"The Ghost of You and Me"

I was thinking about Colin Blunstone's "The Ghost of You and Me" recently and realized that the phrase "all these blues" in the first line ("What am I supposed to do with all these blues") is sung to notes of all different pitches (A B C).  While the span here is only a minor third, this articulation does give something of a sense of breadth or entirety.

"Circus"

While re-reading The Merchant of Venice recently, I found a passage that seems to be quoted (or at least referred to) in the lines "In the circus / Each must play a part" in Argent's "Circus."  In Act One, Scene One (lines 77-78), Antonio says, "I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano: / A stage where every man must play a part."

"I Remember When I Loved Her"

Years ago, I wrote a post about "I Remember When I Loved Her," specifically that the archaic use of "strange" had precedent in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and that this connected to Rod Argent's comment about Shakespeare in Johansen's The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream (p. 30):  "The language spoke to me; it had an indefinable, spiritual quality."

I recently started re-reading The Merchant of Venice and found a passage in which "strange" is used in a sense closer to that in "I Remember When I Loved Her" than the one in Romeo and Juliet is.  In Act One, Scene One (roughly lines 66-68), Bassanio says to Salarino and Solanio, "Good signiors both, when shall we laugh?  Say, when?  You grow exceeding strange."

"Show Me the Way"

I listened to Breathe Out, Breathe In yester-day and noticed a small feature in "Show Me the Way."  In the lines "I'm sorry now / For all that I've done" (that's how they're formatted in the liner notes), the phrase "all that I've done" is sung to notes of all different pitches (spanning a fifth:  D C Bb G), giving a sense of this entirety.

"Be My Lover, Be My Friend"

Yester-day, I listened to Argent's performance at the Paris Theatre from 14 December 1972 and noticed that the line "You sounded so sweet" in "Be My Lover, Be My Friend" alliterates.  The repeated S provides a sense of degree, matching the adverb "so."