Continuing with part two of this essay; please see post 10 for part one. Please note that footnote numbering picks up from the previous post.
Such symmetries are also evident in “Cabin Essence.” In the verses, which evoke the peaceful warmth of the lamplit cabin, the liquid consonants –“l,” “m,” “n,” “r” – dominate:
Light the lamp and fire mellow cabin essence;
timely hello welcomes the time for a change.
Lost and found, you still remain there.
You’ll find a meadow filled with rain there.
I’ll give you a home on the range.
“Filled” skillfully echoes “still,” creating what is in effect a quadruple rhyme: “still remain there”/”filled with rain there.” Harsher sounds are suppressed, although the “k” sound (“folks,” “kiss”) appears in verse two, which also introduces the wind-like sigh of the “w” sound:
I want to watch you, windblown, facing waves of wheat
for your embracing. Folks sing a song of the grange.
Nestle in a kiss below there, the constellations ebb
and flow there and witness our home on the range.
The “iron horse” chorus carries forward the “r” and the “n” sounds of the verses, although the effect here is markedly different: steam-powered force rather than lilting softness. At the heart of the chorus we encounter another sonic/lyrical “turn.” “Who ran” and “iron” work almost as a sort of call-and-response: “who ran” asks the question, and “iron” – pronounced, here, as “I run” – provides the answer.
It is interesting to note that the “truck driving man” lyrics, sung under the second verse, make generous use make generous use of the harsh sounds largely absent from the verses: “truck,” “luck,” “buck,” “catch as catch can.” This difference reflects thematic differences between these two components of the song: the verses are set in an agricultural past, while the “truck driving man” lyrics are set in the modern day of trucks “high-tailing” down the highway. And while this section seems to be pure “stream of consciousness,” its sound-patterns give it a sort of structure: the repeated “truck” rhymes as well as the rhyme-symmetry of the first line (“truck driving man”) and the last (“catch as catch can”).
The song’s coda brings together the “k” sounds and the “r,” “n” and “l” sounds, linking them to a droning long “o” sound that echoes the long “o” of the repeated “home on the range”:
Over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield.
Over and over, the thresher and hover the wheat field.
The interplay of “over,” “crow,” “uncover” and “hover” is subtle: it brings the song to an end that is, paradoxically, endless: an evocation of timeless, cyclical repetition.
There is a timeless quality, too, in the seeming simplicity of “Wonderful”: a simplicity supported, ironically, by a remarkably sophisticated sound structure. Here, the “n,” r” and “l” sounds – liquid consonants, once again – are gathered in the verses (the title-word “wonderful” contains all three sounds). As in “Cabin Essence,” in which the liquids help to evoke the idyllic simplicity of cabin life, the softness of the letter-sounds matches the innocence of the young girl’s life in her secret forest. The design is clearest in the powerful alliterations: the song’s first line is given over largely to “l” sounds –
She belongs there left with her liberty
while the next line is dominated by “n” sounds:
Never known as a non-believer
The structure reveals itself in the details. Exactly one “n” sound (“belongs”) appears in the “l” line, and exactly one “l” sound (“believer”) appears in the “n” line (and each is introduced by the syllable “be”); and so the couplet is reinforced, as it were, by interlocking elements.
The plosive “b” sound, which works against the softness of the dominant liquids, also occurs here (“belongs,” “liberty”); and it is interesting to note that this opposition of sound, provocatively, mirrors a tension in the narrative. The “b” sound is linked, in most instances, with the sexual physicality that imperils the sanctity of the forest: “non-believer,” “body,” and, most clearly, in verse three, in which the intrusive alliteration of “boy bumped” suggests the disruption of ordered patterns:
A boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful.
This opposition lies at the very heart of the song; and so it is not surprising that the young girl’s natural state of “liberty” reflects that tension at the most basic phonological level: the word is made of a “b” sound surrounded by two liquids. Innocence and experience struggle against each other, but neither can exist without the other. The sounds help to evoke the fundamental duality of human nature.
Like “Heroes and Villains,” the song uses a skillful “turn” to form a transitional connection between phrases – in this case, between two verses:
One golden locket, quite young and
loving her mother and father
Farther down the path was a mystery.
