Odessey and Oracle

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (19 December 1967), the Zombies mixed the stereo versions of "Changes" and "Friends of Mine."

Odessey and Oracle

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (13 November 1967), the Zombies mixed both the mono and stereo versions of "Changes" (although the 19 December entry also lists a stereo mix of "Changes") and the stereo version of "Hung up on a Dream."

"Changes"

According to the liner notes of both Zombie Heaven and the 50th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, fifty years ago to-day (7 November 1967), the Zombies recorded "Changes," the last song recorded for Odessey and Oracle.

"Hung up on a Dream"

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A couple days ago, I was thinking about the backing vocals in "Hung up on a Dream," and I realized something about the phrase to which "Gentle love" is sung:

(It's sung in falsetto, so it might have been more accurate to notate it an octave higher, but then there's a mess of ledger lines.)

The first two notes have the same rhythm and pitch as the first two notes of the mellotron part at the beginning of "Changes," which just happens to be the next track on the album (after flipping the vinyl, of course):

Although the songs are in different keys, those phrases' having the same rhythm and tonality is just an-other element (albeit a small one) that gives Odessey and Oracle a kind of cohesion.

"Friends of Mine"

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Yester-day I figured out Rod Argent's (I think it's Argent, at least) counterpoint part during the second half of the second verse of "Friends of Mine."  It's the "ba ba ba..." part.  It's simple enough that I could notate it, and I noticed a couple of interesting things.  First of which is that it's in-between the beats:

Second, I noticed that it has some similarity with the mellotron part during the second verse of "Changes":

Those four bars repeat, so I didn't feel it was necessary to notate the whole thing.  Leaving it at four measures makes it a bit easier to compare with the four-measure phrase in "Friends of Mine" too.

Like I've mentioned before, I'm not quite sure what key "Changes" is in, but I've been assuming that it's A minor.  "Friends of Mine" is in C major.  Already, there's a possibility of some tonal similarities because A minor and C major are relative keys.

The note values are different, but there are some similarities between the phrases.  They each start with E and F notes, although in different orders.  Then there's a matching descent of a second (A to G) and then an-other descent starting from a higher note in which the first two notes are the same (C, B, A, G, in "Changes;" C, B, G# in "Friends of Mine").

Mostly what I noticed about the two phrases is that the intervals are very small.  They're mostly seconds or thirds.  There are two fourths in the "Friends of Mine" phrase (ascending G to C and descending A to E).  "Changes" has only one fourth interval, although it's the same ascending G to C that's in "Friends of Mine."

Because of the small intervals and the up-and-down nature of the melody, once I isolated this part from the rest of "Friends of Mine," it kept reminding me of "St. Anne," the tune to which "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" is sung.  It also has small intervals (the largest of which is a fourth) and - like the phrase in "Friends of Mine" - has only one accidental.  I'm assuming that Argent would be familiar with this because of his chorister days.  I was also thinking he might have known it through Bach's use of the tune in his Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, BWV 552.  But then I did some research, and it turns out that BWV 552 is referred to as "St. Anne" only because of its similarity to the "St. Anne" tune, which Bach wouldn't have known.

However!  I was also going to note the similarity between "St. Anne" and the hymn tune "Was mein Gott will."  Like the "Friends of Mine" phrase and "St. Anne," it's largest interval is a fourth.  It has two accidentals though.

Back in April, I found "Was mein Gott will" in Bach's Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn, BWV 92, and I actually thought it was "St. Anne" at first.  So maybe that's the tune Bach used for BWV 552?  He also uses it in BWV 103, BWV 111, and BWV 144.  In any case, I think there might be something to the similarity between the "Friends of Mine" phrase and these hymn tunes.  It seems that choral singing is frequently touted as a feature on Odessey and Oracle, although usually that's in reference to things like "Maybe after He's Gone" and "Changes."  But now that I know the notes of this "Friends of Mine" phrase, I think it's an indication of Argent's chorister background too.

