Collection Audit

Every other year, I listen to all of the music in my collection. Often, I discover new things about music I'm familiar with or learn new things about songs I'm not as familiar with. This is where I'll be documenting that.

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Success!

Because I listened to the last disc of Zombie Heaven this morning, I completed my Collection Audit project for an-other year.  Two years ago, I finished on 11 November.  I have more music in my collection now, but I finished almost a week earlier, so I guess I listened to more every day.

I plan on doing this again in 2018, but who knows how big my music collection will be by then or how busy I'll be.  Inevitably, there will be a year I won't complete this project.

For more of these same kinds of posts, I'd recommend my general music blog.  I try to have a new post there every Monday, and for the last few months, I've occasionally been posting some notation on Fridays.

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This morning I listened to the last disc of the Zombies' Zombie Heaven, subtitled "Live on the BBC," and I noticed a small thing about their version of "Soulville."  During a section about halfway through the song, the backing vocals consist of the phrase "Come on down to Soulville."  The "down" there is sung with two syllables; it's a G down to an E.  That descent sort of represents the whole "Come on down to Soulville" phrase itself.

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This morning I listened to the second disc of the Zombies' Zombie Heaven (which is the last album I have to listen to before completing Collection Audit this year).  I'm pretty sure I'd noticed before that the harpsichord in "Smokey Day" is panned through different channels about halfway through the song (starting at about 1:00), but this morning I realized that that effect is connected to the lyrics.  The harpsichord moves from the left channel to the right channel after the line "Soft, serene, she dances," and during the next line "Moving sweetly through my life," it moves back to the left channel.  Both of those lines deal with movement, and the harpsichord somewhat literally underscores that movement through that panning.

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I've been making my way through a three-disc set of Sam Cooke (titled You Send Me), and yester-day when I listened to the second disc, I noticed something about "For Sentimental Reasons," specifically the line "I dream of you every every every every night."  Those "every"s are sung with three syllables each (rather than the two they're usually pronounced with), and between that pronunciation and the repetition there, the frequency of "dream[ing] of you" is illustrated.

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Yester-day I listened to the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday, and I noticed a small thing about "Mind Gardens."  The "walls all down" part of the line "I tore the walls all down" is sung to a descending phrase (E D C#), so there's a musical representation of the walls' coming down.

Just for the sake of making this post a bit more than just "hey, there's significance to this descending phrase," I was going to note the origin of the phrase "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," which occurs earlier in the song, but in doing so, I actually found something I hadn't realized before.  I've known for years that this is a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  It's actually in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  He asks himself "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them." (III.i.65-68).  But I hadn't realized that both Hamlet and David Crosby's song are talking about minds.  Hamlet specifically mentions "in the mind," where Crosby seems to use a garden as a metaphor for a mind.

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This morning I listened to the soundtrack of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and I noticed a lot of things.

"Snoopy"

The melody for "Sturdy roof beneath my head" also describes the relative positions of those things.  "Sturdy roof" is sung to the phrase D E D, and "beneath my head" to D D B A.  So "roof" (D) really is "beneath my head" (A).

"My Blanket and Me"

After not being able to leave his blanket on the floor, Linus rushes back to it, and there's the line "Got you back again" sung to a palindromic phrase (C D E D C).  (In a bonus track with a different performer, it's a half step lower: Bb C D C Bb).  The palindromic nature of that phrase represents the coming back.

"Dr. Lucy"

Near the end, when Lucy sings, "You have the distinction to be no one else but the singular, remarkable, unique Charlie Brown," there's a dissonant note (corresponding to "unique") on a chromatic percussion instrument (I can't quite tell what it is; vibraphone, maybe).   That dissonant note represents what - at the beginning of the song - Lucy calls "everything that's wrong with" Charlie Brown .

At the end, after Lucy's line "That'll be five cents, please," there's a Bb note played on piano followed by a rumbling descent to an Eb.  In a different version of the song (inexplicably with a different title: "The Doctor Is In") included as a bonus track, there're just single notes: a Bb followed by an Eb a fifth lower.  That interval (a fifth) and its descent musically represent Charlie Brown's putting down a nickel.

"The Red Baron"

Last time I did Collection Audit, I mentioned that part of the vocal melody from "Over There" is played in this.  I'm a bit more familiar with "Over There" now, so I noticed that "The Red Baron" also starts with the same four-note descending phrase that's in the bass register at the beginning of the chorus of "Over There" (the same pitches even: Bb A G F):

(notation found here)

"T-E-A-M (The Baseball Game)"

After the batter hit Charlie Brown's pitch, Lucy caught it "as easy as pie / Then dropped it."  The "Then dropped it" is sung to a descending melody C# A G, in the same way that Lucy drops the ball.

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Yester-day I listened to The Worst of Jefferson Airplane, and I noticed a small thing about "Greasy Heart" (from Crown of Creation), which is a bonus track, although it's inserted into the middle to fit the roughly chronological track listing.

The "falls" in the line "Don't change before the empire falls" has a descending melisma (I'm not sure what specific notes are sung, but the phrase starts on an A and descends to a D), which is a musical representation of the empire falling.

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Earlier to-day I listened to the Beatles' With the Beatles, and I noticed something about "Devil in Her Heart" that should have been glaringly obvious.  The "apart" in the recurring line "She's gonna tear your heart apart" is sung with a melisma (I think it's A A B G A, but I'm not sure).  Breaking up "apart" into multiple syllables and various pitches both emphasizes and demonstrates the "tear[ing]."

