the highest bough."  The "star" is sung to an A, and the "bough" to a G#.

"I'll Be Home for Christmas"

The Carpenters' version starts with a couplet that I haven't heard in any other version.  It's:

I’m dreaming tonight of a place I love even more than I usually do
And although I know it's a long road back, I promise you

and then it goes into "I'll be home for Christmas / You can count on me...."

There's a grammatical ambiguity with "even more than I usually do," specifically what it's referring to.  It could be either "I'm dreaming tonight of a place I love even more than I usually [dream about it]" or "I'm dreaming tonight of a place I love even more than I usually [love it]."  Either parsing is valid, and it could be understood either way.

"White Christmas"

Last year, I figured out how to play "White Christmas," and I discovered that there's a five-note chromatic phrase corresponding to "of a white Christmas."  I was thinking about that again this year when I realized the whole first phrase is made up of half-steps:

(click the image to enlarge it)

After I realized that, I started thinking about the lyrics for that phrase:  "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."  Because the music there is made up entirely of half-steps, there's a sort of tension.  It sort of portrays either the desperation or the earnestness of the singer/speaker's wish for a white Christmas.

"It Came upon the Midnight Clear"

Since July, I've been slowly working my way through the book I used in my beginner's piano class in college (James Bastien's The Older Beginner Piano Course).  At the end of October, I re-learned how to turn the thumb under or cross the hand over in order to play a scale with one hand.  To demonstrate this, the book provides a few phrases from some Christmas songs that are built on scales.  One of these is the third line in "It Came upon the Midnight Clear":

After practicing this for a few days, I started thinking about that octave drop that accompanies "Peace on the earth."  I realized that it retains a distinction from the Luke 2 text that the lyrics are based on: "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!'" (Luke 2:13-14).  There's the highness of God and the lowness of those on the earth.  While the lyrics here don't include "Glory to God in the highest," they still have that same idea of the difference of levels by setting the "peace" and "the earth" on the same note an octave apart.

For what it's worth, both Handel (in the Messiah: No. 17 - Glory to God in the Highest) and Saint-Saëns (in his Christmas Oratorio: II. Recit et chœur) do similar things with the same text.  They set the "highest" with higher voices and the "on earth" with lower ones.  I hadn't noticed until writing this, but Handel has an octave drop for "peace on earth" too, between A notes in the bass voice:

(notation found here)

The Beach Boys' "Blue Christmas"

A few days ago, I listened to a Beach Boys Christmas album, and I noticed something about their version of "Blue Christmas."  At about 2:00, some brass instruments (I think French horns) quote a phrase from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  I can't find a score of the Rhapsody in Blue in order to look up the notation, and the phrase is too complex for my novice notation skills, but in "Blue Christmas," the phrase is D, Eb, F, and then an F an octave lower.  In the Rhapsody in Blue, it's G#, A, B, and then a B an octave lower.  (In the recording of Rhapsody in Blue I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's at about 11:31.)  It's the same phrase, just transposed down for "Blue Christmas."  (For what it's worth, it's also the phrase that starts "Rhapsody in Blue (Reprise)" on Brian Wilson's Reimagines Gershwin album, although that's E, F, G, and then a G an octave lower).

I did some research and discovered (in the entry for 18 June 1964 in Keith Badman's The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America's Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio) that the Beach Boys' version of "Blue Christmas" was arranged by Dick Reynolds.  While Wilson didn't arrange it himself, he probably had a hand in putting in that quotation because he's acknowledged Gershwin's influence and mentioned Rhapsody in Blue in particular.  The Reimagines Gershwin album provides ample evidence.

Purely as a reference, it's also interesting because "blue" is in the title of both works (and in the lyrics of "Blue Christmas").  To some degree, quoting Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue gives more depth to "Blue Christmas."  There's the feeling of "Blue Christmas" itself, but then - because of that quotation - there's an injection of the feeling of the Rhapsody in Blue too.

I transcribed "Blue Christmas" when I listened to the album a second time, and I found something interesting about the song itself, not just the Beach Boys' version.  The lines in the first verse all have line-ending rhymes ("without you" rhymes with "about you," and "tree" rhymes with "me"), but that same structure isn't in the second verse.  The first two lines rhyme ("certain" with "hurtin'"), but not "You'll be doin' alright with your Christmas of white / But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas."  Instead of line-ending rhymes, there's internal rhyme in the third line ("alright" and "white") and no rhyme at all in the fourth line, either within the line itself or with any other line.  That surfeit of rhyme in the third line and the lack of rhyme in the fourth poetically mirror the lyrics themselves.  "You'll be doin' alright" with internal rhyme, "But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas" with no rhyme at all.

Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues

A couple years ago, I noticed that Innisfree is mentioned in a couple songs on Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues.  I'd wondered if it was related to Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," but until recently, I'd never really looked into it.  In doing so, I found some other interesting things too.

I should note that I took the lyrics from the gatefold of the vinyl version:

However, they're not exactly what's on the album itself.  There are some differences between what's written and what's sung, and some of the line breaks occur in weird places.  The songs on the album are also in a different order than that in the gatefold, but that might be just because of the space the lyrics require when written out.

"Bedouin Dress"

At "return" in the line "Everything I took I’d soon return," more instruments come in, and the dynamics increase, as if to reflect the returning.  Similarly, once the next line starts ("Just to be at Innisfree again") there's a harmony vocal that continues throughout the rest of the song.

In the gatefold, the second half of the last verse is rendered as:

Gleaming white, just as I recalled
Old as I get,
I would never forget it at all.

 Standardized and following what's actually on the album, it's more like:

Gleaming white, just as I recall
Old as I get, I would never forget it at all
Gleaming white, just as I recall
Old as I get, I could never forget it at all

The printed lyrics have only "I would never forget it," but on the album, there's also "I could never forget it."

This is the first track on the album that mentions Innisfree, but there's not that much in common between this and Yeats' poem.  Both narrators want to go to Innisfree (Yeats' poem starts with "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," and here there's "Everything I took I’d soon return / Just to be at Innisfree again"), and both are looking for peace (there's "And I shall have some peace there..." in Yeats, and "Everything I took I’d soon return / Just to be at Innisfree again" from "Bedouin Dress" seems to hint at the same feeling).

"Sim Sala Bim"

When the "Then the earth shook..." verse starts, violin tremolos begin, providing a sense of trembling.

I think it's fairly obvious, but the couplet at the end ("Remember when you had me cut your hair? / Call me 'Delilah' then I wouldn’t care") is an allusion to Samson and Delilah in Judges 16.

"The Plains/Bitter Dancer"

The second verse starts and ends with the line "You took a room and you settled in."  While the next verse does the same thing (with "I should have known one day you would come"), repeating the line with "you settled in" emphasizes the certainty of the settling in.  It implies that the "you" will be there for a rather long time.

At the end, the line "At arm's length I will hold you there, there" is repeated, but it's not present in the gatefold lyrics, which actually mirrors the sentiment pretty well.  There's a cautiousness in holding someone "at arm's length," just as there is in not including those lyrics in the gatefold.

"Helplessness Blues"

There's an interesting feature here with doubles.  The song starts with the lines "I was raised up believin’ I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes / Unique in each way you’d conceive," and there's one voice and one guitar.  But after the lines "I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery / Serving something beyond me," a second voice, a second guitar, and harmonium come in (during the line "But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be").

Later, there's the opposite effect:  at the "know" in "If I know only one thing," the second guitar drops out.  There are still two voices, but now there's only one guitar and one harmonium, so there's an exclusivity to match the "one thing" in the lyric.

For both, the strumming pattern of the guitar(s) matches the number.  If there's only one guitar, the strums are all (or at least mostly) downward, but if there are two, the strums are upward and downward.

"Lorelei"

To some degree, the repeated "you" in the line "You, you were like glue" gives a sense of the adhesiveness of glue.  It's almost as if the word stuck to itself when it was put into the song.

The parallelism in the line "Call out to nobody, call out to me" equates "nobody" with "me," which is the same idea in "I was like trash on the sidewalk" and "I was old news to you."

The "Old news, old news to you then" line is interesting in that - through its repetitions - it itself becomes old news.  Furthermore, there's a sort of motif in the melody to which it's sung:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(I'm fairly confident in this notation, although I might have the key wrong)

For the first three words ("Old news, old..."), each word lasts one measure and is comprised of two eighth notes and a half note.  The first eighth note and the half note are the same pitch, and the second eighth note is one step above the other two notes (sometimes a half-step, sometimes a whole-step).  For the last "news," there are two quarter notes (continuing downward like the rest of the phrase) instead of a half note.

