"It's Alright with Me"

I watched the Zombies concert from Abbey Road on its anniversary on the 18th, and at some point since then, I had the notion that there's some similarity between "It's Alright with Me" and "I Want You Back Again."  The lyrics of the two songs don't have much in common, though (both rhyme "on my own" with "alone"); maybe the similarity I was thinking of is just that both songs are in C minor.*  In any case, as I was looking at the lyrics of "It's Alright with Me," I noticed some significance in the structure.

The couplet "But if you want to stay around and love me / You know it's alright with me" recurs at the end of each verse, providing a sense of the constancy of "stay[ing] around."

The rhyme scheme of the verses is AABB (if rhyming "me" with itself counts), but in the bridge, this is replaced with ABA ("I'm sick and tired of being on my own / But you know I'll take nobody / Who's gonna leave me tired and alone").  Unlike in the verses, the sequential lines don't rhyme, so there's a sense of the isolation of "being on my own."

---

*As I've noted before, though, the version of "I Want You Back Again" on Still Got That Hunger is in D minor.

"Different Game"

I haven't written about any of the songs on Different Game yet because, like I did with Still Got That Hunger, I want to enjoy simply listening to the album for a while before I start analyzing the songs.  Yester-day, though, I watched the performance of "Different Game" from the concert at Abbey Road Studios, and I noticed a small point.  In the line "Such a different game" in the choruses, "different" is sung with three syllables rather than just two, lending a sense of degree (for "such").

Earlier in the song, in the line "God knows life seemed such a different game" in the verse, "different" is sung with only two syllables, so even within the song, the articulation shifts, and this change highlights the word's meaning.

"It's Alright with Me"

I was thinking about "It's Alright with Me" yester-day and realized that the line "I got a leak in my bucket and a great big hole in my floor" contains a sort of merism.  The "leak in my bucket" implies a small hole, and this contrasts with the "great big hole."  Naming these two opposites indicates the variety or range of ways in which the narrator is "a man that's poor."

"Thunder and Lightning" b/w "The Coming of Kohoutek"

According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (2 September 1974), Argent's "Thunder and Lightning" (edited) b/w "The Coming of Kohoutek" (Epic 8-50025) was released in the U.S. and Canada.  This seems to be the last single Argent released in these countries; Russo doesn't list any more.