"Changes"

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I mentioned a week ago that while recording my annual Odessey and Oracle I learned the bottom harmony part to the chorus of "Changes."  I finally got around to notating it so that I can talk about it (and a few other things).

I'd realized before that the lead vocal for the chorus is almost exactly the same as a line in the mellotron part that opens and closes the song (it's two bars shorter and omits the F# whole note that's sustained under the B C B phrase because you can't sing two notes at once).  This is where the notation becomes useful.  The top two lines are the mellotron part (I notated each hand separately, but it wasn't until after I scanned the notation that I realized that the left hand should have been in the bass clef, so I'll have to fix that sometime).  The third line is the lead vocal, and the fourth line is the harmony vocal.  (I haven't figured out the high harmony part, so I couldn't notate it.)  Obviously, the opening mellotron part and the first chorus don't take place simultaneously, but notating them in the way I did makes it easier to see the similarities between the one mellotron line and the lead vocal.

This is way too many words to make a simple point, but between the opening mellotron part and the first chorus, the supporting harmony changes, so the title of the song is represented musically.

The three-note phrase at the end of the opening mellotron part is also changed later in the song.  It remains on mellotron, but instead of

it becomes

It's still a G A B phrase, but the rhythm changes, and the whole phrase is a measure shorter.

While recording this for my annual Odessey and Oracle, I also noticed that the finger cymbals for the last chorus are used more sparingly, so there's an-other change.  At some point, I should really just notate the song in full, but I still don't know the high harmony vocal or the extra piano part (which - incidentally - is an-other musical change within the song).

"Changes"

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I finally got around to trying out the finger cymbals I got recently.  The recording wasn't turning out so well when I was using just one microphone, so I recorded them in stereo (but I still think they're panned a bit to the left just because of where I played them in relation to the microphones).  It wasn't until recording this that I realized that there's also tambourine during that section (it's subtle), so I added that too.

This is just one verse (the second verse, because I love the mellotron part in it).

"Changes"

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An-other thing I was thinking about this morning was the rhythm during the verses of "Changes."  I figured out (correctly!) how to notate it (in my head, even), and I discovered that each measure has the same rhythm:

I notated the bass register of the piano part, and I assumed that the vocal melody was the same, just higher.  But then I verified it, and I discovered that I was wrong.  For the first verse ("Now see her walk by...") it is the same (a half note, two eighth notes, and then a quarter note), but it changes (like the title) when it gets to the second verse ("Now silver and gold...").  The piano part remains the same, but for the last two lines ("Like emerald stones / And platinum glass"), that half note becomes a dotted quarter note and an eighth note:

Before I noticed that difference, I thought something was at odds since the song - as the title would suggest - is about changes (the seasons are mentioned in a cycle, and there's the line "Nothing will last"), yet the rhythm was invariable.  But then I discovered that variation in the second verse, and it makes more sense.  The rhythm of the piano part and the vocal are the same until the lines after "Nothing will last."  It's almost a signal for them to change.

I should note that the key continues to befuddle me, but these sections don't have any accidentals, and there's a high A in the upper register of the piano part, so I'm assuming it's in A minor.

Odessey and Oracle

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I got to thinking about Odessey and Oracle this morning, and I realized that since "Care of Cell 44" and "Changes" both start with A notes, both sides of the album start with A notes, so there's a kind of tonal consistency in beginning.

"Changes"

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When I had an idle moment yester-day, I played a few Zombies things on the piano.  While playing just the right hand of the mellotron part from the beginning of "Changes," I noticed that there are sequential half-steps in it.

It corresponds to the phrase "in spring her voice she" in the lyrics.  The "in spring" is G to F#, and "her voice she" is B C B, which - incidentally - is the same sort of trill that's in "Beechwood Park" and "Hung up on a Dream," among others.  (In the mellotron parts at the beginning and end, I think that F# is sustained through that B C B part.)

