Saturday, November 28, 2015

"I Want You Back Again" [alternate version]

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I had to re-learn virtually all of this, but it came back pretty easily.  I think I need to start making a distinction between this alternate version of "I Want You Back Again" and the single version.  I haven't really compared the two, but that's something I should get around to doing.

While listening back to my own recording, I noticed the rhythm during the electric piano solo (which is missing in my version because I don't know it yet).  It's the same sort of thing that the Zombies did with "Just a Little Bit" on their radio performance, which I wrote about earlier this month.  There are progressively shorter note values.  At first, I thought, "Oh, so they're doing the same thing they did earlier on the radio," but then I realized I had the chronology backwards:  this version of "I Want You Back Again" was recorded in November 1964, and that radio performance was in November 1965.  As far as the record shows (no pun intended), that rhythmic feature was in "I Want You Back Again" first.

I tried notating it the same way I did the bass part in "Just a Little Bit," but in doing so, I discovered that "I Want You Back Again" is in 3/4 (which I hadn't realized) and - apparently - the notation system I have doesn't understand 3/4.  I tried putting in whole notes, but instead of counting for three beats (like they should in 3/4), they counted as four beats.  So I had to do the notation by hand:


My bass clefs look weird; I'm still not good at spacing my bar lines well; and I might have written the half rest on the wrong line, but there you go.

I checked the single version of "I Want You Back Again," and - while it does a similar thing during the solo - it's not the same as what this alternate version does.  The single version does have progressively shorter notes, but they don't divide as uniformly as they do in this alternate version.