"Twilight"

Yester-day was the anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, so I listened to Time, mostly to hear "Ticket to the Moon."  I noticed a handful of small features in a number of songs.

Near the end of "Twilight," from about 3:04 to 3:18, what I think is some kind of synthesizer plays this repeated phrase for a total of eight measures:

A phrase with these same intervals (but a different rhythm) also appears near the end of "Wishing" from the previous album.  I think it's in the violins first, at ~3:23:

The repeated line "Hold on to her" (at ~3:39) is sung to these same pitches with roughly the same rhythm, but the phrases fall within the measure differently.

While the intervals in these parts from "Twilight" and "Wishing" match exactly, I'm not sure if this was an intentional nod to an earlier song or just a coincidence.

"Wishing"

I listened to Discovery yester-day and noticed a small feature in "Wishing."  In the line "I wish that ev'rything was gold" in the chorus, the three syllables of "ev'rything" are all sung to different pitches (F# E C#), giving a sense of entirety.

"Wishing"

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For the last week or two, I've been really into "Wishing."  There are still some phrases in it that I want to talk about, but I feel that text isn't the best medium in which to do it (especially since the phrases in question are beyond my limited notation skills, so I would be unable to provide notated excerpts), so I'll wait on that.  I have to do some more research anyway.

In the meantime, I learned the bass part.  This isn't the complete song, but the sections are repeated, and there's at least one of each here.  I learned the guitar chords too, but the first verse has some kind of effect (I think echo) that I don't have a good way of producing, and I haven't figured out the right rhythm for the rest.

In learning the parts and playing along, I found two things that demonstrate the titular wishing, or - more specifically - the lack of fulfillment that's related to it.  There's a grammatical error in the bridge:  "I wish that everything was gold" instead of "I wish that everything were gold" (because subjunctive verb forms are weird).  So there's an imperfection there, which is similar to the lack of fulfillment the speaker/singer has because he's away from his "little darling."  (I don't know if Jeff Lynne intended that line to have an error or not, but the point stands either way.  I will say though that "I wish that everything was gold" sounds better when sung than "I wish that everything were gold," even if it is grammatically incorrect.)

While the song is in A major, the verses and bridges end with a G note in the bass, which doesn't provide a resolution, and - furthermore - is an accidental.  So there's a musical sense of that yearning.  In the verses and the bridges, the lyrics above that non-resolving, accidental G note are "I'm wishin'," which seems to emphasize that feeling even further.

"Wishing"

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When I listened to Discovery a couple days ago, the opening part of "Wishing" sounded like it would be pretty easy to figure out.  I'm almost certain that it's done with a Moog in the original recording, but I don't have and can't afford one, so I used some other synth voice on my keyboard.

This afternoon I was playing around with this again, and I think I learned the guitar chords too, but I'm suspicious of a few and have some other phrases in the song that I want to look into, so I recorded just the opening for now.

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."