I don't think I've run into too many half-steps in White's writing (I can't remember any at least); they're more common in Argent's writing.  Argent usually links them in the middle (so that A to A# and A# to B combine into A to A# to B - a three-note chromatic phrase), which isn't the case here.  It's interesting that while this is still the same sort of technique, it doesn't really resemble Argent's half-steps.  They're half-steps, but they're not linked.

Odessey and Oracle

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I listened to Odessey and Oracle (with bonus tracks!) to work on transcribing the lyrics (which I think I'm almost finished with), and I noticed a lot of things.  I'm still slightly astounded that I'm only now discovering some things about this album, but at the same time, I hope I continue to do so because it just makes me love it so much more.

In the verses of "Beechwood Park," certain words are repeated within a line, ostensibly to further the images.  There's "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain" and "Do you remember golden days and golden summer sun."

Also in "Beechwood Park," there's assonance (and internal rhyme with "dark" and "park") in the line "And we would count the evening stars as the day grew dark in Beechwood Park."

If you isolate the backing vocals for the verses of "Hung up on a Dream," you can get some (perhaps relevant, perhaps irrelevant) statements:  "Gentle love / turned me on to sounds unheard" and "Sometimes I think I'll never find / Gentle love."

I'm still not sure about the lyrics in "Changes," but what I currently have is:

I knew her when summer was her crown
And autumn sighed how brown her eyes 

I knew her when winter was her cloak
In spring her voice she spoke to me

In checking my transcription, I noticed that the poetic device here isn't line-ending rhyme, but internal rhyme:  "crown" with "brown" and "cloak" with "spoke."  I also noticed that the summer/autumn couplet appears two more times than the winter/spring couplet, which - along with "Do you remember summer days just after summer rain" from "Beechwood Park" - seems to emphasize summer on the album.

"Butcher's Tale" has a very obvious domestic element:

I want to go home
Please let me go home
Go home

I'm sort of embarrassed that I didn't think of that when I initially listed instances of home in the Zombies' songs.

In "Friends of Mine," the line "It feels so good to know two people so in love, so in love" sort of parallels the line "Feels so good you're coming home soon" in "Care of Cell 44."  Both are just a single line (in "Friends of Mine," I think it's technically a pre-chorus, and I believe it constitutes the entire chorus in "Care of Cell 44"), and both mention that it "feels so good."

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I also found some things in the bonus tracks.

The line "Walk in the light of day and talk the night away" from "I'll Call You Mine" is such a perfect line.  There are two instances of internal rhyme ("walk" with "talk" [which, incidentally, is a line-ending rhyme in the bridge of "Care of Cell 44"] and "day" with "away") and a sort of parallelism with the temporal elements ("day" and "night").

From "Imagine the Swan," the line "And it's there in my room to remind me of you" seems to be an-other instance of the Zombies' remembering things in their songs.  It's "remind" instead of "remember," but it's still a similar sentiment.

I also started paying attention to the backing vocals during this section:

For the colors are gone
You've become kind of grey
And you're not like the swan
That I knew yesterday

Now the pictures are wrong
You've become kind of grey
I'll imagine the swan
That you were yesterday

During the first two lines, the backing vocals are descending (the second descent starts at a lower pitch than the first, so it's a continual descent, not just a repetition of the first descent).  During the third line, it's a single note, and during the last line, there are interruptions.  So, taken as a whole, those backing vocals indicate the decay that the lyrics themselves are talking about ("the colors are gone / You've become kind of grey").

The lyrics of "Smokey Day" are still proving to be difficult to decipher, but I did notice an instance of consonance in the line "Smokey day, hey, bring the dust of dusky evening."

And I found instances of crying and dreaming in "She Loves the Way They Love Her," although the crying seems more theatrical than emotional:

Crying, dying, sighing, whining, shining in the microphone
Dreaming dreams of future time when she and me are all alone

It's sort of obvious, but there's assonance in that first line - "crying," "dying," & "sighing" and "whining" & "shining."  That assonance is sort of present in the "time" in the second line too.

