Two years ago to-day, Still Got That Hunger was released. When it came out, I wrote a post saying that I wasn't going to write about it for a while, so I could become familiar with the album without trying to analyze it. I'd planned to wait only a year, but that's turned into two. In any case, I'm finally getting around to it. For the next couple months, I'm going to write a series of posts about the songs on Still Got That Hunger (although I might not write about all of them). Obviously, the first post is about "Moving On," the first track on the album.
It starts with a "One, two, three!" count-off (which I'm pretty sure is Steve Rodford). In a lot of interviews, Rod Argent explained that the album was recorded more or less live in the studio, and - to some degree - this count-off evidences that, for this song and for the whole album. It might also be a small reference to the Beatles since "I Saw Her Standing There" - the first track on Please Please Me - also starts with an exuberant count-off.
In this article (which was actually published before the album came out) and in many other interviews, Rod Argent explains that he started writing the song in 1977 after Elvis died and that the line "April moon, can you tell me where I'm bound?" was originally "August moon...." He says that "for some reason the month has changed from August to April." To some degree, "April moon, can you tell me where I'm bound?" gives a sense of the Zombies' history, since the band formed around Easter 1961 (which was 2 April) and Odessey and Oracle was released in April (19 April 1968). I'm sure that - at the time - the Zombies didn't know where those things would lead them and the significance they would later have.
