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I don't remember the circumstances, but I got to wondering if "She's Coming Home" is like Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." There was an NPR article about it early last year, and one of Cooke's biographers briefly mentions the song's structure: "Each verse is a different movement: The strings have their movement, the horns have their movement." The melody of the verses is more-or-less the same, but the arrangement changes.
"She's Coming Home" - while it has a much simpler scope - does a similar thing. The first verse ("I saw her walking out the other day...") has piano playing the chords and rapid guitar strumming that bridges the chord changes, while the bass and drums anchor everything. But during the second verse ("Oh, baby, baby, baby, I'll be good to you..."), while the vocal melody is more-or-less the same (I haven't looked into it a great deal, but I think the phrases start on B notes instead of the E notes of the first verse), the arrangement is different. The piano plays just the bass notes (almost inaudibly; it wasn't until The Decca Stereo Anthology that I even knew the piano was still present); the organ plays the chords; and the guitar switches from the frantic strumming of the first verse to a single strum on the first beat of every bar (although it starts on the fifth measure). The bass and drums still anchor everything, but as the verse goes on, there's a significant decrescendo in the drums.
Aside from the similarity to the changing arrangement in "A Change Is Gonna Come," the differences in the arrangement reflect the lyrics. The first verse has a sort of insistence, like the re-awakened feelings of the speaker/singer after he sees a girl he used to love and realizes that he still loves her; the second has an almost tender earnestness as the singer/speaker pleads for the renewal of the relationship.
Like all of these this-song-seems-to-be-inspired-by-this-other-song posts, this is purely conjecture, but there is evidence that the Zombies knew (and still know) "A Change Is Gonna Come." In the Zombie Heaven liner notes (under "You've Really Got a Hold on Me/Bring It on Home to Me"), Chris White explains that "We also had a go at Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come.'" And in this interview from a few years ago, Rod Argent says that it's a song he wishes he'd written (in the section starting at about 4:30).
I listened to "A Change Is Gonna Come" and transcribed the lyrics, and I noticed what might be a connection to "This Will Be Our Year," too. Every verse in "A Change Is Gonna Come" ends with "It's been a long, a long time comin', but I know a change gonna come," and every verse in "This Will Be Our Year" ends with "This will be our year, took a long time to come." Again, "This Will Be Our Year" doesn't have the social scope of "A Change Is Gonna Come," but it does have that similar structure.
