"Maybe after He's Gone"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Yester-day I listened to Odessey and Oracle, and the a cappella ending of "Maybe after He's Gone" caught my ear.  I already knew the main vocal melody and one of the harmonies, so all I had to do was figure out the third part, which sounded pretty simple.

I don't think my voice is that great (certainly not when compared to the original), but it's a good enough example, although I'm pretty sure I'm singing Blunstone's part an octave lower than in the original.

Blunstone sings the melody, and that chromatic phrase (panned left) is Argent, so that third phrase is White.  "Maybe after He's Gone" is one of White's songs so I don't know how involved Argent was in the arrangement, but it's a fairly good example of what Blunstone said about the Zombies' harmony in the 2013 SXSW interview:

Rod would try and set a very easy harmony for Chris, because he had to play bass at the same time, so he would be playing a different note to the note he's singing. I don't know how bass players do this, so Chris' harmony very often would be just a straight line. [Sings a single note] "Ummmmm," like that. And then Rod would have to fill in all the holes. So his harmony would be [sings notes at seemingly random intervals] "la-la-la-la-la-la," like that.

While this is an a cappella section, there are different notes in White's harmony from what he plays on bass when this section isn't a cappella.  And it is pretty simple.  It's just four whole notes.  The interesting thing, though, is that the last three of those four notes, like the entirety of Argent's part, form a descending chromatic phrase:  F#, F, E.  So they too contribute to the song's feeling of sadness through the seemingly-inherent melancholy in descending chromatic phrases.

Argent's part here isn't as random as it might be in some other songs; it's just a chromatic phrase from E to C#.

I still want to look at this part more closely with notation, but one thing I noticed just when playing the parts together on piano is that while they resolve to an A major chord, none of the constituent notes are next to each other.  By that I mean there's (from lowest to highest) an E (White), a C# (Argent), and an A (Blunstone), and there's an A between that E and C#, and an E between that C# and A.  They could have resolved to an A major within the interval of a fifth, but instead it's an A major with its three notes spread over an interval that's more than an octave.  The song resolves, but there's still something off and almost-literally isolated and disjointed, which matches the feeling of the lyric.

It's like the first A major here, not like the second, which is more typical:

In writing out that paragraph above, I've realized that the A major is actually upside down in a way.  It's E, C#, A where usually it would be A, C#, E, so it might also act as an indication of how turned around the singer/speaker's life is now that he's alone.