"Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"

In "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," "right" in the line "Being here with you feels so right" is sung with a melisma (C Bb A), musically giving a sense of degree (for "so").

"Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"

I listened to the last disc of The Pet Sounds Sessions on Monday, and I discovered that my post about the melisma'd "sighs" in "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" was incomplete.  I neglected to notice that the following line has a similar feature.  The "eyes" in "And I can see so much in your eyes" is also sung with a melisma (Bb Ab Gb), so there's a musical sense of "so much" in the "eyes."

When I transcribed some of the song on Monday, I also discovered a couple things about the chorus.  In the first iteration, the last line is "Don't talk, take my hand, and let me hear your heart beat," but when the chorus is repeated, this becomes "Don't talk, take my hand, and listen to my heart beat."  There's a sort of parallelism between "let me hear your heart beat" and "listen to my heart beat."  Additionally, "heart beat" could be understood as two separate words (a noun with a verb) or a single word (a noun).

"Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"

An-other thing I noticed when I listened to the stack-o-vocals Pet Sounds tracks a couple days ago is that "sighs" in the line "I can hear so much in your sighs" in "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" is sung with a melisma (C Bb A).  Because "sighs" is sung to three notes, there's a musical sense of the one word's having "so much" in it.

Additional note:  I learned the bass part for "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" two years ago, but - of course - I didn't write it down and forgot it.  On Friday night (when I wrote this post), I relearned it and made sure to write it down.  In my notation, I wrote the key as Eb minor (so the C# and G# notes I mentioned in my original post are actually Db and Ab notes), but I'm not very confident that that's right.  The song doesn't really resolve, and there are a slew of accidentals (the bass part has every pitch but G), both of which make it difficult to identify the key.

"Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I listened to Pet Sounds yester-day, and then I learned the electric bass part for "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)."  It starts about halfway through the first verse, so the beginning sounds a bit weird.  I have to specify that this is the electric bass part because I'm pretty sure there's also an acoustic bass part con arco.

There's a repeated glissando from a G# to a C#.  Or at least there's something of a glissando.  The G# slides down, but not all the way to C#.  I played the G# on the D string (6th fret) so it can't go all the way to C#.  I think it's that way on the recording too.  It's like an interrupted glissando.  In any case, that part comes after the line "Don't talk; put your head on my shoulder," so it could be interpreted as that movement - placing a head on a shoulder.