Song Lyric Sunday: MA.

Is Sunday again and time for Song Lyric Sunday. Our host Jim Adams has given us the prompt: Songs beginning with M and A.

Jim Adams

Written and released before I met hubby Mellow Yellow was part of my youth. I was in love with Donovan! This song was definitely one of my favourites.

“Mellow Yellow” is a song written and recorded by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. In the US it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. (Both “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys and “Winchester Cathedral” by The New Vaudeville Band kept it from hitting No. 1.) Outside the US, “Mellow Yellow” peaked at No. 8 in the UK in early 1967.

The song was rumoured to be about smoking dried banana skins, which was believed to be a hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s, though this aspect of bananas has since been debunked. According to Donovan’s notes, accompanying the album Donovan’s Greatest Hits, the rumour that one could get high from smoking dried banana skins was started by Country Joe McDonald in 1966, and Donovan heard the rumour three weeks before “Mellow Yellow” was released as a single. According to The Rolling Stone Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, he admitted later the song made reference to a vibrator; an “electrical banana” as mentioned in the lyrics. This definition was re-affirmed in an interview with NME magazine: “it’s about being cool, laid-back, and also the electrical bananas that were appearing on the scene – which were ladies’ vibrators.”

Paul McCartney can be heard as one of the background revellers on this track, but the “quite rightly” whispering answering lines in the chorus is not McCartney but rather Donovan himself. Donovan had a small part in coming up with the lyrics for “Yellow Submarine“, and McCartney played bass guitar (uncredited) on portions of Donovan’s Mellow Yellow album.

In 2005, the track was remastered by EMI Records for the Mellow Yellow album re-issue.

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Next a song beginning with A. It has to be Billy Joel and Always a Woman to me. When this came out in 1977 we had been married six years and have two of the boys by then.

“She’s Always a Woman” is a song from Billy Joel‘s 1977 album The Stranger. It is a love song about a modern woman whom the singer has fallen totally in love with to the extent of falling for her endearing quirks as well as her flaws. The single peaked at No. 17 in the U.S. in 1977, and at No. 53 in the UK in 1986, when it was released as a double A-side with “Just the Way You Are“. It re-entered the UK chart in 2010, reaching No. 29. The song is played in the compound time signature of 6/8. The song was released in 1977, following several other hits from The Stranger including “Just the Way You Are“, “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” and “Only the Good Die Young“. Musically, Joel has said that he was influenced by Gordon Lightfoot and his mellow acoustic guitar ballads. It is a love song that Joel wrote for his then wife, Elizabeth Weber. Elizabeth had taken over management of Joel’s career, and was able to put his financial affairs in order after Joel had signed some bad deals and contracts. She was a tough and savvy negotiator who could “wound with her eyes” or “steal like a thief”, but would “never give in”. Because of her tough-as-nails negotiating style, many business adversaries thought she was “unfeminine,” but to Joel, she was always a woman. The two eventually divorced in 1982.

Happy Sunday Everyone.