Simon & Garfunkel's "Blessed"

Last week I listened to Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence for the first time in over a year, and I remembered something I'd previously noticed but (apparently) haven't written about: the song's verses have the same structure as the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12).  Each Beatitude has the structure "Blessed are [group] for...."  The first three lines of each verse in "Blessed" begin with either "Blessed are..." or "Blessed is...."  For instance, the first line of the song is "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit," which is almost straight from Beatitudes.  It's just missing the direct object of "inherit" - "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).

I'd noticed that similarity years ago, but when I listened to the song again recently, I found an-other Biblical reference.  Each verse ends with the line "Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me," which is similar to the first half of Psalm 22:1:  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  This verse is also quoted by Christ on the cross (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34).

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."

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:

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).

Noel Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)"

Near the end of last year, I discovered two Biblical references in Noel Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)."  I'm finally getting around to writing about them.

In the first and last verse, there's the line "For whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name, there is love."  It's not exactly the same, but it bears a strong resemblance to Matthew 18:20, where Jesus says, "'For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.'"

At the beginning of the second verse, there are the lines "Well, a man shall leave his mother, and a woman leave her home / They shall travel on to where the two should be as one."  There's a bit of poetic license taken here, but otherwise, it's Matthew 19:4-5:  "He [Jesus] answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?"  There's a parallel account in Mark 10, but I think it's more likely that Matthew was the source for both references (especially since they're from consecutive chapters), rather than one from Matthew and one from Mark.

Delicious Pastries' Pretty Please

I got Delicious Pastries' album Pretty Please shortly after it came out, and even though they're not that famous of a band, that album became my favorite new album at the time.  I hadn't listened to it for a while, but I recently got back into it and noticed lots of things I'd been oblivious to.

"safe & sound"

The couplet "and I will do all those things / that I would have done unto me" seems to be a reference to the Golden Rule.  "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" - Matthew 7:12.

"dad"

This is where most my re-sparked interest lay, specifically in the line "you never gave us stones, we only ate bread."  I'd always thought that, following the Matthew 7 reference in "safe & sound," this was based on Matthew 7:9-10:  "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?"  But then while reading Lord Byron's Don Juan, I came across a reference to Saturn:

One system eats another up, and this
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones (Canto 14, stanza 1, lines 5-8)

I also looked up Saturn in Edith Hamilton's Mythology.  She explains that

Cronos [the Greek name for Saturn] had learned that one of his children was destined some day to dethrone him and he thought to go against fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born.  But when Rhea [his wife] bore Zeus, her sixth child, she succeeded in having him secretly carried off to Crete, while she gave her husband a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he supposed was the baby and swallowed down accordingly.

Later in "dad," there's the line "you'd have to eat the veins and arteries too," which seems more relevant to the story of Saturn than the Matthew text.  I still can't seem to make much sense of it, but running across that reference to Saturn in Don Juan has at least showed me that there's more to "dad" than I originally thought.

At the very end of the song, there's the sound of a train, which I'm fairly certain is a reference to "Caroline, No," the last track on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which also ends with the sound of a train.

"marian"

The book-related metaphors ("you're no open book" and "I'd dog-ear a couple of your pages") made me realize that this might be a reference to Marian Paroo, the librarian in The Music Man.  The names are spelt the same, and there are those book references.

Punch Brothers' "Rye Whiskey"

Back in May, I watched the Punch Brothers live at the House of Blues via WGBH.  During "Rye Whiskey," I noticed the lines "Oh boy, rye whiskey makes the sun set faster / Makes the spirit more willing / But the body weaker."  I realized that this is an allusion to the Bible.

It's actually in two different places in the Bible, but the verse is the same: "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.  The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41 and Mark 14:38).  Jesus says this to the disciples after they fall asleep while Jesus is praying alone in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It seems like "The spirit is willing, but the body is weak" has become a pretty common expression, but I think "Rye Whiskey" illustrates a deeper familiarity since the next line is "Because rye sleep isn’t good sleep, boys."  The particular weakness of the Biblical "the flesh is weak" is falling asleep, which "Rye Whiskey" also mentions.  In fact, "Rye Whiskey" seems to go even a step further and say that it "isn't good sleep."  It's not only the weakness of a body that's weary; it's the weakness of a body that's weary but can achieve only a fitful sleep because of the effects of rye whiskey.

The Moody Blues' "Ride My See-Saw" and "The Voice"

Last month, I realized that two Moody Blues songs have rather similar lines.  There's "School talk one and one is two / But by now that answer just ain’t true" from "Ride My See-Saw" and "Won’t you take me back to school / I need to learn the golden rule" from "The Voice."  Both deal with almost elementary education (simple addition and the golden rule), but - interestingly - the songs are by different writers.  "Ride My See-Saw" is by John Lodge, and "The Voice" by Justin Hayward.  I'm not sure if there's really anything else comparable between the two songs, but those similar lines at least illustrate the consistency of the Moody Blues' writing, especially since "Ride My See-Saw" is from In Search of the Lost Chord from 1968 and "The Voice" is from Long Distance Voyager from 1981.

