"Confusion"

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An-other of the parts that sounded easy to figure out when I listened to All over the World a few days ago was the bass part in "Confusion."  I figured this out last night.  I think I wanted to learn it partially just because of that glissando (I'm a fan of bass glissandi).

All over the World: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra

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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."

Discovery

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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."