"When I Was a Boy"

Last night I saw a couple posts about how the "When I Was a Boy" single was released three years ago yester-day:

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On this day: 3 years ago, “When I Was A Boy”, the first single from Alone In The Universe was released.

A post shared by Jeff Lynne's ELO (@jefflynneselo) on Sep 25, 2018 at 2:23am PDT

Of course, this got me thinking about the song, and I realized a small thing about it:  "away" in the line "Far into the night and drift away" is sung with a melisma (D A G, I think).  Musically, this gives something of an impression of the movement of "drift[ing] away." 

"The Quick and the Daft"

This morning I was looking at the texts in Cherubini's Solemn Mass in G major for the Coronation of Louis XVIII, and I remembered something I'd long ago realized about "The Quick and the Daft" (an instrumental bonus track on the re-issue of Out of the Blue).  The title seems to come from either the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed.  Cherubini's Mass includes the Nicene Creed, where one of the lines is: Jesus "shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead," but there's a similar line in the Apostles' Creed, which is older.  The title of the ELO song simply changes "dead" to "daft."