"Dirty to the Bone"

I don't think I mentioned this here, but one of my musical projects for 2018 is to figured out at least one part for every song on Alone in the Universe.  Yester-day I figured out some parts for "Dirty to the Bone" and discovered an interesting feature.

There's a repeating guitar phrase that's something like:

And so on.

The title phrase ("dirty to the bone") is sung to this musical phrase:

These two parts consist of the same three pitches (G, B, and C), which gives the song some cohesion.

That the title phrase descends also gives a musical impression of going to the very core or - as the song puts it - "to the bone."

"Look at Me Now"

Lately, I've been listening to a ten-CD box set of works by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen.  I found a melody in his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 33 that sounded familiar.  Near the end of the Allegro cavallerésco in the first movement, there's this phrase in the solo violin:

[notation found here]

I knew this was similar to a phrase from one of the songs on No Answer, but I had to do a bit of searching before I found which one.  It's the vocal melody at the beginning of the bridge in "Look at Me Now," which is something like:

(I guessed on the key.  I'm still having trouble understanding the lyrics on a lot of the early ELO songs, but I think the lines here are "Now she's a sallow face / Got a ring of lace.")

The exact pitches (and even the intervals) aren't the same, and the rhythms are a little different, but the two melodies do have the same general shape.

"Look at Me Now" was written by Roy Wood.  I don't know if he was familiar with this particular piece by Nielsen, but there is a certain similarity between these two phrases.