Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Never Even Thought

Because yester-day was Colin Blunstone's eightieth birthday, I listened to the two-albums-on-one-CD re-issue of Planes and Never Even Thought.  I noticed a few small points to write about, all in songs on Never Even Thought.

Initially, I noticed just that both "I'll Never Forget You" and "Do Magnolia Do" contain the phrase "all alone," and as I've noted before with other songs, since the two words begin with the same sound, there's a sense of that singularity.  When I transcribed some more of the lyrics, though, I discovered that the two songs have a number of similarities.  In both, this "all alone" comes at the end of the first line of the second verse and is rhymed with "telephone" in the following line.

"I'll Never Forget You":
I'll turn down the lights; I'm all alone
I lie here by the telephone
"Do Magnolia Do":
Tomorrow's stormy mornin', I'll probably wake up all alone
Nothin' but my mornin' and a quiet telephone
Because the phrase is in both songs (and with the same placement), it lends some cohesion to the album, and since "I'll Never Forget You" is the first song and "Do Magnolia Do" is the last, there's even a sort of book-ending effect.