George Harrison's "Devil's Radio"

I recently listened to George Harrison's Cloud Nine, and I rediscovered that one guitar phrase in "Devil's Radio" (first present at about 0:29) sounds similar to a guitar phrase in the Beatles' "It Won't Be Long" (first present at about 0:26, when the verse transitions to the chorus).  I'd discovered this similarity in 2014; however, I hadn't lookt into the music back then.  This June, I learned some of the guitar phrases in "It Won't Be Long" for my Beatle Audit project, so all I had to do was learn the phrase in "Devil's Radio" and compare them.

Tonally, the phrases are exactly the same; the only difference is in the rhythm and articulation:

A few caveats on my notation: 1) these are both notated an octave higher than played, in order to avoid a mess of ledger lines below the staff, 2) for both examples, I'm not sure if the last note is specifically a half note; it might be longer or shorter, 3) there's a glissando at the end of the phrase in "Devil's Radio," so where my notation has a single C#, it's really a B slid into a C#, but the B is negligible as far as note values.

One of the other songs on Cloud Nine is "When We Was Fab," which has lyrical and musical references to Harrison's days in the Beatles.  Those references suggest that the similarity between these guitar phrases is intentional rather than coincidental.

Andrew Bird's Are You Serious

I listened to Andrew Bird's Are You Serious a few times this month and found some things to write about.

"Capsized"

This is just a small point, but the various articulations of "falling" in the lines "Night's falling" and "Sky's falling" descend in pitch, so there's a musical falling to mirror the falling in the lyrics.  Sometimes, the "falling" is even sung with a melisma, which emphasizes the effect.

"Puma"

As written in the liner notes (which differ a bit from the song itself), the lyrics for one section are

When she was radioactive for seven days
How I wanted to be holding her anyway
But the doctors they told me to stay away
Due to flying neutrinos and
Gamma rays

The backing vocals harmonize with the lead vocals for the ends of the first two lines ("seven days" and "anyway") and then repeat the "ay" sound of the rhyme, so there's a musical representation of the half-life of radiation.  There's the initial "ay" sound in the lead vocals, and then it "decays" by moving to the backing vocals, where it "decays" even further by lowering in pitch (F# to E to D).  Perhaps significantly, this feature isn't present for the "ay" of "away" because the singer/speaker is "stay[ing] away" from the radioactive girl.

"Left Handed Kisses"

This is an-other small point, but there's a fairly large musical interval between the notes in "To us romantics out here that amounts to" and those in "high treason."  I think it's a fifth (A to E) between "that amounts to" and "high."  In any case, the high musical note emphasizes the notion of "high treason."

"Saints Preservus"

The first line is "I once was found but now I'm lost," which is an inversion of sorts of "I once was lost but now am found," a line from "Amazing Grace."

A later line is "Bring me your poor and your trembling masses," which is a near quote of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" (the poem written about and displayed in the Statue of Liberty).  In Lazarus' poem, the lines are "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

I think there might be a third allusion in the line "I'm a stranger in a land that's anything but strange."  It has a similar structure to a pair of lines in the folk song "Wayfaring Stranger" (here's a link to the song in Roger McGuinn's Folk Den).  Since it's a folk song, different versions of "Wayfaring Stranger" exist (including mine), but - as I'm familiar with it - the first two lines are "I am a poor wayfaring stranger / Wandering through this world of woe."

"Bellevue"

The album is bookended with nautical imagery, which is in both "Capsized" (the first song on the album) and "Bellevue" (the last track on the album).  The title line in "Capsized" is "This ship is capsized," but in "Bellevue," there's the line "Guides my lonely ships on through the shallows."  The images themselves are opposites, but they're drawn from the same pool, as it were.

Don McLean's "Babylon"

I haven't found much to write about recently, so here's a short post about Don McLean's "Babylon" from the American Pie album.  I recently learned and notated the vocal melody:

These twelve measures repeat, but the second half of the song is sung as a round so that these three lines are sung simultaneously among three voices.

As formatted in the liner notes, the lyrics are:

By the waters
The waters of Babylon
We lay down and wept
And wept for thee, Zion

We remember... Thee
Remember... Thee
Remember... Thee
Zion

In the liner notes, McLean comments that "the song was created in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1930s, and it was taken from one of the Psalms in the Bible."  About two years ago, I discovered that it's Psalm 137:1:  "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion."

Mendelssohn: String Quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. 1

I listened to Mendelssohn's String Quartet in D major (Op. 44, No. 1) a few times last month, and some melodies in the second movement sounded familiar to me.  Here's the first line:

(notation found here)

The first and second violin parts here bear strong resemblances to the hymn tune "Chesterfield" (used for "Hark the Glad Sound").  Last December, I recorded this tune for my blog about hymns:

The arrangements I used for my recording (I combined arrangements from Lutheran Worship [#29] and The Lutheran Service Book [#349]) are in F major, but here's the first phrase of "Chesterfield" transposed up an octave and into D major in order to compare it to the first few bars of the first violin in Mendelssohn's string quartet:

A few note values are different, but - with "Chesterfield" adjusted for key - the pitches are all the same.

Here's the second phrase of "Chesterfield" (again transposed to D major, but not transposed up an octave) and the second violin part from Mendelssohn's string quartet, starting from the sixth full measure:

These phrases are quite similar too.  The last five notes here have the same intervals; while they start from different pitches, the melody goes down a half-step, up a half-step, down a minor third, and then down a whole-step.

I couldn't find much information about Mendelssohn's string quartet, just that it was composed in 1838.  Likewise, I couldn't find a great degree of definite information about "Chesterfield."  Either it was written by or is attributed to Thomas Haweis, who was born in 1732 or 1734 (sources vary) and died in 1820.  According to Hymnary, the tune itself was published in 1792.  While all of that is a bit shaky, it's clear that "Chesterfield" is older than Mendelssohn's string quartet.

I don't know if Mendelssohn was familiar with "Chesterfield," but the resemblance between it and this movement of his string quartet seems to suggest so.  For what it's worth: this wouldn't be the only instance of Mendelssohn's using a hymn tune in his music.  His Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 107, written in 1830, quotes Martin Luther's "Ein feste Burg."

Les Paul and Mary Ford's "Whither Thou Goest"

Last month, I listened to a three-CD set of Les Paul (with Mary Ford, although she's not credited), and I realized that the lyrics in "Whither Thou Goest" come from the Bible, specifically Ruth 1:16.  The first verse of the song is:

Whither thou goest, I will go
Wherever thou lodgest, I will lodge
Thy people shall be my people, my love
Whither thou goest, I will go

It's taken almost directly from the King James Version:

And Ruth said, "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

For what it's worth, here's a video that walks through the original Hebrew of the second half of the verse: