"I Can't Be Wrong"

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I felt like figuring out a part last night, and since I'd listened to New World recently (well, sort of recently, two weeks ago), I thought I'd figure out a part from that album.  But because it had been a while since I'd listened to it, I couldn't remember which parts I'd thought sounded easy when I listened to it.  I did get this guitar phrase from "I Can't Be Wrong" though.  I think it's actually played on a (double-tracked) classical, nylon-strung guitar, but I don't have one of those.  I hadn't noticed until figuring it out that there's a keyboard part under this, so that'll probably be the next part of this song that I try to figure out.

New World

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I listened to New World to-day because it was released to-day in 1991, according to Russo's Collector's Guide.  And - as usual - I noticed things:

There's a line in "New World (My America)" that I'm fairly certain is a reference to The Tempest - "All of my life begins within this brave new land."  "Brave new world" is a phrase in The Tempest, and "brave new land" is similar enough that I don't think it's just a coincidence.  Plus, there's the quotation from The Tempest in the original Odessey and Oracle liner notes.

"When Love Breaks Down" wasn't written by any of the Zombies, but it occurred to me while listening to it that a lot of the later material uses rain as an image.  I just recently discovered the connection between "Beechwood Park" and "Let It Go" from Breathe Out, Breathe In ("after summer rain").  "When Loves Breaks Down" mentions "The sweet September rain," and rain is prominent in "Only the Rain" from Argent and Blunstone's Out of the Shadows.  There are probably other songs that rain is mentioned in, but I've been holding back on writing stuff like that (incidentally, a lot of the songs on New World mention dreams, memory, and home - things that I've traced throughout the catalogue).

"I Can't Be Wrong" contains a reference to "Time of the Season" that I'd never noticed.  The first line is "For me, time is only seasons."  "I Can't Be Wrong" was written by Sebastian Santa Maria who appears on the album almost as a replacement for Rod Argent.  I found the reference interesting.  It's akin to the "In you I've found my odyssey and oracle" in "In My Mind a Miracle" in that it's a reference but it's not blatant.

There's also an interesting bit of wordplay in Santa Maria's "Moonday Morning Dance."  The first lines are (I think) "Don't 'xpect any movement out my eyes / Not even a wink, not even one side."  With expect abbreviated as such, it sounds the same as spect, so there's the connection between eyes and words like spectacle and spectacular that ultimately come from the Latin verb spectare (to look at).