"Passing By"

A couple days ago, I figured out the vocal part in "Passing By," and yester-day, I realized that in a number of ways, the song bears some resemblance to the Beatles' "Flying" (from the previous year), although this may be just coincidental.

Here's the vocal part in "Passing By" (the top two lines are the "verses"; the bottom line is the coda):

Here's the vocal part (starting at ~1:02) in the Beatles' "Flying":

There's some degree of similarity in the beginnings of the phrases:  an initial fourth or third, the second note of which starts a conjunct group of notes, usually all ascending.  More idiosyncratic, though, is the sort of skipping rhythm in both (in the even-numbered measures of "Passing By" but the odd-numbered measures of "Flying"):  quarter note, eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, quarter note.  Of course, both vocal parts are also wordless.

The titles are similar, too; both are either gerunds or participles that describe movement.

"Be with Me"

The lead vocals in "Be with Me" are doubled-tracked except for a single line about halfway through the song.  The left-panned voice sings, "It could set us free," but the right-panned voice sings, "It could set you free."  Up to that point, the voices had been singing the same lyrics, so they're bound together to some degree, but the divergence here matches being "set... free."

"Do It Again"

I listened to the two-albums-on-one-CD re-issue of Friends and 20/20 this morning and noticed that, appropriate for the retrospective theme, the lyrics of "Do It Again" contain the titles of a couple previous Beach Boys songs:  "California Girls" in the second verse ("With sun-tanned bodies and waves of sunshine / California girls and a beautiful coast line") and "Lonely Sea" in the bridge ("And with a girl the lonely sea looks good with moonlight").

"Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)"

I was thinking about "Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)" again yester-day and had an-other small realization about it:  coinciding with the phrase "rock me in the cradle" in the introduction, the bass register of the piano starts alternating between two notes (I think they're A flats an octave apart).  This figure gives a musical impression of that "rock[ing]."

"Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)"

Recently, the Reelin' in the Years Archive posted a video from 1969 in which the Beach Boys mime to "Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)":

I realized that while most couplets are linkt by perfect rhymes ("rotten" with "cotton" and "warm ya" with "California") or assonance ("in a fix" and "lickety split"), this isn't the case for the lines "Came along a nice old man with- he had a hat on / 'A-wait a minute, mister; can you give me some direction.'"*  There's no strong relationship between "hat on" and "direction."  To some degree, this break from the established structure matches how the narrator has left familiar roads.

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*I'm not entirely confident in my transcription.  I referenced some lyrics websites (which I'm always skeptical of), and they all have "a nice old man, well, he had a hat on," but I think what I have is more accurate.  In any case, the ends of the lines are the salient point here.

"Little Deuce Coupe"

While reading The Beach Boys yester-day, I ran across the phrase "Deuce Coupe" (on page 287, Dennis mentions a ballet with this name, inspired by the Beach Boys' music).  In thinking about the song "Little Deuce Coupe" afterwards, I realized that the second half of the line "Well, I'm not braggin', babe, so don't put me down" is sung to a descending melody ("so don't put me down" is sung to the notes Db C Ab Ab Ab), so while the expression is used more metaphorically and is negated, there's a musical sense of "put[ting]... down."

"Spirit of America"

Months ago, I had a small realization about "Spirit of America," but it wasn't until recently that I was able to articulate it.

The phrase "half airplane, half auto" is sung to a melody something like this:

"Half airplane" is sung to notes that total five beats, and "half auto" is sung to notes that total six beats, so it's not quite exact, but there is a sort of musical balance that matches this "half" and "half."

This balance is also present in the lyrics alone:  the two phrases have the same number of syllables, and there's a parallelism in the initial letters of the words.