Incidentally, while transcribing the lyrics to "The Voice" (and then checking them against the ones in the CD booklet once I remembered that they were printed in the liner notes), I found two instances of structural parallelism: "Make a promise, take a vow" at the beginning of the third verse and "With your arms around the future / And your back up against the past" - the last lines of the second bridge.

It also occurred to me that the last two lines of the first bridge ("Can you hear the spirit calling / As it’s carried across the waves") are probably a reference to the second half of Genesis 1:2 - "The earth was without form and voice, and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

Pink Moon

I spent a majority of last year reading John Keats' complete poetry.  (Incidentally, I also have a blog where I talk about literary things.)  In September, I read "The Castle Builder" and noticed that two consecutive lines end with "pink" and "moon."

To-night I'll have my friar - let me think
About my room, - I'll have it in the pink;
It should be rich and sombre, and the moon,
Just in its mid-life in the midst of June,
Should look thro' four large windows and display
Clear, but for gold-fish vases in the way,
Their glassy diamonding on Turkish floor 

- John Keats - "The Castle Builder" (lines 24-30)

Because I'd heard he had liked the Romantic poets, I was suspicious that this is where Nick Drake got the phrase "pink moon" that he used for both a song and an album, but I didn't really have a way to prove that.  But yester-day, I looked up the lyrics for "Pink Moon."

Saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get ye all
And it's a pink moon

The "saw it written" gave me reason to say that I'm rather confident that Nick Drake did indeed take the phrase "pink moon" from the line-ending words of Keats' poem.  Later in the poem, Keats writes, "In letters raven-sombre, you may trace / Old 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.'" (lines 53-55)  These are the words that are written on the wall in Daniel 5 that - once interpreted by Daniel - tell Belshazzar that his kingdom will be given to the Medes and the Persians.  They're also words that inspired the phrase "the writing on the wall."  Drake's "saw it written" has the same idea as "the writing on the wall."  Also, the definitive declaration that Belshazzar's kingdom will be given to the Medes and the Persians bears some resemblance to Drake's "Pink moon gonna get ye all."  Neither of these are things that can be avoided.

I think it's too much of a coincidence that both the phrase "pink moon" and the idea of writing on the wall would appear in both Keats' poem and Drake's song, so I'm pretty sure that "Pink Moon" comes from "The Castle Builder."

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People/Candles

I've finally started doing the idea I had back in February.  Namely, listening to all of my Argent albums every week in August (also, alliteration).  However, since I decided to do that, I bought Circus.  It had worked out perfectly:  seven albums for seven days of the week.  Now I have eight albums that I have to squeeze into seven days.  So I've decided to listen to Greatest: The Singles Collection and Encore on Sunday and then listen to the other albums on the rest of the days of the week, going chronologically:

• Monday:  Argent
• Tuesday:  Ring of Hands
• Wednesday:  All Together Now
• Thursday:  In Deep
• Friday:  Nexus
• Saturday:  Circus

So because to-day is Thursday, I listened to In Deep to-day.  And I realised a few things:

I've heard "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" dozens of times, but until to-day, I had never been able to understand what Rod Argent sings at about 3:45.  It's "To every boy he gave a song to be sung."

I'm pretty sure that Rod Argent musically quotes some classical piano piece in "Be Glad."  I'm fairly certain that it's something he later recorded for Classically Speaking, but I have yet to listen to both albums back to back and figure out which one it is.

I revisited an earlier idea I had about "Candles on the River" and figured out something interesting.  According to Bob Henrit's comments on the LP sleeve, "Candles on the River," while billed to "Argent/White," is mostly a Chris White song.  And the "candles" part reminded me of "Brief Candles" from the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, which Chris White also wrote.  He re-uses the metaphor of people as candles.  But then I remembered that that wasn't his original idea; he took it from Aldous Huxley's collection of short stories titled Brief Candles.  And Huxley took "brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth.  But I realised that Shakespeare didn't really come up with the metaphor of people as candles either.  It's in Isaiah 42:  "Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.  He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench." (Emphasis added.)

Which has a lot of interesting connections.  Even though it doesn't appear that Chris White was familiar with the "brief candles" line in Macbeth, the Zombies did list Shakespeare as an influence.  There's a quote from The Tempest in the original liner notes to Odessey and Oracle.  Similarly, while Argent (the band) may not have recognized the Biblical reference that the people/candles metaphor has, there are religious influences in their work.  There's the musical quotation of the Latin hymn "Dies Irae" in "The Coming of Kohoutek" from Nexus.  In the version of "Hold Your Head Up" on Encore, Rod Argent includes part of "God of Grace and God of Glory" in his solo.  And there are also religious connections (or at least hints to them) in "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," "Gonna Meet My Maker," "Music from the Spheres," and "Rejoice."

So even though it doesn't appear that these bands realized where some of their references came from, the references still fit within the context of the band's past work and acknowledged influences.

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