"Smokey Day"

Yester-day, I figured out the vocal melody for the first two verses of the Zombies' version of "Smokey Day," by which I mean I not only figured out the notes but I also notated them.  There are some interesting connections between one musical phrase and the lyrics that are sung to it.

The last line of the first two verses is something like:

I was having some trouble distinguishing the lead vocal from the harmony vocal, so this might be something of an amalgamation, but when I played what I notated, it sounded right.

The last two lines of the first verse are "Weave the spell of evening / Into patterns of my life," so that wave-like figure - particularly in the second bar of what I've notated - represents the weaving (although "Into patterns of my life" is what's actually sung to that phrase).

The last two lines of the second verse are "Soft, serene she dances / Moving sweetly through my life," so again, that wave-life figure represents the movement.  "Life" - in both this verse and the previous - is sung to an A note, and the phrase passes through A notes in its rising and falling, so if that pitch is taken to represent life (which seems appropriate since the song is in A minor), it's almost a literal "Moving... through my life."  During this line the harpsichord track moves through the stereo channels, so that movement is represented in an-other way too.

I referenced Colin Blunstone's version (on One Year), but there are some differences in the melody.  (I think the voice that's panned right has the melody and the voice that's panned left has the harmony.)  At the end of the first verse, this phrase has some different pitches.  The phrase at the end of the second verse is the same, but the rhythm is a bit different.

"The Ghost of You and Me"

I recently started transcribing the lyrics from the liner notes of Colin Blunstone's The Ghost of You and Me.  While copying the title track, I remembered something I'd noticed a long time ago, but apparently I neglected to write about it.

In the bridge, there are the lines "I hear the voices call / Following footsteps down the hall," which are fairly similar to the second verse of the Zombies' "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself":

Late at night I hear footsteps sound down the hall
And I kid myself that you're coming back after all
Telephone rings, but there's no one on the line no no no
When I stop and think, I know it's all in my mind

Both portray a lost love's imagined "footsteps down the hall."  There seems to be a bit of a connection between "the voices call[ing]" in "The Ghost of You and Me" and the "telephone ring[ing]" in "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" too.

However, neither of these songs was written Blunstone (or the other Zombies).  "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" was written by Clint Ballard Jr. and Angela Riela, and "The Ghost of You and Me" by Jon Lind and Richard Page.  So while it doesn't seem that the resemblance is meant to be a reference, it does seem to say something about Blunstone's sensibilities and what sort of songs he records.

In Deep

As promised, here's a post about a couple songs on Argent's In Deep.

"God Gave Rock and Roll to You"

While listening to this, I started wondering if the musical phrase to which Rod Argent sings "To ev'ry boy He gave a" is a scale.  The first note (F#) is doubled, but otherwise it is a section of a D major scale:

The next word in the phrase ("song") drops to an A note, discontinuing the scale.

While I was thinking about that, I also started wondering if the "ev'ry boy" part of that lyrical phrase is a reference to the "Every good boy does fine" mnemonic for remembering what notes go on the lines in written music (in treble clef, at least).  It seems to fit because both that phrase and "God Gave Rock and Roll to You" are about music.  Furthermore, that musical phrase is a scale (the same sort of thing that would be learned along with that mnemonic), and it begins on the last of the lines in that mnemonic.  But I'm not confident that it's a reference.

"Be Glad"

At about 6:28, there's this phrase in the piano part (I think I have the notation right):

It occurs again at about 7:22 (after the line "Your soul, your voice, your freedom"), lowered a whole step so that it starts on Bb.

I'm surprised I never noticed before, but it's very similar to the first phrase of the tune "Antioch":

Both are diatonic descents that start with the same rhythm.  "Antioch" is the tune to which "Joy to the World" is sung, so the lyrical connection of "Joy" and "Be glad" is there too.

As I mentioned a couple years ago, Rod Argent quoted the hymn tune "Cwm Rhondda" in a live version of "Hold Your Head Up" (on the Encore album, which was released about a year after In Deep), so there's precedence for his borrowing and altering hymn tunes.  (Maybe precedence isn't the right word though, since "Be Glad" pre-dates that quotation of "Cwm Rhondda").

As I realized only recently, the next song on the album - "Christmas for the Free" - quotes the phrase "Joy to the world," which seems to suggest this was an intentional borrowing and not just a coincidental resemblance.

"God Gave Rock and Roll to You"

This morning I listened to In Deep.  Among some other things (about which I hope to have a post to-morrow), I noticed that there's a glockenspiel in "God Gave Rock and Roll to You."  I'd completely missed that before.  It's only four notes, so I thought I could figure those out.  But then I also got the bass part and - surprising myself - the guitar part for almost all of the introduction:

I can't play the guitar part accurately in tempo yet (I learned it just to-day), so I left out the tremolo part.  I tried to overdub that on a second track, but it didn't seem to work.

The song is mostly in D major, but there are some weird accidentals so that one section of the bass part has the same intervals as the glockenspiel part.

The glockenspiel part consists of the notes F#, G, A, and A#:

In one section of the bass part, there's a string of notes (B, C, D, D#) with the same intervals:

It's a half-step, a whole step, and then an-other half-step.  The phrases aren't played in the same rhythm (I just put all of the notes in one measure to save space), but because they have the same intervals, it gives a bit of cohesion to the song.

"Smokey Day"

About a week ago, I submitted some questions to the Zombies Fan Club Q&A for Chris White and Hugh Grundy.  One of my questions was something like "What's the line after 'Hear the call of plaintive voices' in 'Smokey Day'?"  I'm currently listening to Colin Blunstone's One Year, and - of course - after I askt that question, I finally deciphered it on my own.  I'm pretty sure it's "Dulcet vesper voices / Calling gently for the night."  If anything, I can just have that confirmed.

