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I'd forgotten that the only album on which I have versions of "All over the World," "Xanadu," and "Alright" is All over the World: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra (incidentally, it was also the first ELO album I owned), so I listened to that to-day in order to start transcriptions of those three and work on my transcriptions of the other songs. Also, I noticed some things:
"Don't Bring Me Down"
There's alliteration in the line "You wanna stay out with your fancy friends," which I think is there as an almost pretentious use of a poetic effect. Like, the effect is there just to look fancy, just like the friends it describes.
An-other verse begins with
You're always talkin' 'bout your crazy nights
One of these days you're gonna get it right
Because one line has "nights" and the other has "days," I think the sentiment here is a bit sarcastic.
"The Diary of Horace Wimp"
The line break between
And if he was late once more
He'd be out
seems rather important. There's almost a whole measure of rest in the vocal part, which, in a way, emphasizes the delay that's mentioned in the line itself.
"Confusion"
The "lean" in each stand-alone "To lean on" after "You feel there's no one there for you to lean on" has a melisma; it's more than the usual one syllable it would be were it just spoken, so there's an unstable feeling, like leaning itself.
"Alright"
At the end of the lines "And as you speak, everything that you say / Goes out on the big transmitter," some effect is applied to the vocal. It's something like an echo. In any case, it provides a sense of the projection from the "transmitter."
