Wednesday, July 30, 2025

"Blueberry Hill"

Yester-day, I listened to the two-albums-on-one-CD re-issue of 15 Big Ones and Love You (because I've been reading about Love You in The Beach Boys lately), and I noticed a few features.

In the lines "But all of those vows you made / Were never to be" in "Blueberry Hill," the phrase "all of those vows" is sung to notes of all different pitches (E# F# G# A#), giving a sense of the entirety of "all."  That this E# is an accidental (the song is in B major) lends a further sense of breadth.

When I was thinking about the song later, I also realized that there's some significance in the placement of one of the line breaks in the second verse:
The moon stood still
On blueberry hill
It lingered until
My dream came true
The semantic sense is spread across the line break between "It lingered until" and "My dream came true."  The second line is necessary to complete the meaning, and in a way, the pause that comes before it matches this "linger[ing]."