With the addition of a single letter, parental security (“father”) gives way to the uncertainty of a journey (“farther”) into the unknown. (A similar contrast is suggested by the near-rhyme, across verses, of “liberty” and “mystery.”) And there is a “turn” of sorts in the very name of the song, in which the word “one” becomes the first syllable of “wonderful.” The transition into “Song for Children” represents a further elaboration of the effect, as “won” reverts to “one”:
Maybe not one. Maybe you too, wonderin’.
The “too”/”two” pun gives additional resonance to the word “one,” and the first syllable of “wonderin’” takes us back, finally, to “won.”
There is a return, too, in the last verse: a return in sense as well as sound. Just as the girl “returns” to the seclusion of the forest, the sound-scheme returns to the clustered liquids of the first verse. Even the structure has its parallels. Verse one’s present-tense phrase “she belongs” is linked to the final verse’s future-tense “she’ll return”; and “left with her liberty” is perfectly echoes by “in love with her liberty.” The intrusive word “non-believer” occupies the same relative position in the two verses; and the phrase “laughs and stays” matches the pairing of “sigh and thank God.” Sound and meaning are joined into a delicate architecture of feeling. And the symmetries of that architecture reinforce the sense of closure: of order restored. The serenity of the forest is disturbed, but it endures.
The third movement of SMiLE is its most diverse: its unities underlie a surface of sudden twists and unexpected transitions. And the sound-patterns, too, may seem – at first impression – to be scattered or chaotic.
In “I’m in Great Shape,” the hard consonants and short “i” sounds form the quick syllables that evoke the bustling activity of a morning in the country:
Eggs and grits and lickety split
(And the action-verbs “tumble” and “jump” are linked by similarities of sound.) But the agricultural heartiness is undercut by a joke hidden in the opening phrase, in which the gymnastic self-assurance of “mornings tumble” is sonically identical to the bleary-eyed clumsiness of “morning stumble.”
“On a Holiday” seems, at first, to be a riot of alliterations, assonances, near-rhymes and puns. The “m” sounds of “mister moon” recur in the following line: in “mood” and “milky” (and in “man” and “mystery,” one verse later). Words repeat, or seem to repeat: “chanty” follows “shanty”; “course” (a ship’s path) is echoed by the commonplace “of course”; “rum” rhymes with “scum” and “come”; the first syllable of “anchor” matches “yank”; and “port” (at once harbor, nautical direction and post-prandial spirit) is linked with “sport.” And the word “holiday” is echoed by words combining the same sounds (“l,” “d” and “y”) and repeating the same pattern of syllabic stresses (stressed, unstressed, moderately stressed): “roundalay” and “melody.”
The most riotous line of all ends verse one, sounding for all the world like a random sequence of syllables:
A ukulele lady – a roundalay.
In the space of a single line, the syllable “lay” occurs no fewer than four times, and in three different spellings; four, if one counts the variant “lei,” which is present by way of wordplay: “a roundalay” is also “around a lei” (the “lay”/”lei” pun recurs throughout the movement).
The song ends with an instance of pure onomatopoeia: an example, in fact, worthy of any anthology:
Whisperin’ winds send my
wind chimes a-tinklin’.
The breathy “w” sounds that begin the passage – along with the sibilant “s” sounds – replicate the moving winds. The repetition of “wind” (paired this time with the new sound of “chimes”) forms a transition to the ending, in which the word “tinklin’” suggests the sound of the wind chimes themselves. This is textbook onomatopoeia of the sort Pope would have approved, reproducing in sound the scene being described: the sighing winds set the chimes dancing. (And “Wind Chimes,” in its first line, acknowledges a deeper, etymological connection between “wind” and “window”: the word “window” derives from the compound “wind eye”: originally, an unglazed opening through which the wind blew.)
From wind to water: the so-called “water prayer” that begins “In Blue Hawaii” is a function not only of rhyme and narrative meaning, but also of alliteration: from “hot as hell” (associated with purgatorial fires) to “drop to drink” (capturing the moment of redemption) to “placid pool” and “pink” (evoking a paradise both earthly and spiritual).
