"Across the Border"

About a month ago, I figured out the rest of the chords for "Across the Border."  While doing so, I noticed a nod to Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock."  The first line of the first verse of "Across the Border" is "In the heat of the day many miles away," which is quite similar to the first line of "Let It Rock":  "In the heat of the day down in Mobile, Alabama."  Obviously, the phrase "in the heat of the day" is exactly the same; more generally, "many miles away" refers to a location in the same way that "Mobile, Alabama" does.

I think it's also worth mentioning that Jeff Lynne later recorded a cover of "Let It Rock" on his Long Wave album.

"The Way Life's Meant to Be"

I listened to Time back in October and noticed a feature in the rhyme scheme of "The Way Life's Meant to Be."  Along with line-ending rhymes (ABCB), there's internal rhyme in the first and third lines of each verse:

Well, I came a long way to be here today

And I left you so long on this avenue

And here I stand in the strangest land

Not knowing what to say or do

This pattern is broken in the fourth verse:

And when I see what they've done to this place that was home

Shame is all that I feel

Oh, and I wonder, yes, I wonder

Is this the way life's meant to be

"Feel" doesn't rhyme with "be," but more significantly, there's a slant rhyme between "done" and "home."  The change in the established rhyme scheme mirrors the change that "this place that was home" has undergone.

"Songbird"

In "Songbird," "long" in the line "She'd been gone for so long" is sung with a melisma (A G), musically giving a sense of that duration.

"Goin' out on Me"

In "Goin' out on Me," the bass repeats a four-measure phrase in the introduction and roughly the first half of the verses.  Rhythmically and melodically, it bears a strong resemblance to the bass part in the Beatles' "This Boy."  I'm not exactly sure what time signatures the parts are in, but I notated them in 6/8 in order to illustrate their similarity: