Take It Away | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Just some random things I like about this song:

1) the bass at the beginning, juicy and deep, wide spacings of notes

2) the drum style, particularly during the main parts (e.g., “lonely driver, out on the road, with a hundred miles to go” etc) — the snare sound is nicely a mix of snare and tight tom-tom, and the pattern is hitting every quarter note, instead of the usual of every other quarter note, and it has a bouncy feel, almost as though Paul was hitting two drum heads on either side set up sideways.

3) the way he has structured the rhythm of the lyrics where the “Take” of “Take it away” comes right on the downbeat, creating the illusion of an unusual time signature or an extra beat in some measures (but it’s really just 4/4 or perhaps 2/4)

4) the chorus, tinged with female voices (Linda recorded over with 2 or more of her?), harks back in a nicely retro way to that winsomely 60s song by Petula Clark, “Downtown”

5) the chords of the main parts, led into by D to — Gma7 — A/B — B7 — Em/A — D. There’s something deeply satisfying about playing bass to them, navigating around them as touchstones; and at the end, Paul’s use of a wall-of-sound mass of voices singing “ahhhhh” around those chords really brings it out well.

6) the superlatively slick & intricate scoring of the saxophone-heavy brass section at the end, further enhancing those chords in #5 — as good as anything Chicago or Tower of Power ever did (I wonder if Paul told George Martin precisely what he wanted and George Martin then wrote out the score for the brass? Or did Paul just say, “write me something cool & slick”? Knowing Paul’s perfectionistic streak, I’d guess the former)