"You Make Me Feel Good"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

This is a thing I've been meaning to write about for at least a few months, if not a year or more.

In figuring out the opening riffs for "Sticks and Stones" and "You Make Me Feel Good," I found a few similarities.  I felt it would be better to write out the notation for them rather than try to describe them verbally.  (Actually, I figured out how to make notation in Cubase, which is infinitely better than my trying to do it manually.  Plus I could check the note values with MIDI.)  I've put different colored boxes around the parts that are similar.

Both songs are (mostly) in E major, but even the accidentals have some similarity.  There are the same two in the opening riffs (D natural and G natural), and both songs include a descending chromatic phrase (G to F# to F to E) at the very end ("Sticks and Stones" has it as major chords and has it at the beginning too - after the riff).

I haven't found anything that confirms that the Zombies performed "Sticks and Stones" early in their career, but since "You Make Me Feel Good" has a riff that's pretty clearly inspired by it and since "You Make Me Feel Good" is one of the first songs they recorded, I'm fairly certain that "Sticks and Stones" was in their repertoire before they were signed to Decca.