I recently listened to Odessey and Oracle {Revisited} and noticed a small point in "I Want Her She Wants Me." I also remembered a similar point I found in November but forgot to write about.
In the line "I sleep so easy," "so" is sung with a longer value than the surrounding notes, giving a sense of degree.
In the line "All around me," "all" is likewise sung with a longer value than the surrounding notes, here lending a sense of breadth or entirety.
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 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").
I was thinking about "I Want Her She Wants Me" last week, and I realized that one section of the bass part at the beginning of the song is similar to a section of the bass part in "Summertime."
Notating the bass part in the introduction to "I Want Her She Wants Me" is still beyond me, but the first few phrases fit nicely in 3/4 (the majority of the song is in 4/4, though):
where the first G in each measure is a hammer-on.
In "Summertime," there are some very similar phrases, first occurring at ~0:23, under the "high" of "and the cotton is high":
where the first E in each measure is a hammer-on.
The interval between the two pitches in "I Want Her She Wants Me" is a half-step, and the interval between the two pitches in "Summertime" is a whole step, but otherwise, these figures are the same. In both songs, the figure also occurs three times in succession.
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This similarity between the bass parts reminded me of a similarity between the backing vocals that I noted years ago. I revisited the parts and improved my accuracy, but I'm still not sure I have everything note-perfect.
The backing vocal in "Summertime" is something like:
It's a bit different the second time. Instead of just E F# in the last line, the E F# G# F# figure is repeated.
The backing vocals in "I Want Her She Wants Me" are something like:
Common to both is the sequence E F# G(#) F# in fairly even note values.
According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (27 December 1967), the Zombies mixed the stereo versions of "Time of the Season," "Beechwood Park," "Maybe after He's Gone," and "I Want Her She Wants Me."
The entry for the next day (28 December 1967) is "EMI Abbey Road Room 53 Odessey & Oracle (master)." I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I'm assuming it has something to do with gathering together all of the mixes. There's a corresponding entry for 1 January 1968 that reads "EMI Abbey Road Room 53 Odessey & Oracle original master (stereo)," so I'm assuming (again) that this 28 December entry refers only to the mono version of the album.
According to the liner notes of both Zombie Heaven* and the 50th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, fifty years ago this month (July 1967), the Zombies recorded "Beechwood Park," "Maybe after He's Gone," and "I Want Her She Wants Me." Because Abbey Road was booked, these sessions were held at Olympic Studios. According to the liner notes of the 50th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, the sessions' being held at Olympic Studios is the reason precise dates aren't available.
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*In the track-by-track section, the Zombie Heaven liner notes list "July or August" for these three songs, but in the chronology, they're all listed under July.
I have a bunch of things I need to get around to writing. Here's something about "I Want Her She Wants Me" that I realized back in April:
The bass part at the end of the song just repeats the same figure (G D E G' E D G), and in some ways, this figure represents the mutual wanting in the title and lyrics. There are two G notes in the figure, and they're an octave apart. The phrase involves moving from one G up to the second and then back down to the first. So the ascent represents "I want her," and the descent is the reciprocal "She wants me."
I'm getting to this late, but here are the chords for "I Want Her She Wants Me."
Introduction
|: G major / D major / C major / G major :|
Verses:
G major / F# minor / B major / E minor
Note: This E minor has some extra notes played on top of it. First, it's just a regular E minor, with the top string open (an E note). Then, the top string plays an F#, a G, back to F#, and then back to a regular E minor.
When I was learning the bass part for the demo version of "Summertime" last week, I started paying attention to the backing vocals. The backing vocals in the demo version are actually more complex than those in the final studio version, but I found something interesting that's present in both.
I figured out and notated (I think correctly) the backing vocals for the studio version:
It occurs to me that "backing vocals, second verse" is sort of superfluous because there aren't any backing vocals for the first verse. You might be able to see a bunch of eraser marks because the higher range of treble clef still gives me difficulties in notation; I had to re-do all of this because I did it wrong the first time.
What caught my attention here is the melody in the first four bars (the repeated E F# G# F#). This sounded familiar because a very similar melody is in the backing vocals for "I Want Her She Wants Me":
Again, the "backing vocals, second verse" is superfluous because the first verse has no backing vocals (which is a similarity in itself). Also, I'm not certain of the quarter rest or bottom harmony here; I might be misconstruing the harmony with the bass part.
Starting in the third measure, there's the phrase E F# G F#. They're half notes where the phrase in "Summertime" is whole notes, but that and a half step (G instead of G#) are the only differences, even though "Summertime" is in A minor and "I Want Her She Wants Me" is in G major.
The more I got thinking about this, the more I started to convince myself that "Summertime" was floating around Rod Argent's head as he wrote this (even if it was just a subconscious influence). I found some (admittedly slight) lyrical similarities too. The first line of "Summertime" is "It's summertime, and the livin' is easy," and "I Want Her She Wants Me" has some similar lines in "I sleep so easy" and "And life seems kind now."
According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, "I Want Her She Wants Me" was "written and demo'ed by the band almost a year prior [to its recording] in September 1966." Rod Argent was certainly thinking about "Summertime" when he was writing "Time of the Season," since he's admitted in interviews that "Who's your daddy? / Is he rich like me?" is a nod to "Your daddy's rich, and your mama's good-lookin'" in "Summertime," but "Time of the Season" seems to be one of the last songs written for Odessey and Oracle, with some accounts of Argent still working on it the morning before it was recorded, so I'm not sure how convincing that is as evidence.
To-day I started in earnest in recording my annual Odessey and Oracle (I have all of the guitar parts and some mellotron parts so far), but - to my own surprise - I got a telephone call that I have a job (after almost two years of looking) and I start to-morrow, so I'm not sure if I'll actually finish this by the 19th. I really have no idea what to expect from employment (aside from money so I can buy [and learn to play] a flute for that part in "I Know She Will").
Anyway, I discovered a few things just in recording what I have so far:
There's some assonance in "I Want Her, She Wants Me" - "I sleep so easy." That repeated sound sort of represents the ease of the sleep; it's a mellifluous sound. Also, what I thought was just a regular E minor chord has some variations; it's more like E minor, E minor 9, E minor with a G on top (which is apparently not called E minor 10), and then back through E minor 9 to a regular E minor. There's a phrase constructed of the notes E, F#, G in the harpsichord part at the same time.
I thought I knew all of the mellotron parts on the album, but recording them for "Hung up on a Dream" has made me realize that I am missing some there. I also found some alliteration in "Hung up on a Dream" - "Sometimes I think I'll never find / Such purity and peace of mind again." It sort of demonstrates the same thing that the lyrics themselves mention - "purity and peace."
Rather than writing notes on my arm so I know when I come in with the mellotron parts for the verses in "Care of Cell 44" (like I did a few years ago), I notated the mellotron part for the verses. The mellotron part during the bridge should be pretty easy to notate too, so hopefully I can post the notation for the entirety of the mellotron part sometime soon. I've been trying to think of Zombies songs that have straight-forward guitar chords, and "Care of Cell 44" qualifies for that too, so it'll probably be the first song for which I post more than one notated part.
I've been really into Elvis' "Don't Be Cruel" lately, and I just realized that there's a similarity between it and "I Want Her She Wants Me." Except for the first one, after each "Don't be cruel to whose heart is true," the bass descends diatonically from D to G (and, since it's in D major, it's D C# B A G). I haven't learned the whole bass part (I know just the chords and the guitar part at the beginning), but in that section, they're playing the root note of the chords above them. So that D C# B A G phrase is between a D major and a G major.
"I Want Her She Wants Me" is in G major, but it does the same thing. After "'Cause she had given her heart once before" in the bridges, the bass descends diatonically (D C B A G) while the chords above go from D major to G major. It differs slightly from "Don't Be Cruel" in that the G at the end of the phrase is above the D.
