Saturday, January 26, 2013

The Monkees - "Sometime in the Morning" (1967)

The verse in this song starts off with an eight bar section (tonic, ii chord, and iii chord harmonic vocabulary) that's straightforward enough. The second section has simple harmonies, too - I, IV, and V chords - but it's thirteen bars long. This supports an unusual word/rhyming structure:

Your love has shown me things I never thought I could see
I didn't know...
It could be done so easily - now I know
You're where it is for me


Coolest thing is when they take the last nine of these thirteen bars and stick them in again after the bridge, where they fit so perfectly, and where outfitting them with lyrics that are supposed to come at the beginning of the verse structure is so clever:

Sometime in the morning
You'll just reach out and she will be there
Close as the summer air