Songs from 25 November 1964 Session

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I've been listening to each group of songs on the 50th anniversaries of when they were recorded, and I found some interesting lyrical things about the batch from the 25th.  (Mostly because I was either transcribing the lyrics or checking transcriptions I'd done earlier.)

In "Tell Her No," there's the line "Just remember she said that to me" - an-other instance of remembering in the Zombies' songs.  Although, unlike the others I've found, it's an imperative.

I also noticed the conjunctions in the first verse of "I Remember When I Loved Her":

She seemed so cold to me
And I remember when I loved her
She seemed so cold to me
But I remember when I loved her

The conjunctions make a huge difference here.  The first ("and") indicates simply that the speaker/singer remembers his past love.  The second ("but") seems to suggest that he still harbors some sort of feeling, whether it's remorse or nostalgia.  This could probably be taken in other ways, but that's how I understand it.  At least for now.

I'm not sure if I'd noticed this or not (apparently I haven't written anything about it), but there's also a reference to dreams (an-other common Zombie theme) in "I Remember When I Loved Her":  "My dream of love has gone."

Finally, the phrasing in the second verse of "I Want You Back Again" seems to be a precedent for the phrasing in the third verse of "If It Don't Work Out."  (I should note that I'm talking about the alternate version of "I Want You Back Again," but the single version may very well have the same phrasing.  I haven't compared the two.)  I'd format the verse from "I Want You Back Again" as:

Since you have left me
I'm all alone
I need your help, I
Can't stand on my own

That "I" is tacked on to the end of the third line even though grammatically it goes with the fourth.  The same sort of thing is in the third verse of "If It Don't Work Out":

One day I know we'll find again the love we had and I
Will know and feel the joys and pleasures that I'm dreaming of

Like I said in a previous post about "If It Don't Work Out," it's like the speaker/singer is so concerned and worried (or perhaps, in that particular verse of "If It Don't Work Out," excited) that he stumbles over his words.  Not surprisingly, considering that similarity, both were written by Rod Argent.  Actually, all of the songs I talked about in the post are by Rod Argent.  "He's our A side writer."