That phrase links the bridges to the verses in "I Want Her She Wants Me," and while I don't think the phrase in "Don't Be Cruel" really links any two sections, they are similar in that the vocals resume as soon as the bass hits the G.
Yester-day, I figured out the chords for the verses of "Christmas for the Free." I used Argent's original version, but I'm fairly certain the Zombies' version from Breathe Out, Breathe In uses the same chords.
I also figured out one phrase, and it contains Argent's characteristic sequential half-steps, although there're four notes this time: B, C, C#, D.
Anyway, the interesting thing: part of this chord progression has a descending bass part that's achieved through 7ths, which is the same thing that Rod Argent does in "She's Coming Home" and "I Want Her She Wants Me." I've written about this before, but not at the length that it really deserves.
Like I mentioned in that post, according to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, Rod Argent took part of the chord progression for "She's Coming Home" from Howells' Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. Last summer - after writing that post I just linked to - I got a copy of this. I didn't find the phrase then, but I listened to it this morning, and I think I've discovered it in the "Gloria Patri” from the Magnificat section. It's the part that corresponds to "Holy Ghost" in the text.
So now I'm fairly confident that the section of "She's Coming Home" that Argent took from Howells is that descending bass part achieved through 7ths. In "She's Coming Home," it's E major, E major 7th (although played the same as an inverted G# minor), and then C# minor. To complete that phrase in "She's Coming Home," there's a B major, but I don't think that same phrasing is in Howells' Magnificat (also, I think Howells starts on F major, so his progression is half a step higher).
Like I mentioned last summer, that same sort of thing is in the bridge of "I Want Her She Wants Me." There's a difference I didn't notice though: that's a dominant 7th. (G major, G major dominant 7th, Eb major, Eb major 7th) That descending bass part is still achieved (G, F, Eb, D), but the intervals aren't the same as the descending bass part in "She's Coming Home" (E, D#, C#, B).
"Christmas for the Free" features this same descending bass through 7ths. It's A major, A major 7th (or an inverted C#m, which - incidentally - is a chord change present in "This Will Be Our Year"), F# minor, F# minor 7th (which I think is equivalent to an inverted A major - E, [F], A, C#). So, like "She's Coming Home," you get those same descending intervals (A, G#, F#, E).
What's more interesting: "Christmas for the Free" uses the same descent that Howells has (assuming I've identified the correct phrase in Howells' Magnificat), and the Magnificat is Mary's response a while after the angel announces to her that she will bear God's Son - an event that culminates in Christmas (the Magnificat actually occurs when she visits her sister; see the first two chapters of Luke for more on this). So - provided I have that phrase sussed out and traced the history from "She's Coming Home" to "Christmas for the Free" right - the Christmas element of "Christmas for the Free" inadvertently continues that inspiration from Howells.
I've been meaning to write about this for a long time. I looked in my search history and discovered that I did research for this two weeks ago, and I knew I had suspicions about it before that.
Anyway, it's the G7 that's underneath the "careful" in "I Want Her She Wants Me" - "she told me to be careful if I loved her."
G7 sounds kind of weird. In doing research, I discovered that it sounds weird because of the dissonance between the G and the F. And that dissonance is important to the line - it's as if that G7 is a misstep despite the telling to "be careful." It works well with the key change that also takes place during that line, which I've written about before. It seems that both that dissonant G7 and that key change portent ill. But only for that section of the song - "She told me to be careful if I loved her / 'Cause she had given her heart once before." So maybe it's taking on the tonal characteristics of the mood in which those lines were said.
I keep comparing "I Want Her She Wants Me" with "Care of Cell 44," which has some of the same ill-portending elements, but which seems different in some way.
In thinking about certain musical elements that tie together the songs on Odessey and Oracle, I remembered that "Kind of Girl" from early in the Zombies' career bears some resemblance to "Beechwood Park." (It's not a unifying musical element specific to Odessey and Oracle, but I think it's interesting nonetheless.) I discovered this when I learned the chords for "Kind of Girl" in September, but I neglected to mention it then. In any case, both songs have the same descending chord progression - Em, D, C, G. "Kind of Girl" includes a B major at the end of the progression too, to complete the phrase.
But, like a lot of other Zombies songs, there are some weird key changes in "Kind of Girl" and "Beechwood Park," and even those are sort of similar. Both are mostly in E minor, but "Kind of Girl" veers into Bb during the bridge ("But more of that another day…"), and a section of "Beechwood Park" ("All roads in my mind…") is in Eb. Bb and Eb are adjacent in the Circle of Fifths.
These same sorts of key changes (that is, changes to keys that are distant by three or four places in the Circle of Fifths) are present in "I Must Move," "I Want Her She Wants Me," and "Care of Cell 44." I mentioned that here, although I have to correct what I said about "Care of Cell 44" - at the end of every other phrase in the verses, it changes from G major to Bb major, not to Eb major. I got confused because the two flats in the key of Bb are Bb and Eb.
Like I've mentioned before, I don't know that much about keys and tonality. Aside from what I learned in a semester of beginner piano four years ago, I'm completely self-taught as far as theory goes. But I think I have this right.
I knew that Chris White wrote "Beechwood Park," but I couldn't remember who'd written "Kind of Girl." I was surprised to find that it was Rod Argent. Their writing is similar at times, but these chord progressions and key changes were so similar that I thought they would be from the same writer.
I've been talking about "I Want Her She Wants Me" so much I thought I should do a more complete version.
It started just as an attempt to figure out the harmonies during the bridge ("She told me to be careful…"), which I'm not sure I have right, but then I just did the whole thing.
I triple-tracked the background parts, and even after the first time through the ending repetition of "I want her she wants me," the words kind of lost their meaning, as they do when you repeat them too much. The interesting thing during that section is the falsetto parts, which I didn't even attempt.
As I mentioned in the previous post, there are some key changes in the bridge in "I Want Her She Wants Me." (It flips between G major and Eb major four times.) After realizing this, I got to thinking about the lyrics during the bridge:
She told me to be careful if I loved her 'Cause she had given her heart once before
I realized that the first of the key changes takes place right before loved. Along with the rest of the lyrics ("She told me to be careful"), that key change seems to imply that a romantic relationship between these two people won't work out. It's as if the key change on loved indicates a misstep.
At first, I didn't think anything further about this, aside from that it's pretty cool how Rod Argent did this. But then I realized that Chris White did the opposite in "This Will Be Our Year."
I mentioned this in a post about half a year ago, but in the bridges of "This Will Be Our Year," there's a minor to major modulation right before "'Darling, I love you.'" (The whole line is, "And I won't forget the way you said, 'Darling, I love you.'") With this realization, I thought this was super cool. One song has a key change that seems to portent ill toward a relationship, and an-other song on the same album has a minor-to-major modulation that suggests the opposite - that the declaration of love is a joyous thing.
And then I thought of something else. I'll admit that I had to look at the track listing to confirm this, but "I Want Her She Wants Me" and "This Will Be Our Year" are sequential tracks. Not only is there this playing around with the musical accompaniments to love, but they're on back-to-back songs!
If they planned it that way, it's genius. Even if they didn't plan it that way, it's amazing.
As I was thinking about "Care of Cell 44," I realized that - along with the key it's (mostly) in (which I've talked about elsewhere) - it has an-other similarity with "I Want Her She Wants Me."
Both songs are based on (mostly) diatonic bass parts. During the first half of the verses of "Care of Cell 44" and during the first half of the bridge of "I Want Her She Wants Me," the bass plays almost a whole descending scale. What's weird is that "I Want Her She Wants Me," while the older song, is more inventive in how the chords are positioned on top of this (mostly) diatonic line.
The bass part for the first half of the verses of "Care of Cell 44" is G, F#, E, D, C, B, A (an unresolved descending G major scale). The chords on top of that are G major, D major, E minor, D major, C major, B minor, A minor. The relationships between the bass note and the overlaying chord are root, third, root, root, root, root, and root, respectively.
