"I Want Her She Wants Me"

Backdated, archival post

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When I was learning the bass part for the demo version of "Summertime" last week, I started paying attention to the backing vocals.  The backing vocals in the demo version are actually more complex than those in the final studio version, but I found something interesting that's present in both.

I figured out and notated (I think correctly) the backing vocals for the studio version:

It occurs to me that "backing vocals, second verse" is sort of superfluous because there aren't any backing vocals for the first verse.  You might be able to see a bunch of eraser marks because the higher range of treble clef still gives me difficulties in notation; I had to re-do all of this because I did it wrong the first time.

What caught my attention here is the melody in the first four bars (the repeated E F# G# F#).  This sounded familiar because a very similar melody is in the backing vocals for "I Want Her She Wants Me":

Again, the "backing vocals, second verse" is superfluous because the first verse has no backing vocals (which is a similarity in itself).  Also, I'm not certain of the quarter rest or bottom harmony here; I might be misconstruing the harmony with the bass part.

Starting in the third measure, there's the phrase E F# G F#.  They're half notes where the phrase in "Summertime" is whole notes, but that and a half step (G instead of G#) are the only differences, even though "Summertime" is in A minor and "I Want Her She Wants Me" is in G major.

The more I got thinking about this, the more I started to convince myself that "Summertime" was floating around Rod Argent's head as he wrote this (even if it was just a subconscious influence).  I found some (admittedly slight) lyrical similarities too.  The first line of "Summertime" is "It's summertime, and the livin' is easy," and "I Want Her She Wants Me" has some similar lines in "I sleep so easy" and "And life seems kind now."

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, "I Want Her She Wants Me" was "written and demo'ed by the band almost a year prior [to its recording] in September 1966."  Rod Argent was certainly thinking about "Summertime" when he was writing "Time of the Season," since he's admitted in interviews that "Who's your daddy? / Is he rich like me?" is a nod to "Your daddy's rich, and your mama's good-lookin'" in "Summertime," but "Time of the Season" seems to be one of the last songs written for Odessey and Oracle, with some accounts of Argent still working on it the morning before it was recorded, so I'm not sure how convincing that is as evidence.