I recently learned about the song "Dixie," which had been lurking on my periphery for a while (by which I mean I was sort of aware of it, but it was only recently that I actually lookt into it), and I instantly remembered Electric Light Orchestra's "Down Home Town." I just confirmed that it quotes "Dixie," lyrically and musically.
At about 2:42 in the backing vocals, there's the line "Wish I was in the land of Dixie," and then the trumpets play almost all of the tune "Dixie," near the end of which some more lyrics (the overlapping "Look away"s) from "Dixie" appear. At about 3:30, those backing vocal parts ("Wish I was in the land of Dixie" and the overlapping "Look away"s) appear a second time.
For some reason, the chorus from "Ticket to the Moon" popped into my head yester-day. I already had my bass out, so I learned some of the bass part, but there's still a lot of it I'm not sure of yet. Instead, here are the first eight measures of piano. which I also learned. This morning, I even notated as much as I played in this recording. Eventually, I plan on posting the chords, notation, or even tabs for some of these songs, but since I started this project only a year and a half ago, I don't know very much yet (and a lot of the parts I do know are still incomplete).
I listened to Face the Music a few days ago, and the bass part for "Evil Woman" sounded like it consisted of only three notes in some places. I figured it out yester-day, and - for the most part - it is just three notes.
This is just a verse and a chorus, but I'm pretty sure the bass part remains the same throughout.
I remembered the guitar part that I figured out in January too, although I do have it written down somewhere, so I still have it in case I forget.
I listened to ELO II this morning for my Collection Audit project, and I found an-other mention of blue, which I missed when I did my initial notes on the album. In "Mama" there's the phrase "blue horizon" in the first verse.
Especially on the early albums, I'm still having trouble making out the lyrics, so I don't know how much I'll be able to write about them.
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.
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.
I listened to Discovery yester-day, and even before it got to this part in "The Diary of Horace Wimp," I was pretty sure that the tubular bell part (after "And she did" in the Sunday verse) was just a scale. I figured out that it's a Bb major scale, although the last note is the same pitch as the first.
This is an extremely small part of the song, but at least now I can be pretty sure that the rest of the song is in Bb major too.
Yester-day, I finally got Alone in the Universe! I think it's a bit cut-throat to start analyzing it and figuring out parts from it right away, so I'm going to wait a year or so before I start doing that. For now, I just want to enjoy it as a listener.
I also got a two-disc set of Del Shannon songs, partially so I could hear his "Little Town Flirt," a cover of which is a bonus track on Discovery.
The same day I learned the opening bass part for "Nightrider," I also learned the opening bass part for "Steppin' Out."
The phrase that's at the very end of my recording is an ascending chromatic phrase (every note from F# to D), which - in some ways - helps to emphasize the "steppin' out" that's in the lyrics and title. There's an incremental progression from note to note.
A couple days ago, I learned the opening bass part to "Nightrider." When I was recording this to-day though, I discovered I had a few notes wrong and had to correct them.
Two days ago, I learned most of the bass part for "Midnight Blue." Last night I did some more work on it, and I thought I had it figured out, but when I tried recording it this afternoon, I kept messing up just because I couldn't remember where I was in the song. So I notated the whole thing, and - in doing so - I realized that I actually had a few parts wrong.
I'm still unsure of a phrase in the chorus:
With those eighth note phrases, I might be projecting a tonality onto a percussion part. Also, I'm pretty sure there are A notes both times (2nd and 6th measures), but the second pair sounds really different (originally, I thought they were C notes), which I'm assuming is because of the surrounding notes, so I'm interested to find out what those are.
The bass starts halfway through the first verse, so the beginning sounds a bit off.
This was worth reading just for finding out that that word in "Don't Bring Me Down" is "groose." I lookt in the liner notes for the CD re-issue (I'd forgotten that the lyrics are printed in it!) and discovered that there it's rendered as "grrroosss." The engineer Lynne cites is correct that it means "greetings" in German, although in German it's spelt as "Gruß."
