"I'll Call You Mine"

I listened to the 50th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle yester-day and noticed a small feature in "I'll Call You Mine."  Excepting one break, the phrase "Walk in the light of day" is sung to a conjunct melody (G# A B F E D), musically giving an impression of the steps involved in this "walk[ing]."

"This Will Be Our Year"

Yester-day, I heard a sloppy cover of "This Will Be Our Year" where the singer got half of the words wrong, but referencing the correct words led me to a realization.

I noticed that there are slant rhymes in the verses:  "the warmth from the sun" with "the darkness has gone" and "smile for me, little one" with "all your worry days are gone."  In a way, the imperfect nature of these rhymes illustrates the current absence of "the darkness" and "all your worry days."  Even poetically, they're incompatible with the present situation and time.

"Southside of the Street"

I listened to As Far As I Can See yester-day and noticed that during one section of "Southside of the Street" ("How much can I begin to say..."), the guitar plays chords in triplets.  This may indicate the Beatles' influence since their "All My Loving" also features triplets in the guitar part.  Additionally, since a triplet is defined as "a group of three musical notes, tones, or beats performed in the time of two of the same value," the sense of degree and frequency in the lyrics here ("How much can I begin to say / I want you ev'ry single day") is heightened.

"Cast Your Spell Uranus"

I was thinking about "Cast Your Spell Uranus" a couple days ago and realized that a number of features differentiates "the princess of the moon" from the narrator in the lines "She had the cars, the clothes, and the scenes / I had my long hair and my jeans."

Most obviously, she possesses three items while he has only two, but these possessions also differ in quality:  "my long hair" and "my jeans" are both tangible, but "the cars, the clothes, and the scenes" is a mix of concrete and abstract nouns.  Along with a larger amount, there's a greater variety in type here.

When I referenced the song again to confirm all of this, I realized that the melodies for the two lines also demonstrate these differences.  The line "She had the cars, the clothes, and the scenes" repeats a sequential pitch only once ("clothes" and "and" are both sung to F notes), but "I had my long hair and my jeans" is sung almost entirely to a single pitch (all Eb notes, aside from "jeans," which is sung to an F).

"Knowing You"

In the line "And after all the loneliness to know that you are near" in "Knowing You," "all" is doubled by a second voice, lending a slight sense of this entirety.

"Blue"

The last section of "Blue" exhibits anaphora:

Blue the rainbow, blue the trees

Blue the raindrops, blue the seas

Blue is ev'rything around me

The repetition here indicates this entirety ("ev'rything around me").

"Heaven's Gate"

I listened to New World last week and noticed a handful of small features that I'm finally getting around to writing about.

Unlike the other verses, which have perfect rhymes ("place" with "face" and "fast" with "last") or at least assonance ("safe" and "way"), the first verse of "Heaven's Gate" doesn't rhyme:

It took so long to see it

Perhaps I looked too hard

Sometimes it was just easier

To take another path

In a way, this lack of poetic cohesion matches the divergence that the lyrics describe.

"It's Not Easy"

I was thinking about "It's Not Easy" a couple days ago and had a realization about the syntax in the lines "It's not easy / Lovin' you, baby / It's not easy / Wanting you so."  The sentiments here could be simplified as "Lovin' you isn't easy" and "Wanting you so isn't easy," but the sort of circumlocution (the inversion and pleonastic "it") matches the difficulty that the narrator is describing.

When I referenced the song, I also noticed that "heart" in the line "When you take this old heart and tear it in two" is sung with a melisma (G# F# E), giving a sense of being torn.

"Love Left a Long Time Ago"

The line "And all of those words, they didn't mean a thing" in "Love Left a Long Time Ago" contains a pleonasm, and while this redundant "they" isn't necessary grammatically, it does provide a sense of amount (for "all").

"Memphis"

I'd long suspected that the line "Changing my life with its freedom ring" in "Memphis" contained an allusion to something, and I finally placed it.  Ultimately, it seems to refer to the last line of the first stanza of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee":

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring.

"What Becomes of the Broken Hearted"

I recently listened to Colin Blunstone's Collected again.  I have many notes (some from previous times I listened to the album) that I'm going to wait to write about until I've become more familiar with those songs, but over the next few days, I'll have some posts about small features I noticed in the songs I already know fairly well.

Significantly, "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" doesn't resolve.  The version on Collected just fades out, and even the live versions by the Zombies (on Odessey and Oracle {Revisited} and Live at Metropolis Studios) don't end on the tonic.  (I'm pretty sure the song is in Ab major but the live versions end with a C note.)  This lack of a definite musical conclusion matches the open-ended nature of the titular question.

Odessey and Oracle

I'd read in The "Odessey" (p. 17) that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec "is shown in the Oracle's 'O'" on the cover of Odessey and Oracle:

I happened to see a picture of him yester-day (since it was his birthday) and discovered that his image on the album cover is apparently based on an actual photograph, taken by Paul Sescau in 1894:

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