"This Old Heart of Mine"

Recently, I re-watched the Zombies' performance of "This Old Heart of Mine" (mislabelled as "I Love You") in France in 1966:

For the first time, I noticed that Paul Atkinson is using a bit of vibrato.

More significantly, I realized that there's a similarity between "This Old Heart of Mine" and "Whenever You're Ready" in that - unless I'm mistaken - the guitar parts in both feature pairs of notes an octave apart.

According to the Zombie Heaven booklet, "Whenever You're Ready" pre-dates "This Old Heart of Mine."  A demo was recorded "April or June 1965," and the released version was recorded on 24 June 1965.  According to the chronology in the booklet, this television appearance (on Dents De Lait Dents De Loups) was on either 29 or 30 October 1966, and the liner notes of The BBC Radio Sessions add that the Zombies recorded further live versions of "This Old Heart of Mine" on 1 November 1966 and 10 October 1967.

The liner notes of both Zombie Heaven and The BBC Radio Sessions seem to indicate that the Zombies used the Isley Brothers' version of the song as a basis for their cover.  I hadn't heard it before, but I found it on YouTube (here's a link to the official lyric video).  It doesn't have these octave pairs (not on guitar, at least), so it seems that this is something that the Zombies added to the song, re-using an element from "Whenever You're Ready."

"Care of Cell 44"

I was thinking about "Care of Cell 44" a couple days ago and had a small realization about the line "Saved you the room you used to stay in ev'ry Sunday."  The phrase "ev'ry Sunday" is sung to notes of all different pitches (G A B C), giving a sense of number.

Odessey and Oracle

Last week, I found an-other small musical element that lends some cohesion to Odessey and Oracle.  I was playing the vocal melody from "Care of Cell 44" on organ and realized that a section of it contains all of the same pitches as the bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me," which I wrote about recently.

The bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me" has only four pitches (G D E G'), something like this:

The vocal melody in "Care of Cell 44" is beyond my notational ability, but every other line of the verses is something like D D E D E D G' E D E G A B C (sometimes with the initial D omitted).  The first eleven notes (corresponding to the words "It's gonna be good to have you back again" in one line) match the pitches in the bass part in the coda of "I Want Her She Wants Me."

"I Want Her She Wants Me"

I was thinking about the bass part in "I Want Her She Wants Me" yester-day and had a notion about one section, although it may be a bit far-fetched.

In the coda, the bass plays something like this:

This section is played in the higher register, so I notated it in the treble clef.  I also resolved it with a high G, like the Zombies do in live performances, although in the version on Odessey and Oracle, these figures just repeat until the fade-out.

Most of these notes occur on the off-beats, and in a way, this matches the relationship described in the lyrics; the bass part emphasizes what's in-between the beats in the same way that the lyrics focus on the mutual nature of the relationship ("I want her; she wants me").