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.

"Are You Lonesome Tonight?"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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For my Collection Audit project, I'm listening to The Essential Elvis Presley.  In the spoken part in "Are You Lonesome Tonight?," there's a reference to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" from As You Like It:  "You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part."

This reminded me that there are references to that same line in "A Moment in Time" from the Zombies' Breathe Out, Breathe In and "Circus" from Argent's Circus.

"Are You Lonesome Tonight?" is from 1960, so it's after the Elvis period that Rod Argent really likes (he said that in the first three years, Elvis' voice was "transcendent").  (I think one of the Beatles said that after Elvis was in the army, his music wasn't as good, which seems to be the same position that Argent takes.)  It's unlikely then that this Shakespeare reference inspired the same Shakespeare reference in these Argent-related songs, but I still think it's interesting that - despite how "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" is after that revered Elvis period - it has that same reference in common.

Argent/Breathe Out, Breathe In

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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This morning, I listened to Argent and Breathe Out, Breathe In just for the sake of it.  I didn't even work on lyric transcriptions.  But I still noticed interesting stuff.  There are a lot of things I still have to look into, but here are things I'm sure about:

Argent
Some of the guitar part at the beginning of "Like Honey" is double-tracked.  I plan on recording an example of this, and when I post that, I'll explain more fully.

At about 1:16 in "The Feeling's Inside," there are guitar harmonics.

"Free Fall" starts with a falling fifth, beginning the song with a musical portrayal of what the lyrics relate.  When I confirmed this, I was surprised to find that it starts with the same falling fifth that "She's Not There" features - E to A.

There's some connection between "Stepping Stone" and "Brief Candles" in that the very end has a piano part (accompanied by bass in "Brief Candles") panned to one side ("Stepping Stone" is panned right; "Brief Candles" left).  That part is still audible on the other side, but it seems more distant, so between the two channels, you get the impression of space.  I'm not sure that's the best explanation though.

Breathe Out, Breathe In
For the first time, I noticed Rod Argent's falsetto part during the second halves of the choruses in "Play It for Real."  While Colin sings, "When you feel how you feel / There's no deal to reveal," Rod sings "Feel," spreading it out to four syllables.

There are a lot of elements that evoke the feeling of Odessey and Oracle too:

I'd noticed the music that's the mellotron plays in "Shine on Sunshine," but I don't think I'd really realized that it's a mellotron.

"A Moment in Time" also has mellotron, which I hadn't noticed at all.  The lines "Life is a stage where / We all just act a part" come from Shakespeare's As You Like It.  I'm not sure if I'd really recognized their origin before, but listening to it this time, I realized that it goes well with the quotation from The Tempest in the Odessey and Oracle liner notes and Macbeth's "brief candle" in "Brief Candles."

Finally, I noticed the lyrics in one of the verses of "Let It Go":

I long to see you
Back again
In sunshine after
Summer rain
That washed away
The hurt and pain
So we would never know

It re-uses a phrase from the first line of "Beechwood Park" - "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain."  Not realizing this until just now made me feel pretty dumb.  It was literally a head-smack moment.