"On the Run"

I was thinking about "On the Run" yester-day and discovered some significance in the shape of the melody at the beginning of the song.  The first four lines are:

Whatever I do

Wherever I go

The same afterglow

Is keepin' me low

sung to a melody something like this:

The initial musical phrase is repeated exactly as the second and third phrases, and this repetition matches both the "same" in the line "The same afterglow" and the constancy of "keepin'" in the line "Is keepin' me low."

"On the Run"

I'm not sure of the specific notes, but "away" in the line "But they just won't go away" in "On the Run" is sung with a melisma, so while it's negated, there's a sense of movement.  The "around"s and "away" in the coda ("Woman, I gotta move around / Woman, I gotta get away / Woman, I gotta move around") also have this, and - as I noted before - those vocal articulations seem to owe something to Buddy Holly.

"On the Run"

Last night, I figured out most of the chords for "On the Run" (up to ~2:56), and while playing along to the recording, I noticed a couple features in the first verse.

The first two lines are "Whatever I do / Wherever I go."  Both "whatever" and "wherever" are sung to the phrase G F E.  Each syllable is sung to a different pitch, and as a whole, the pitches span nearly an octave (the F is above the G), both of which give a musical sense of the span of possibility of "whatever" and "wherever."

I also noticed that in the lines "The same afterglow / Is keepin' me low," the "low" is sung with a descending melisma (E D C), musically giving a sense of its meaning.

Discovery

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I listened to Discovery twice before writing this post, but I still don't have much to say about it.

"The Diary of Horace Wimp"

Like I've mentioned before, I'm more likely to see Beatles references in ELO songs because of the "pick up where 'I Am the Walrus' left off" quote, even if those references are actually just coincidences.  The list of days in "The Diary of Horace Wimp" might take something from the Beatles' "Lady Madonna" and possibly even Fats Domino's "Blue Monday," which seems to have inspired "Lady Madonna" (and has blue in the title!).

All three songs have a list of days.  "Blue Monday" has the weekdays and Sunday in the verses, and Saturday is in the bridge.  "Lady Madonna" has all of the days in the verses, although it omits Saturday.

"The Diary of Horace Wimp" goes a bit further and has a verse for each day (preceded by the name of the day through a vocoder).  Like "Lady Madonna," Saturday is omitted, probably because it's a syllable longer than the other days of the week, so it would present complications for the choral part at the end ("Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…").

"Midnight Blue"

An-other (very obvious) instance of Jeff Lynne's use of blue.  Also, the line "But what's the difference 'cause they say, 'What's in a name?'" seems to be a reference to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  In any case, it's a quote of Juliet's lines: "What's in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" (II.ii.43-44).

"On the Run"

At the very end, there are Buddy Holly-like hiccups on the words "around" and "away" ("Woman, I gotta move around / Woman, I gotta get away…").  I'm not certain if Holly was the inspiration here, but that is characteristic of his music.

"Don't Bring Me Down"

During the sections where the only line is "Don't bring me down" (I guess they're choruses?), each of the "down"s is broken into syllables via melismas, and the syllables have a downward trend as far as pitch goes.  So the "down"s are literally going down.

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I also noticed a few things that appear in multiple songs.

I might be making too much of this, but the "standin' (in/at)" that I noted in the Out of the Blue songs makes an appearance here too.  "Last Train to London" has "You were standin' there," and "Midnight Blue" has "I see you standin' there."

"Under(neath) the starry sky" is present in both "Confusion" and "Last Train to London."

"Darling" is a word that seems to be used a lot on the album too.  It's in "Shine a Little Love" and "Confusion" once each, and it starts each of the verses in "Wishing."