"She's Coming Home" and "Care of Cell 44"

Backdated, archival post

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At the beginning of the year, I started two more of these types of projects where I foolishly try to learn every part to every song (one for the Alan Parsons Project and one for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and SMiLE [and maybe other albums eventually]).  On Saturday, I got to thinking about tonic chords and the lyrics that accompany them (I wrote this post about "nice" and the tonic chord in "Wouldn't It Be Nice").

Thinking about how the tonic chord is the "home" for whatever key the song is in brought me to the Zombies' common theme of home.  So, naturally, I started thinking about the lines that contain "home" and how/if the tonic chord relates, and "She's Coming Home" and "Care of Cell 44" were the songs that came to mind.

I've compared these before, and "Care of Cell 44" seemed to come out on top, but as far as the relationship between the tonic chord and instances of "home" in the lyrics, "She's Coming Home" is actually better.  In the lead vocals, "home" appears only in the chorus:

But she sent word to me
She's coming home
And so I'll cry no more
I'll dry my tears
She's coming home to me
She's coming home to me

It's in the backing vocals once - in the line "Baby, come on home" after "Well, I remember how I loved her so" in the lead vocals in the first verse.

Each time "home" appears in the lyrics, the accompanying chord is E major - the tonic chord.  During the chorus, the chord progression rises to that E major, emphasizing the return.

In "Care of Cell 44," the word "home" appears only in the chorus (if, indeed, it is a chorus; it's only one line, after all):

Feels so good you're coming home soon

There are multiple chords beneath it, but none of them are the tonic (G major).  It starts on E minor (the submediant and relative minor), then holds out through D major (the dominant), and then C major (the subdominant) before the "soon" comes in on B minor (the mediant).

Like the imperfect rhymes that the mellotron emphasizes and the nostalgic and subjunctive elements in the bridge ("We'll walk in a way we used to walk / And it could be so nice…"), the lack of the tonic chord's accompanying "home" in the lyrics seems to indicate that there's something off about the relationship described.

There are other instances of "home" in the Zombies' lyrics, but these two songs are the only ones I've looked into so far.