(Also inevitable was that a couple days after I submitted my questions, I realized that I should have said "principal writer" instead of "principle writer.")

"The Best Is Yet to Come"

I've been transcribing the song lyrics from the liner notes of Colin Blunstone's On the Air Tonight album, and I noticed a small thing about "The Best Is Yet to Come."  In the bridge there are the lines "And if the stormy nights surround you / I will always shine the light that guides you."  There's a similar image of surrounding night* in "Maybe after He's Gone" on Odessey and Oracle:  "As the night folds in around me / Night surrounds me; I'm alone."

"Maybe after He's Gone" was written by Chris White, and the liner notes of On the Air Tonight credit "The Best Is Yet to Come" to Charlie Grant, Pete Woodroffe, and Melanie Chisholm (Woodroffe is also credited with playing keyboards on the album, although specific tracks aren't mentioned).  I'm not sure if this line in "The Best Is Yet to Come" was written as a reference to "Maybe after He's Gone," but I think it might illustrate something about Blunstone's taste.

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*There's also "I want to hold you tight / While the warmth of the night surrounds us" in "Don't Go Away" (also written by Chris White), but - like I mentioned back in November - the situations are different.  The surrounding night described in "The Best Is Yet to Come" has the same desolation that's in "Maybe after He's Gone."

"Christmas for the Free"

I've been going through the liner notes booklet from Breathe Out, Breathe In and copying out the lyrics as they're printed.  While transcribing "Christmas for the Free," I noticed something that should have been obvious:  the third line ("Joy to the world at Christmas") quotes the Christmas hymn "Joy to the World," written by Isaac Watts.  The first line of the hymn is "Joy to the world, the Lord is come!"

It also occurred to me that in the first two lines of the second verse, the clauses are inverted so that the predicate adjective precedes the subject:  "Blunt is the pain of hunger / Cold is the wind of grief."  That way, those qualities are emphasized.

"I Must Move"

A few days ago, I listened to the first disc of Zombie Heaven, and I noticed a chord change in "I Must Move" that I'd missed.  Initially, I thought it was Asus4 to A major, but after playing around on the guitar I discovered that it's actually A6 to A major.  I was close.

I'd forgotten some of the bass part, and in re-learning that, I discovered that I actually had a lot wrong.  I'd been playing notes in the wrong octaves and neglecting some other notes.  But then my more accurate bass part didn't sound right with my guitar chords, so I discovered that I was playing a few of those wrong too (I'd been playing an A major that should be an A minor, and I totally missed a C major).  I think I have it now, although I won't make any guarantees.

The guitar part is somewhat difficult, and between that and my being so used to playing the wrong thing, I had a lot of problems in recording this.  (I'm still not very good at using reverb either, and it's something of a feature in this song.)  Eventually, I just recorded each segment separately.  The bass is one complete take though.

"Can't Nobody Love You"

Yester-day, I listened to the first disc of Zombie Heaven.  I rediscovered something I'd noticed before but hadn't written about, so I thought I might as well write about it.

In "Can't Nobody Love You," there's the phrase "apple of my eye," which has Biblical origins.  I first thought of Psalm 17:8:  "Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings."  But I did some research, and apparently the first instance anywhere is Deuteronomy 32:10, where Moses says, "He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye."

The song was written by James Mitchell, so this is kind of a tangential note to the Zombies themselves, but I still felt it worth noting.

Re-Establishment

About five years ago, I started a project in which the goal was to learn every part to every song by the Zombies.  I don't think I ever thought I would actually achieve this (and I still don't), but I thought it a worthy objective all the same.  As time went on, this initial goal changed and expanded so that I was also learning parts to songs by Argent and Colin Blunstone and writing musicological analyses about them.  More recently, I've started to notate some of the parts I've learned, making myself something of a musical archivist.

I started this project on tumblr, but recently I've started to feel dissatisfied with it.  I felt I should have a cleaner, more professional-looking platform.  (I found some aspects of tumblr's interface less than ideal too.)  Initially, I went with tumblr only because I could directly post audio files of my own recordings of the songs, as a way to demonstrate that I had in fact learned the parts I said I had.  But I can achieve the same thing just with embedded YouTube videos.

So essentially, I'm jumping ship.  I'm going to continue doing everything I would normally do for this project, just on Blogger rather than on tumblr.  I'll be going back and copying my old posts over to this blog, so I'll have the complete archive, but it'll certainly take a while to transfer five years' worth of writing.

"Breathe Out, Breathe In"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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A couple months ago, I started yet an-other project in which I copy out song lyrics as they're written in the liner notes (for whatever albums that make them available, not just those that fall under this project).  They have a degree of authority, so while there might be some differences between what's actually sung and what's written, I thought it'd be helpful to have an easily accessible file of them.

This morning, I started copying out the lyrics to Breathe Out, Breathe In, and I noticed something about the title track that I'd been completely oblivious to when just listening to it.

The second verse starts with the lines "Won't you look at the evening / Spread out to the sky."  I think this might be a reference to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which starts:  "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky."  Both have "the evening… spread out to/against the sky."  (Also, both have - in sections, at least - first person plural pronouns ["we" and "us"].)  If that's not a quotation of T.S. Eliot, it's an incredible coincidence because "the evening spread out to the sky" is not such a common phrase.

The Odessey: The Zombies in Words and Images

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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[source]

I'm getting really excited about the new Zombies book.