As with the word “wound,” in “Heroes and Villains,” the word “sink” is fundamentally equivocal: while it is first and foremost a verb – one “sinks” into the placid pool – it is also, half-jokingly, a noun: “sink” as a water vessel, placed next-door to its larger cousin “pool.”
Wordplay plays a prominent role, too, in the second section. The opening phrase, “I lose a dream,” is also “a lucid dream” (perfectly fitting for this dreamlike song); and the “lay”/”lei” pun recurs here not once, but twice:
Hawaii lay beyond the sea
and
Take me to a luau now and lay before me.
Rhymes and near-rhymes collect in these lines: “to a” is a near-rhyme for “luau”; “luau” itself rhymes with “now” and “cow”; and “wholly” rhymes with its neighbor “holy.” Alliterations reverberate here as well: “sleep” and “slumberin’,” and “luau” and “lay.”
Internal details; and external links as well. “In Blue Hawaii” (it is a mischievous irony that a song about “blue” Hawaii begins with the word “pink”) is connected in interesting ways to the language of other SMiLE songs. These lines –
Is it hot as hell in here, or is it me?
It really is a mystery. If I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take my misery
are linked to “Wonderful”: the pairing of the sound-alike words “mystery” and “misery” mirrors the pairing of the like-sounding “mystery” and “liberty.” (There is an echo, too, of “juxtapose a man with a mystery,” from “On a Holiday.”)
And in this passage
I lose a dream when I don’t sleep. I’m slumberin’.
There’s still a promise we must keep - I’m wonderin’.
the single word “wonderin’” (given added emphasis by its position here, at the end of the line and near the end of the entire work) awakens echoes everywhere: “Wonderful,” of course, but also “Song for Children”:
Maybe not one. Maybe you too, wonderin'.
Wonderin' who. Wonderful you, a-wonderin'.
Child – the child, Father of the Son. Where is the Father, Son.
Where is the wonderful me/wonderful you.
Tho' I know I'm wont to wonderin', nevermind,
wonderful you. I can't stop a-wonderin'.
Never you mind, wonderful you!
and “Surf’s Up”:
I heard the word. Wonderful thing!
“Surf’s Up”: the very heart of SMiLE. It is not the grand finale – that distinction is reserved for the celebratory “Good Vibrations” – but it is the emotional center of the work.
The sophistication of the song’s wordplay is deservedly celebrated. Triple rhymes and near-rhymes are tossed off with seeming effortlessness:
A blind class aristocracy.
Back through the op’ra glass you see
and
Hung velvet over taking me.
Dim chandelier awaken me.
But the virtuosity of the eight-syllable rhyme in verse two – a verse that also includes the remarkable “holocaust” pun – is truly breathtaking:
The music-hall – A costly bow.
The music all is lost for now
But if the song’s artistry is most extravagantly on display in the showy rhymes, it is at work in the subtle details as well. It is evident, for instance, in the patterns of alliteration: “played the pawn”; “the pit and the pendulum”; “dissolved in the dawn”; “brush the back-drop”; “strike the street”; “adieu or die”; “heart hardened”; “beyond belief a broken man.” It is present in the paired rhyming words: “some drummed”; “towers” and “hour”; “roast” and “toasting”; “music” and “muted” (a pleasing tension, there, between the similarity of the sound and the opposition of the sense).
And there is more: the playfulness that places “handsome” next to “hand in hand some.” And the deftness of the following passage:
A choke of grief, heart-hardened eye….
Here, the difficult transitions – from the final “f” of “grief” to the initial “h” of “heart,” and from the final “t” of “heart” to the initial “h” of “hardened” – force the voice to pause for breath, creating a sort of “choke” that dramatically enhances the emotional impact of the lines. And when we first listen to this line, we are apt to mistake the word “eye” for the pronoun “I”; it’s not until we arrive at the phrase “too tough to cry” that this tension is resolved.
Such virtuosity is everywhere. Brian Wilson insisted, memorably, that the percussion effects in the song’s first two verses replicate the sounds of clinking jewelry. Those sounds echo through the language as well: cold, hard “k” sounds linked with “l” and “s” sounds:
A diamond necklace played the pawn
and
A blind class aristocracy
“Class” is an echo of the second syllable of “necklace”; in fact, “diamond necklace” and “blind class” are very nearly identical phrases, in terms of the letter sounds of which they are constructed.
