I wrote1 just over one year ago About once a month, the 'Unhalfbricking' version of 'Who knows where the time goes?' gets played on the radio, but recently it seems to be played once every few days. My wife has become extremely enamoured of the song (finally, after 43 years of marriage) and asked me to add it to her telephone playlist. She then asked if there were any other songs that she might like - I could think of at least one hundred - and so I sent her "I'll keep it with mine".
It occurs to me now that IKIWM has several similarities to WKWTTG in terms of harmony - although in fact it should be written the other way around, as IKIWM was written in 1964 by Bob Dylan and WKWTTG was written in 1968 by Sandy Denny. Both start off with a chord stream that can be seen as I ii iii ii; after that the chords used by the songs differ but their gross structure is quite similar. The Dylan song is unusual (for Dylan) in its use of the bVI chord (every time I hear the Hollies' "He ain't heavy", my mind always plays the piano riff from the Dylan song - played by Denny - when the Hollies' song also reached the bVI song) whereas Sandy's has the unusual iv chord - A minor - that is especially striking when it comes after the iii chord, G#m. Not only that, iv is the relative minor of bVI - if both of the songs were in the key of E major, then one song has Am and the other has C; almost the same notes.
There are further, formal, correspondences: both songs have three verses, neither song has a chorus, and both feature each song's title as the last line of every verse. Dylan does this frequently whereas Denny does it less often.
The arrangements also are similar with Richard Thompson playing guitar obbligatos. There is a world of difference between the original Strawbs' version (Sandy solo) and the Fairport version, and today I wonder how much the arrangement of WKWTTG was inspired - if at all - by what they did with the Dylan song.
Could I renew my old channel of communication with Simon Nicol in order to check my hypothesis? Probably not as I strongly suspect that the email address that I have for him has not been current for at least a decade.
My wife also recognises Nick Drake on the radio; he too gets played once
every few days, primarily "Northern Sky".
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[1] 1685
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 649 | What's in a name? | Israel, Personal | |
| 904 | Even dogs in the wild | Ian Rankin | |
| 1186 | E dorian | Song writing, Music theory | |
| 1274 | The luxury of digital recording | MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing | |
| 1441 | Tables in Word documents opened in a thread | Programming, Delphi, Office automation, Threads | |
| 1553 | DBA update | DBA | |
| 1688 | Network upgrades and printer problems | Computer |
