Recently, I listened to the deluxe edition of
The Monkees. When I listened to the second disc yester-day, I noticed something about "All the King's Horses." Except for the first instance and the repetitions in the coda, the chorus is sung so that as one voice finishes singing "All the king's horses and all the king's men," an-other starts singing it, and as that second voices finishes, the first starts singing "They couldn't put my broken heart back together again," and then the second likewise echoes this. (Note that I'm using "voice" in a more generic sense here; there are actually multiple voices singing each part.) I'm not sure if the term quite applies here, but this is at least similar to stretti in classical music. The parts are something like this:
I think one of the voices sings, "Now all the king's horses and all the king's men," with the "now" as an eighth note pick-up (G#) in the preceding measure, but this "now" isn't consistently included. Sometimes it's there, and sometimes it's not, so I left it out of my notation.
This may be making too much of it, but because the lines are sung like this, with one echoing the other, there's a musical sense of the fragmentation that's in the lyrics ("my broken heart").