Perhaps the most brilliant effect, however, is the marshalling of sonic and linguistic resources to evoke an image that is not literally present at all. Consider the following couplet:
Dove nested towers –
the hour was strike the street, quicksilver moon.
A tower; and the word “hour” a syllable’s distance from the word “strike.” It is the moonlight that is “striking” the street, of course; but the words clearly suggest a clock tower and a bell striking the hour, although neither of these things is actually described. Other techniques subtly reinforce the effect. Throughout the song, bell-like sounds – “ong” and its near-rhyme “awn” – occur again and again: “pawn,” “along,” “baton,” “drawn,” “song” and “dawn.” (with “song” repeated in the “children’s song” coda). And tolling over and over, a word that powerfully suggests passing time and memory – a word that rings sonic changes by rearranging the “o,” “n” and “g” sounds:
Bygone, bygone
It is all there, but it is there by implication, by suggestion, by allusion. And a final allusion completes the effect: repeated references – “are you sleeping?” – to “Frère Jacques,” which concludes with the ringing of the morning bells. The last line is pure onomatopoeia, ending with a repeated bell-like “–ong” sound:
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping
Brother John, Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing
Morning bells are ringing
Ding Ding Dong, Ding Ding Dong
A fitting gesture. For the bells that sound all through “Surf’s Up” mark the ending of one world – the world of “ruins” – and the birth of another: the world of the “young and often spring.”
And here, at last, we may glimpse an overarching architecture of sound that helps to unite all of SMiLE in a single design; because those same bells echo throughout the entire work.
The bell-like “ong” sound occurs at the midpoint of the first line of “Heroes and Villains”; and the initial couplet ends with that same sound, this time doubled for emphasis:
I been in this town so long that back in the city I been
taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time
(The word “gone,” earlier in the line, operates much the way “bygone” does: by rearranging the same sounds into a slightly skewed echo.) And the word “long” recurs later in the song, not once but three times:
My children were raised, you know they suddenly rise.
They started slow long ago
and
I been in this town so long, so long to the city
In “Wonderful,” the same syllable, hidden in plain sight, occurs in the second word of the song:
She belongs there….
(There are reciprocal links here as well: the “Surf’s Up” coda echoes “Wonderful” in the phrase “wonderful thing!”)
In “On a Holiday,” the syllable recurs in the phrase that serves as a transition from a piratical past to the present day:
Long, long ago…Long ago.
It is surely no coincidence that the syllables are often doubled or tripled: the repetitions replicate multiple bell strokes.
And finally, in “Wind Chimes,” the bells make their long-deferred appearance as concrete objects expressly referenced in the lyric:
On the warm breeze, the little bells tinkle like wind chimes.
From the mighty bells of “Surf’s Up” to the “little bells” tinkling on the breeze: the bells that toll throughout SMiLE do more than signal the change of generations. They evoke the power of memory, the weight of history, the passage of time (and we may reflect, remembering the finale of the work, that the tolling of a bell is, on the most literal level, a species of “vibration”). And so the interplay of sound and sense underscores, mysteriously, the themes that lie at the very core of the work.
In 2005, Van Dyke Parks, recalling his SMiLE experience, spoke with characteristic self-deprecation about his lyrical contributions:
I work like hell to give syntax, rhythm, palatability to the ear for a most mellifluous sensation. I try to make words a musical force among the notes. 15
A musical force among the notes: in attempting to describe that force, we may count consonants and vowels; we may dissect and admire technical effects; we may tabulate and measure, drawing diagrams and distinctions. We do what we can with the methods we have. But we do it secure in the happy foreknowledge of failure. The completion of SMiLE in 2004, after nearly four decades of speculation, gave us answers to many of our most perplexing questions. But its essential mysteries – as with any great work – triumphantly resist solution. Among them: the mystery of the emotional power of its language: its “speech…like music so profound."
Footnotes
15Van Dyke Parks at brianwilson.com, 2005
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