About two weeks ago, I wrote a post on my general music blog about descending phrases in Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Since the Beach Boys covered this on Shut Down Volume Two, I figured I should also post that here.
The Beach Boys' version is in a different key though. Where Lymon's is in F# major, the Beach Boys' is in the much simpler F major (with only one flat rather than F# major's six sharps). Because of that difference, all of the notes in my original post are a half-step higher than those in the Beach Boys' version, but this doesn't affect the musical/lyrical connections.
A couple years ago, I happened to think of Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" and I realized that a lot of the musical phrases descend, as if to illustrate that "fall[ing] in love."
A lot of the rhythms are too complex for my novice notation skills, but the first "Why do fools fall in love" (after the initial "ooh wah"s) is:
The "Why do they fall" in the chorus is sung to the descending phrase A# G# F# E#, and while the initial note of the "in love" that completes the line starts from a higher pitch than that E#, that short phrase descends too. The "love" is sung with an extra syllable, and the second note is lower than the first, continuing the descent so that "in love" is sung to G# G# F#.
Some other lines in the chorus descend too. The "Fall from up above" in the lines "Why does the rain / Fall from up above" is sung to the phrase A# G# G# F# F#, and the "fall in love" in the line "Why do fools fall in love" is sung to the phrase A# G# F#.