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A few days ago, I listened to the White Stripes' White Blood Cells, and I noticed something about a melody in "I Can Learn."  Near the end of the song, there are the lines "Falling down / Is no longer around."  The "Falling down" is sung to a descending phrase (E B G#), so there's a musical representation of that descent.  The end of "Is no longer around" is sung to an ascending phrase (E G A A# B).  It's as if descending further is no longer possible (because "Falling down / Is no longer around"), so the melody has to rise at that point.

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This morning I also listened to Wilco's Wilco (The Album), and I noticed a small thing about "Deeper Down."  The title phrase descends (it's sung to the melody C G E), so there's a musical representation of depth.

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This morning I listened to the Guess Who's Wheatfield Soul, and I noticed a couple things about "A Wednesday in Your Garden."  First, there are some melismas that mirror the lyrics.  The "down" in the first line of the chorus ("It's a long way comin' down") is sung to the phrase F# E D.  By spreading "down" out across those three syllables, there's both a musical representation of the "downness" and an emphasis on the length of the "long way."  Furthermore, because F# E D doesn't skip over any notes in that section of the A major scale (I'm pretty sure the song's in A major), there's a sense of climbing down each rung of the ladder that's mentioned in the next line ("The ladders in your eye").  There's scale in the sense of musical intervals, and there's scale in the sense of climbing (albeit downward).

The "fall" in the second "You watch me fall" at the end of the second verse is sung to the phrase F# E, so there's a bit of a representation of that fall.

In the third verse, "garden" is rhymed with "harden" (the full lines are "I tried to fly in your garden" and "I watched the sky above me harden").  The first line of each verse ends with "garden," and the fourth line rhymes with it.  In the first verse, "garden" is rhymed with "pardon," and in the second, it's rhymed with "cards in" (a mosaic rhyme).  There's the least amount of orthographic change between "garden" and "harden" though, which sort of tacitly indicates that hardening.  There's less variation in how the words resemble each other visually.

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This morning I listened to Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?, and I noticed two small things about some lyrics.

"Who's Feeling Young Now?"

There's something of a reference to Icarus in the line "She said, 'Hey, you look a lot like someone I liked who flew just far enough under the sun to never come down'" (I'm not even going to try figuring out where the line breaks go there).  In the story of Icarus and Daedalus, Daedalus makes wings for himself and his son in order to escape the labyrinth.  He warns his son not to fly too close to the sun, lest the heat melt the glue and the wings fall apart, but Icarus doesn't heed his advice.  He does fly too close to the sun; the glue melts; and he plummets into the ocean.  So, the "someone... who flew just far enough under the sun" isn't like Icarus.

"Patchwork Girlfriend"

There's some great parallelism in the phrase "No false start or dead end," and because of that book-ending of terms ("start" and "end"), there's sort of an implication that nothing in the middle will go wrong either.

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This morning I listened to She & Him's Volume Two, and I noticed a small thing about "I'm Gonna Make It Better."  I can't seem to figure out the precise notes, but the "down on you" in the line "Yes, it all comes crashin' down on you" is sung to a descending phrase, evidently to portray that crashing.

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This morning I listened to a compilation album of the Coasters.  A spoken line at the beginning of "Little Egypt" caught my attention:  "Just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar."  I had to reference the recording to get the exact phrase, but word-for-word, this is almost the same exhortation that's in the Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A." on the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album.  There, it's "One thin dime, just one tenth of a dollar."

Last time I did Collection Audit, I postulated that that phrase in "Amusement Parks U.S.A." came from the song "Broadway," specifically the line "One thin dime won't even shine your shoes."  This song by the Coasters seems much more likely to be the actual origin though.  While I don't know if the Beach Boys were familiar with this song, both it and "Amusement Parks U.S.A." have a carnival-esque atmosphere.

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Two days ago, I listened to an album of the VeggieTales titled VeggieTales: Veggie Tunes.  I noticed a couple things.

"King Darius Suite"

This starts with a quotation of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525 (albeit in Eb major), commonly referred to as Eine kleine Nachtmusik (literally, a little night music).  Since "King Darius Suite" is about King Darius' dream (there are two in the Bible: in Daniel 2 and Daniel 4) and dreams usually occur at night, that quotation helps to set that nighttime context.

"We are the Grapes of Wrath"

I think I was dimly aware that this is a reference to John Steinbeck's book The Grapes of Wrath, and apparently Steinbeck's title alludes to Revelation 14:17-20 (so, it's an allusion upon an allusion).  Listening to it this time, however, I noticed this stanza:

I'm ma; I'm pa; this is our brood We're grumpy, and we know it That's Tom and Rosie; they're both rude And not afraid to show it

The names here are the same names from Steinbeck's book!  I've read The Grapes of Wrath only once (and that was almost three years ago now), but - if I remember correctly - the parents are referred to only as "Ma" and "Pa."  The main character is Tom Joad, and his sister is named Rose of Sharon (although it's rendered as "Rosasharn" when it appears in dialogue).

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An-other thing I noticed when I listened to a Peter & Gordon compilation album yester-day was some wordplay in "Jokers."  In the last verse, there are the lines "we know / That once they leave the pack / The jokers can't come back."  "Pack" has a dual meaning here.  There's pack in the sense of a group of people, but there's also pack in the sense of a pack of playing cards, which jokers are a part of.  The playing card sense seems to be the primary one here because a later line is "their place will be taken by the jack."

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Yester-day I listened to a compilation album of Peter & Gordon, and I noticed something about the harmonies in "My First Day Alone."  For much of the song, both Peter & Gordon are singing, but during the line "no one's to blame but me," one of them (I'm pretty sure it's Peter) drops out so that the other (Gordon) sings "but me" alone.  Because there's a single voice for that "but me," the exclusivity of the blame is represented musically.