Recently, I learned a good deal of the bridges in "Shine a Little Love." Here's a recording of bass, electric piano, and violin, along with the notation of what I played:
I used the Wurlitzer sound on my Nord Electro 5, along with a phasing effect, which the original recording seems to have. For the violin part, I used the Mellotron sound.
I listened to ELO II this morning and noticed a small feature in "Baby I Apologize," which is included as a bonus track. There's a temporal merism in the line "Love her in the mornin' and the evenin', too."
Yester-day, ELO's social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram) posted that it was the fortieth anniversary of the release of Secret Messages. I didn't have time to listen to the album yester-day, but I listened to it this morning and noticed a small feature in "Danger Ahead": for most of the verses, the vocal is centered in the stereo picture, but in the second half of the third verse, starting with the line "With her entourage on either side," there are two sets of vocals, with one panned left and one panned right to portray "on either side" in a musical way.
Recently, I watched this performance of "Kuiama" on The Midnight Special on 29 June 1973:
I'm pretty sure this is the same backing track as the studio version (although edited for length) but with live vocals.
This probably isn't a very significant point, but yester-day, I realized that one of the verses exhibits anacoluthon, a rhetorical effect that's basically just an interruption in the logical flow of a sentence. In the song, it appears in the lines "It's just that I mean - well, that is to say / That I'm trying to explain, but I'll start again."
When I watched the video again in order to embed it here, I also noticed the line "No horsemen in the night a-ridin' through your dreams and tearin' at your life" (I'm not sure where or if there should be line breaks there). This is an allusion to the four horsemen of the apocalypse in Revelation 6:1-8.
When I listened to Time yester-day, I also noticed the structure of this verse in "21st Century Man":
Things ain't how you thought they were
Nothing have you planned
So pick up your penny and your suitcase
You're not a 21st century man
The syntax of the second line is inverted, apparently so that "planned" will come at the end of the line in order to rhyme with "man," but this inversion also illustrates the line "Things ain't how you thought they were." Instead of a normal word order ("you have planned nothing"), there's this unexpected inversion.
I listened to Time this morning and noticed that at ~2:34 in "Another Heart Breaks," a voice starts counting off the measures, from one to eight. This may be yet an-other instance of the Beatles' influence; there's also a voice counting off the measures in "A Day in the Life." According to the liner notes of Anthology 2, this is "Mal Evans, one of the Beatles' two assistants, counting out the first of two long gaps that would later be so famously filled with the orchestral crescendos."
I noted before that the phrase "blue days, black nights" in "Telephone Line" seems to be a reference to the song "Blue Days, Black Nights," which was recorded by Buddy Holly. Recently, I figured out some of the bass part for "Telephone Line," and as I was looking at the chords as something of a guide, I realized that "Blue Days, Black Nights" and "Telephone Line" are in the same key: A major. This might be an-other facet of this reference, or it might simply be a coincidence.
Recently, I learned the arpeggiated synthesizer part in "Prologue." To this, I could add the synth bass part that I learned a couple years ago.
The liner notes for the CD re-issue of Time aren't very detailed in terms of the specific synthesizers used for the album. I used my Moog Subsequent 37 for the bass part and Nord's sample of the Hohner String Melody II for the arpeggiated part. I'm pretty sure that neither of these is accurate, but they're the best I could do.
I did the notation to put in my file, and I figured that I might as well put it in the video too. Note that the synth bass part actually starts before this; I just started it where the arpeggiations begin (at ~0:39 in the original recording).
Last night, I figured out the chords for "Birmingham Blues." The song is in B major, and I'm wondering if this is meant as something of a musical joke, as if the B of B major also stands for Birmingham.
In the line "She took me for ev'rything" in "Four Little Diamonds," the three syllables of "ev'rything" are each sung to a different pitch (F Eb G), musically giving a sense of breadth.
"Day and night" in the line "I keep a-wonderin' 'bout her day and night" is a merism.
In the line "I'm gonna search everywhere," the "every-" of "everywhere" is sung with three syllables, giving a sense of thoroughness.
As if to reflect the searching nature of "I looked around; I climbed up high into the dawn...," there's something of a key change. The verses are in C major, but this section is in a flat key.
