"Starlight"

I noticed a couple different things about how the vocals are articulated in "Starlight."

"Run" in the line "And then you run" is sung with a melisma, although it's not always the same.  At ~0:47 and ~2:52, it's C Ab F, but at ~1:47, it's Ab G F G.  For both, there's a musical sense of the movement of "run[ning]."

"Away" in the line "Your eyes are lookin' out so far away" (at the beginning of the second verse) is sung with a melisma (C D F), musically giving a sense of distance.

At the end, in the repeated line "Starlight, your eyes are lookin' down on me, so far away," "down on me" is sung to a descending phrase (D C Ab, I think), giving a sense of that "down," and "away" is sung with a melisma (Eb D C Bb A), giving a sense of distance again.

Out of the Blue

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Collection Audit:

This morning I listened to Electric Light Orchestra's Out of the Blue.  Last March I started a project where I look into ELO's music specifically (which I started because of this project, actually), and I've already written a fair amount about Out of the Blue there, but I noticed some more things this morning. 

"Starlight" 

I've had this album for years (it was actually the first original ELO album I got), but it wasn't until this morning that I deciphered the line "You've gotta stop" in "Starlight."  Had I noticed that sooner, I probably would have understood long ago that there's a musical/lyrical connection there.  After "You've gotta stop," the music stops before the lyric continues with "Foolin' around." 

"Big Wheels" 

There's a musical connection between "Big Wheels" and "Steppin' Out."  After some measures of tied whole notes, the bass part in "Steppin' Out" has this figure: 

 

(click here for a larger image) 

I use the MIDI component of my digital audio workstation to make these examples of notation, and where I would have tied a half note and a dotted quarter note, it put two dots on a half note.  I guess it ends up with the same value, but I haven't seen double-dotted notes anywhere else. 

When the bass part finally starts in "Big Wheels," every other measure has the same rhythm as that in the bass part in "Steppin' Out."  The phrase also alternates between fourths, although here it's a semi-tone higher: 

 

(click here for a larger image) 

"Birmingham Blues" 

Near the beginning, there's the line "Yeah, I've been rollin' like a stone," which recalls "Like a rollin' stone" in "Steppin' Out." 

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Both of those last two things make the album more coherent.

I noticed a couple more things about Out of the Blue when I listened to it for my Collection Audit project recently.