Odessey and Oracle

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While recording my 2015 version of Odessey and Oracle, I kept finding more things to write about, so I just saved them for later.

I'll just go by track order.

I never remember when the mellotron comes in during the verses of "Care of Cell 44," so I wrote down on my arm the words on which it comes in:

It looks kind of funny because arms are not the best surface to write on, and my pen was giving me difficulties.

The last two verses have the same lyrics, but the mellotron comes in on different words the second time.  The first time, it comes in on "again" and "saved;" the second time on "have" and "train."  The whole verse:

It's gonna be good to have you back again with me
Watching the laughter play around your eyes
Come up and fetch you, saved up for the train fare money
Kiss and make up, and it will be so nice

After seeing those four words written out, I realized that they're pairs of imperfect rhymes - "again" & "train" and "saved" & "have."  I'm not sure if this was Rod Argent's intention either in 1) writing those particular pairs of words or 2) having the entrance of the mellotron emphasize them, but as imperfect rhymes they sort of provide the sense that the ideal situation that the speaker/singer is describing isn't going to work out.  This is also seemingly hinted at by the "could" in the line "And it could be so nice," which appears twice in the bridge.

Since 2014's version, I've learned some of the chords for "A Rose for Emily" (mostly from a book I have that has some sheet music for a few of the songs).  Knowing some of the chords has helped in correcting the bass notes I'd had.  And - if I'm right in what I have now - there's a Bachian sort of sequential half step.  C# to D and then G to F#.  I've mentioned multiple times that Rod Argent likes to use sequential half steps, but his are usually linked (the second note in the first pair is the first note in the second pair), but that's not the case here.  It's not strictly Bachian either, because one is a rising half step and the other is a falling half step (in the B-A-C-H motif, they're both falling half steps).  Still, I thought it interesting.

Apparently I've severely neglected "Maybe after He's Gone."  Before this year, I've mentioned it in only two posts.  So it's good that I have six things to say about it:

1. For the first time, I noticed how much of the music is chromatic and diatonic.  Excepting the chorus ("Maybe after he's gone / she'll come back / love me again") the chords are almost entirely diatonic, and there's a chromatic phrase (E to C#) in the backing vocals (it's most prominent at the end, when the instruments fall away).  Similar to Argent's imperfect rhymes and mellotron, I don't know if this is what Chris White had in mind while writing the song, but that predictability and steadiness of the diatonicism and chromaticism give the assurance that the singer/speaker seems to need so desperately.
2. There's an-other instance in "Maybe after He's Gone" of remembering - "I remember joy and pain."  I'm fairly certain that joy is present in some Zombies songs and more particularly in early Argent songs (like "Bring You Joy," obviously), but - again - I need to work on a lyrical concordance to investigate this.
3. "Maybe after He's Gone" also has crying!  The line after "I remember joy and pain" is "Her smile, her tears are part of me."  Later, there's "And all the dreams I'm dreaming now / Hide the tears that I cry."
4. And, of course, dreams: "All the dreams I'm dreaming now."
5. Along with the A, Bm, D chord progression that I mentioned earlier, "Maybe after He's Gone" contains an-other musical element that's present in some of the other Odessey and Oracle songs and that helps to tie the album together.  Specifically, high and insistent A notes.  During the chorus, these A notes are in the piano part (later, they move to B, then D, then back to A, to follow the chords, and then there's a chromatic phrase from B to C# [which is a good example of Rod Argent's type of sequential half step - B to C to C#]).  There are also high A notes in "Changes" (also on piano) and in "Brief Candles" (prominently on guitar, but I think also on mellotron).  The bass parts for "Care of Cell 44" and "Brief Candles" also contain high A notes at times (high for bass, at least).  Incidentally, both sides of the album start on A notes.  That is, both "Care of Cell 44" (the first song on Side One) and "Changes" (the first song on Side Two) start with an A note.
6. In checking the notes for that chromatic phrase, I learned how to play the melody for the lead vocals (just to see how the two parts go together), and I discovered a phrase that's also in the mellotron part in "Hung up on a Dream."  The melody that accompanies the lyrics "she'll come back, love me a[gain]" (just the first syllable of "again") is the phrase G# A B G# A B.  And if I have that section of the mellotron part from "Hung up on a Dream" right, that phrase (even repeated like that) is in the solo (at about 1:04).  Some of the note values differ, but not too greatly.

