yes it is a wonderful world

Since reading Ian Leslie’s John and Paul, I’ve been listening to the Beatles and thinking Beatly thoughts. Whenever I listen to them I always stumble across songs that are unprominent in their catalogue but still terrific — songs that we’d all remember more vividly if they had been recorded by anyone other than the Beatles, whose masterpieces tend to dominate our attention. The one for this week is “Yes It Is,” a little gem by John that features some lovely doo-wopish harmonizing.

The experience of music can be a peculiar thing. Here’s an example:

On a walk I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself, but as the middle-eight was coming … Do any of you do this? Sing or play a song and simultaneously think about and almost hear in your head what’s coming next? I suppose people who read music well and play from written music have this experience all the time, but I am a poor reader of music — I often say that I read music the way I read Greek, reasonably accurately but far too slowly and painstakingly to be good for much — and thus almost never sing or play anything from the page.

Anyway, I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself and realizing that I didn’t remember the middle-eight. But when I’m singing a song and think I don’t know what’s next I usually discover, when the moment arrives, that I do. I figured that the first word and note of the middle-eight would come to me when I needed it. It didn’t — but something else did: the bridge of “What a Wonderful World,” the part that begins “The colors of the rainbow” (right at the 1-minute mark in that video). I somehow found myself at that moment leaving one song and entering another — and then, when the bridge was over, I went right back to the next verse of “Yes It Is.”

The two songs aren’t in the same key — “Yes It Is” is in E, “Wonderful World” in F, but maybe, since the tonic notes are only a half-step apart, that’s close enough for someone with as poor an ear as I have to make a connection. The harmonic sequences are also similar. And probably someone with a better background in music theory than I have could tell me something about cadences that would help to explain it. But in any event it was a funny experience … and now, I suspect, for the rest of my life I’ll be unable to recall the actual middle-eight of “Yes It Is” and will find myself singing “The colors of the rainbow….”