1. The Beatles – Hey Jude. After a few years of listening only to classical music, the Beatles were the first rock band I ever got into. And yet, despite the fact that I’ve been a Beatles fan for over a decade, I’ve never gotten to know “Hey Jude” that well, because I got to know the band mainly through their albums, and “Hey Jude” was only released as a single. I never thought much of it based on the times I heard it in the background of movies and commercials, plus karaoke renditions and people singing bits and pieces of it, but listening to it now, I find that I like it quite a bit. The na-na-na-na ending, which literally takes up more than half the song, is certainly a bit excessive, especially since it doesn’t have the increasing intensity or the addictive chord loop of the similarly repetitive “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” — but the first half builds up a rich, satisfying texture, starting with the piano in the right channel, adding a strumming guitar in the left, and then adding chordal backing vocals in the center. Later the backing vocals add little melodies (e.g. after the line “You have found her, now go and get her”) and a distorted, slightly out-of-tune lead guitar makes an occasional interjection (e.g. after the line “You’re looking for someone to perform with”). And more importantly, the chorus contains one of those little gestures that gets me for reasons I can’t quite understand — a little appoggiatura, mi resolving to re, over a V7/IV chord, like on the word “well” in the line “And well you know that it’s a fool.” Actually, it’s the same relationship between melody and harmony that I commented on in “Ode to Billie Joe,” except that the seventh chord there really is a I7, a tonic with a bluesy added minor seventh, rather than a V7/IV, a chord that leads away from the tonic toward a new key, which means that the Beatles’ version has a foward-moving, directional quality, while the Bobbie Gentry version feels static.

2. Paul Mauriat – Love is Blue. An easy-listening instrumental featuring harpsichord and the occasional oboe against the backrop of a full orchestra and a prominent drum-kit backbeat. Seems like something that might have been a themesong for a Western romance, although Wikipedia tells me that it started out the Luxembourgian entry in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest (!) before Mauriat did his instrumental version. It’s mostly pretty drippy, and even manages to make my favorite chord, iii, seem schmaltzy rather than genuinely sad. The only good part is when the texture thins out and the harpsichord gets to play some angular figures against a i-IV-i chord progression.

3. Bobby Goldsboro – Honey. OK, what the hell is going on with this song? At first I thought it was a sentimental Christmas ballad, with its glockenspiel and theremin and soupy string section, and its lyrics about trees and snow and puppies. Then I thought, geez, this is one hell of a creepy Christmas song, not just cheesy but demonically cheesy, between Goldsboro’s quavery, vulnerable voice and the moment two thirds of the way through where the music shifts up a whole step and a backing choir starts crowding the texture like walls closing in on your head. But then I looked more closely at the lyrics and realized that they’re actually pretty disturbing too, and not in a kitschy way either.  The way Goldsboro describes Honey makes her sound mentally disabled — a volatile child-woman, an object of affectionate ridicule, someone who sits up late crying at radio dramas — and the song climaxes with her unexplained death, the backing choir representing the angels who took her away, and Goldsboro announces that his life is now an empty stage. All this set to music that sounds like it should be sandwiched between “White Christmas” and “Wonderful, Wonderful.” I guess it’s supposed to be a tearjerker, but I hear it mainly as unnerving.

4. Otis Redding – (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay. Here’s another song whose entire meaning changes when you listen more carefully to the lyrics. At first it seems like a pleasant, unassuming ode to laziness, but it’s actually about depression, about leaving your home because there’s nothing left for you there and spending the rest of your life staring out at the San Francisco Bay, with nothing else to look forward to. Once you realize that, Redding’s whistling solo at the end sounds darkly ironic, and the V/vi chords in the chorus sound hollow and lonely. If you ever need an example of emotional ambiguity in music, here it is. There are also a lot of nice textural details that are easy to ignore if you’re focused on the constant elements (the piano, the guitar and Redding’s distinctive voice): recurring samples of waves, rhythmic guitar fret noises, and a brass section that’s always kept in the background.  I approve.

5. The Rascals – People Got To Be Free. This song is boring, and the lyrics are generic hippie fluff. I don’t feel like writing about it.

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