Breathe Out, Breathe In

Last night I watched the four videos of songs from Breathe Out, Breathe In, and I realized something about the title track:

The piano solo has a baroque feel, and while that might be the influence of actual baroque music (as Argent says in the liner notes for Classically Speaking, "I've always loved Bach!"), it might also be the Beatles' influence, specifically the baroque-inspired keyboard solo played by George Martin in "In My Life."

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This morning I listened to the entire album, and I noticed something about "A Moment in Time":

As rendered in the liner notes, the first few lines are:

All my beginnings

That preciously I find

Lead me to sorrow

Or happiness incline

I'd write these as two lines rather than four, but regardless, there's a syntactical inversion.  Instead of "beginnings that lead me to sorrow or incline me to happiness," the second of those verb phrases is inverted, and that inversion mirrors how sorrow and happiness are opposites.

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As a general point, I also noticed that a number of the songs mention breath or breathing.  I lookt through the lyrics, and six of the ten songs have one or the other.  Obviously, there's "breathe out, breathe in" in the title track, but there's also "I'd take my last breath whispering your name" in "Any Other Way," "She reminds me of / The breath of summer sun" in "Shine on Sunshine," "Feeling for the breath of angels" in "A Moment in Time," "You take my breath away" in "Another Day," and "Like a baby I'm learning to breathe" in "I Do Believe."  So Breathe Out, Breathe In is appropriately titled.

"Shine on Sunshine"

Because of Jim Rodford's recent and unexpected death, I've been listening to Argent albums.  Yester-day I listened to Circus (the first Argent album with a song written by Rodford: "Trapeze"), and I noticed a small thing about "Shine on Sunshine."

In the second verse, after the line "The rain that breaks your heart" in the lead vocals, that same line is sung in the backing vocals to a melody something like:

(I guessed on the key based on the pitches in this phrase.)

The "breaks" is sung with a melisma (G# to A# in the second measure), giving a musical impression of the breaking.

I referenced the version that the Zombies recorded for Breathe Out, Breathe In, but it doesn't have this feature because the second half of the verse is re-written (along with other sections of the song).  In Argent's version, I think it's:

Better yet by far
The best I ever saw
The rain that breaks your heart
Won't bend our love for sure

But in the Zombies' version, it's:

Better yet by far
The best I ever saw
Each time the clouds start crying
She dries their tears once more

Odessey and Oracle

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (1 January 1968), the Zombies did some work on Odessey and Oracle.  The entry reads "EMI Abbey Road Room 53 Odessey & Oracle original master (stereo)."  As with the corresponding entry for 28 December, I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I'm assuming it indicates when the Zombies gather together the stereo mixes for Odessey and Oracle.