It's All Too Much - Composition, Lyrics and Musical Structure

Composition, Lyrics and Musical Structure

The song remains firmly in the key of G major, with a simple melody emphasis on scale notes 2 (A) and 7 (F#) and no restless key and harmonic movement. Such movement characterises many of Harrison's other spiritually oriented Beatles songs such as "Long, Long, Long" and "The Inner Light". There may be a connection between this musical constancy of the tonic and the song's lyrics such as "It's all too much for me to see, a love that's shining all around here. The more I am, the less I know, and what I do is all too much" and Pollack states that the refrain appears to utilize IV (C major) ii minor (Am) chords but insists "there is no root chord change anywhere in this section; that it all boils down to neighbour tone motion in the inner voices superimposed on to the pedal tone of G in the bass." The song contains several lines taken from other works. The line "With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue" was lifted from The McCoys' "Sorrow", and at one point the trumpets seem to emulate Jeremiah Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March".