I have one other thing I noticed about "Hung up on a Dream," but I still have to look into that.

"Changes"

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I was practicing some Zombies songs to-night, and "Changes" came up on shuffle, and I've made a tiny bit of progress on the piano part at about two minutes in.  I'm not confident enough in what I have now to record and post it, but I learned that it's musically foreshadowed by the mellotron part in the verse previous (the first part with "Now silver and gold…"), which could help in figuring it out.

Odessey and Oracle

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Recently I was looking through the liner notes of the 30th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle - the one that includes the lyrics.  I'd been suspicious of the accuracy of these lyrics, specifically the first line of "A Rose for Emily" and part of "Changes."

These liner notes list the first line of "A Rose for Emily" as "The summer is here at last," but I'd always heard it as "Though summer is here at least."  Additionally, though acknowledges the difference in mood - summer is usually seen as a happy time, but the rest of this song is about a woman who doesn't have any love.  Though seems to signal that contrast.

The liner notes also have part of "Changes" as:

I knew her when summer was her crown
And autumn sad
How brown her eyes

The British accents are a bit difficult for me to decipher here; just by hearing it, I can't tell whether it's "sad" or "sighed."  But based on the other lyrics, I think it's "sighed."  I (mostly) agree with these other lyrics that the liner notes list:

I knew her when winter was her cloak
And spring her voice
She spoke to me

I'd always thought it was "In spring her voice she spoke to me," but that's a minor point.

Still, you have the structural parallelism between "summer was her crown" and "winter was her cloak," so it makes sense to me that that parallelism would also apply to further words and that they would relate to speech and respiration  - "Autumn sighed" and "She spoke to me."

Those were my qualms up to that point.  But just recently, in looking through the lyrics, I found that among the friends listed in "Friends of Mine" are "Jim and Christy."  But the Zombie Heaven liner notes lists them as "Jim and Christine."  The on-screen text on the 40th anniversary concert DVD also has "Christine."

With the cases of "A Rose for Emily" and "Changes," I had only my own dissent, but now I have more viable evidence.  The Christy/Christine thing for me is the final straw that sort of invalidates the lyrics as listed in the 30th anniversary edition liner notes.

—

This post is the first of five ideas/realizations I had about Odessey and Oracle.

"Changes"

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It seems like I post a version of "Changes" every few months.  This time, I think I've figured out how to do the panning from hard left to hard right.  For almost four years, aside from "This Will Be Our Year" and "Time of the Season," I'd heard Odessey and Oracle only in stereo, so, for me, that panning was as much a part of the song as the mellotron.  So many parts on the album work so well in stereo, that it's weird to think that it was originally planned to be only in mono.

Anyway.  I'm not sure if the way I did the panning is the same way that the Zombies did it, but it's a method I'm really excited about (I wrote a whole page about ways I could use it).

"Changes"

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I learned most of the piano part for "Changes" and the rest of the mellotron parts (one of which I had never even noticed).

Because most of this is just voices (which I haven't even ventured yet), there is a lot of blank space.

"Changes"

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I got an-other microphone to-day, which means I can record in stereo now, so I figured I would try it out.  And since the last version I posted of the mellotron part from "Changes" had an error, I thought I would fix it.

I figured out a better way to simulate the mellotron sound, but I didn't bother with that for this.  This is just on melodica.

"Changes"

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The opening mellotron part from the Zombies' "Changes."  I don't have a mellotron, so I tried my best with the fake strings setting on my keyboard.