The bass part for the first half of the bridges of "I Want Her She Wants Me" is G, F, Eb, D, C, B, which isn't a scale, but resembles one. The chords on top of it are G major, G major dominant 7th, Eb major, G minor, C minor, G major. What's interesting here is that there are two key changes. It starts in G major, goes to Eb major, and then comes back to G major. The relationships between these notes and the overlaying chords are root, dominant seventh, root, fifth, root, and third, respectively.
Here's a chart of both of them:
According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, "I Want Her She Wants Me" is from 1966 (and the oldest song on the album), and apparently "Care of Cell 44" was written for Odessey and Oracle, so it's interesting that the older one is more adventurous as far as bass note/chord relationships, going so far as to include a key change while still retaining the descending bass line.
I'd also just like to note that this sort of comparison is possible because both sections of these two songs have a pretty steady one-to-one ratio of bass note/overlaying chord. Lots of other bass/chord rhythms are more complex than this.
I recently figured out the chords for "I Want Her She Wants Me." (Or at least I think what I have is correct.) I'd gotten the feeling that they were familiar for some reason, and I finally figured out why: they're similar to the chords for "Remember You."
They're not just an exact copying though. While they are almost the same, they're positioned differently against the phrasing of the lyrics.
The chords for "Remember You" start with a descent from D to C to G and then stick around on F# for a while ("When I'm thinking back, I won't forget you") before going to B to E to Abm* to D ("And if I should change my mind"). It's the G to F# to B to E that I want to draw particular attention to because that's really close to the chords for "I Want Her She Wants Me."
After the introductory part of "I Want Her She Wants Me" (a bass line and then a cycle of G D C G), the chords move from G to F#m to B to Em ("I close my eyes, and soon I'm feeling sleepy").
So you have G F# B E in "Remember You," and G F#m B Em in "I Want Her She Wants Me." The bass is doing different things, and the articulation and length of the chords are different, as are the vocals, obviously, but I still think it's interesting to note.
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*It might technically be G#m. They're played the same, but I'm not sure which key it's in at this point, so I'm not sure of the actual name.
I just spent about an hour trying to figure out the chords for "I Want Her She Wants Me" (it did not seem to last that long). I'm really close to having the whole thing. I think there's only one chord I have left to figure out, but for now I'm stumped on it.
But I learned some really interesting things. Fascinating, even.
At the beginning of the "She told me to be careful if I loved her" part, the chords go from G to G7, which is the same transition at the end of "Care of Cell 44." Normally, I wouldn't place such importance on this because it's just a transition from one chord to an-other. However, that bridge part also contains a transition from Cm to G, which is also a change in "Care of Cell 44" (and which also appears in the bridge). Not surprisingly, both songs are (mostly) in the same key - G major. For a while I've been wondering whether part of the cohesion of Odessey and Oracle might be just from the keys that the songs are in. Most of the first side is in G major.
The bridge also contains a chord change from Eb to Gm. The Gm is the second inversion (or at least I play it that way), so the transition is basically lowering the tonic in Eb by a half-step (Eb G Bb > D G Bb). That same change is in "She's Coming Home" (although a half-step higher - from E to G#m). In the liner notes to Zombie Heaven, Rod Argent explains that he took part of the chord progression for "She's Coming Home" from Howells' "Nunc Dimittis." I'm not sure, but I think the chord progression in question is E G#m C#m B, which includes the chord change also present in "I Want Her She Wants Me." Most of "She's Coming Home" is just an alternation between E and A (throwing a C in between them during the chorus), so unless it's the very end of the chorus (B, Bb, A, which is characteristic of Argent's writing in that it includes two sequential half-steps) or the bridge (C#m F# A B), the E G#m C#m B progression is what Argent took from Howells. If I'm right in that, it's interesting that that particular progression (or at least part of it) makes its appearance in two of Argent's songs. If I'm wrong, it's still interesting that he uses the same transition in two different songs.
