After listening to Headquarters recently, I figured out and notated the lead and harmony vocal parts for the second chorus of "I'll Spend My Life with You" (the first chorus doesn't have a harmony part, and the last chorus has a slightly different rhythm at the end, but the note values in the second chorus sounded like they would be easy to figure out). While notating the parts, I remembered that the second and third iterations of the chorus can have two different readings because of the to/too homophone pair. I wrote a post about this last June (before I started this project), and I thought I should post that here too:
To-day I listened to the first disc of the deluxe edition of the Monkees' Headquarters album, and I noticed an ambiguous word in the chorus of "I'll Spend My Life with You." The last two lines could be rendered as "And if you want me to / I'll spend my life with you" or "And if you want me too / I'll spend my life with you."
The first rendering is an example of elliptical phrasing. Because the same phrase is repeated in the second line, it's omitted from the first, lest there's the lengthy "And if you want me to [spend my life with you] / I'll spend my life with you."
The second rendering indicates a reciprocity with the "too." The "if you want me too" implies that the singer/speaker also wants the girl he's addressing.
Because the chorus is repeated (the first chorus has some different lyrics, but the iteration with these "And if you want me to(o) / I'll spend my life with you" lines is sung twice), both renderings could be understood in turn.
