Argent/Breathe Out, Breathe In

Backdated, archival post

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This morning, I listened to Argent and Breathe Out, Breathe In just for the sake of it.  I didn't even work on lyric transcriptions.  But I still noticed interesting stuff.  There are a lot of things I still have to look into, but here are things I'm sure about:

Argent
Some of the guitar part at the beginning of "Like Honey" is double-tracked.  I plan on recording an example of this, and when I post that, I'll explain more fully.

At about 1:16 in "The Feeling's Inside," there are guitar harmonics.

"Free Fall" starts with a falling fifth, beginning the song with a musical portrayal of what the lyrics relate.  When I confirmed this, I was surprised to find that it starts with the same falling fifth that "She's Not There" features - E to A.

There's some connection between "Stepping Stone" and "Brief Candles" in that the very end has a piano part (accompanied by bass in "Brief Candles") panned to one side ("Stepping Stone" is panned right; "Brief Candles" left).  That part is still audible on the other side, but it seems more distant, so between the two channels, you get the impression of space.  I'm not sure that's the best explanation though.

Breathe Out, Breathe In
For the first time, I noticed Rod Argent's falsetto part during the second halves of the choruses in "Play It for Real."  While Colin sings, "When you feel how you feel / There's no deal to reveal," Rod sings "Feel," spreading it out to four syllables.

There are a lot of elements that evoke the feeling of Odessey and Oracle too:

I'd noticed the music that's the mellotron plays in "Shine on Sunshine," but I don't think I'd really realized that it's a mellotron.

"A Moment in Time" also has mellotron, which I hadn't noticed at all.  The lines "Life is a stage where / We all just act a part" come from Shakespeare's As You Like It.  I'm not sure if I'd really recognized their origin before, but listening to it this time, I realized that it goes well with the quotation from The Tempest in the Odessey and Oracle liner notes and Macbeth's "brief candle" in "Brief Candles."

Finally, I noticed the lyrics in one of the verses of "Let It Go":

I long to see you
Back again
In sunshine after
Summer rain
That washed away
The hurt and pain
So we would never know

It re-uses a phrase from the first line of "Beechwood Park" - "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain."  Not realizing this until just now made me feel pretty dumb.  It was literally a head-smack moment.