Almost every "Old news, old news" section has this melody, so there's the repetition of the phrase as a whole, and there's the repetition of that three-note motif within the phrase.  The only one that doesn't have this melody is the one that's after the line "Fell for the ruse with you then."  Instead, it becomes:

That line ("Fell for the ruse...") has its place in the narrative of the song, but it also affects the "Old news..." section that follows it.  The melody itself "fell for the ruse," was deceived, and changed.

"Someone You'd Admire"

Like the second voice in "Helplessness Blues," a second voice comes in for the line "I walk with others."

The phrase "gnash their teeth" seems to be a Biblical reference.  It's actually in a few places in Matthew where Jesus explains some parables, but Matthew 13:41-42 is probably the most easily quotable:  "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace.  In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

The strumming pattern emphasizes "Claw" and "gnash" in the line "Claw at my skin and gnash their teeth and shout."  They both occur on the first beat of the bar, and that first beat is a quarter note where the other beats are eighth notes, so that first beat (and the impact of those words) stands out:

(click the image to enlarge it)

I should note that my notation is accurate only as far as the guitar strumming, not the tonality.  I used B notes just because they're in the middle of the staff.

"The Shrine/An Argument"

I think the first pair of lines in these verses are really long, rhyming "dawn" with "gone" and "shrine" with "fine."  In the gatefold lyrics though, there are some really interesting line breaks that seem to have some extra meaning.

The gatefold renders a section from the first verse as:

Underneath were all these pennies
Fallen from the hands of
Children they were there and
Then were gone.

The line breaks occur at places of separation: the pennies from the hands, and the children's being there and being gone.  The second verse, as renders in the gatefold lyrics, has something similar:

But that day, you know, I left
My money and I thought of you only

Here, there's the separation of the speaker/singer from his money.

There's a weird metrical strain in the line "In the driveway, pulling away, putting on your coat."  I don't understand meter enough to be able to diagram or illustrate this, but the "away" is stressed on the first syllable instead of the second.  The resulting strain seems to betray the speaker/singer's frisson.

In the line "In the ocean washin’ off my name from your throat," there's a similar sound in the "c" of "ocean" and the "sh" of "washin'."  Purely poetically, this is just consonance, but it also suggests scouring or scraping something clean, which is more explicitly present in the "washin'" itself.

There are two features here that seem to connect this song with "Helplessness Blues."  First, there's "I left my money, and I thought of you only, all that copper glowin’ fine."  It's kind of ambiguous whether the "copper glowin' fine" is a literal description of the money or a figurative description of "you" (that is, the person's hair).  If it's the second, it's similar to "Gold hair in the sunlight" in "Helplessness Blues."  Second, both mention apples.  There's the line "Green apples hang from my tree" near the end of "The Shrine/An Argument," and "Helplessness Blues" has a number of lines beginning with "If I had an orchard...."  In looking through the album's lyrics, I noticed quite a lot of similar descriptions in various songs.  I'm still not sure what to make of some of the others, but this one seemed to be one of the most connected, which is why I'm mentioning it.

This is the second song on the album that mentions Innisfree, and there's more that would seem to connect this to Yeats' poem than there is in "Bedouin Dress," but still not enough to say that it was intentional.  Both use a lot of natural imagery, but there's only one that they have in common.  The last few lines of "The Shrine/An Argument" are:

And if I just stay a while here, starin' at the sea
And the waves break ever closer, ever near to me
I will lay down in the sand and let the ocean lead
Carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze

There are image of water (the sea, the waves, and the ocean), which is somewhat similar to the tenth line of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" - "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

Between this and "Bedouin Dress," there really isn't anything that specifically references Yeats' poem.  If anything, Innisfree is used just in the same general sense of a peaceful, natural place.

"Grown Ocean"

It doesn't really make a difference to the meaning of the line, but "Kept like jewelry kept with devotion" could be parsed in two different ways.  As it is in the gatefold rendering, because there's no comma, "kept with devotion" is modifying the "jewelry."  With a comma, both "kept like jewelry" and "kept with devotion" modify the "children grown on the edge of the ocean" from the previous line.

This song ends with:

Wide-eyed walker, don’t betray me
I will wake one day, don’t delay me
Wide-eyed leaver, always going

The "wide-eyed walker" appears earlier on the album in "Battery Kinzie":

Wide-eyed walker
Do not wander
Do not wander through the dawn

Like the features that seem to tie together "Helplessness Blues" and "The Shrine/An Argument," this was one of the stronger inter-song connections I found on the album.