Sunday, May 4, 2025

"John Riley"

Halfway through the line "He picked her up all in his arms" in "John Riley" (in the pause after "He picked her up"), there's an ascending phrase in the string part, musically illustrating this "picked... up."  (I think the most prominent violin plays just a whole step, though:  A to B.)

Saturday, May 3, 2025

"I See You"

In the line "Under there, behind your hair, ev'rywhere" in "I See You," the three syllables of "ev'rywhere" are each sung to a different pitch (A G E), giving a sense of this breadth.

Friday, May 2, 2025

"Mr. Spaceman"

I recently got a vinyl copy of Fifth Dimension and listened to it a couple days ago.  I'd previously noticed some odd structures in the third verse of "Mr. Spaceman," but while listening to it this time, I realized that they may be significant.

Each line in the first two verses can stand by itself, but in the third verse, the meanings seem to extend beyond the line breaks.  Poetically and musically, it's structured as:
Woke up this morning; I was feelin' quite weird
Had flies in my beard; my toothpaste was smeared
Over my window; they'd written my name
Said, "So long, we'll see you again"
but, as I understand it at least, some of the semantic breaks don't follow the line breaks:
My toothpaste was smeared over my window
They'd written my name, said, "So long, we'll see you again"
"My toothpaste was smeared" seems incomplete without "over my window" to specify where it was smeared.  That the line "Over my window they'd written my name" would otherwise be inverted seems to confirm my reading.

This sort of discrepancy between the structure and the meaning, with the line breaks falling in strange places, matches the narrator's "feelin' quite weird."

Additionally, it occurred to me that there's some resemblance between "Mr. Spaceman" and Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man."  The titles are obviously similar, and the chorus of each has lines that start with "Hey, Mr. Spaceman/Tambourine Man."  Although the two songs are in different keys, the entirety of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the verses of "Mr. Spaceman" have the same chords:  G major, A major, and D major, sometimes even appearing in the same order and for only one measure each.