"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

I listened to One Year yester-day and noticed a small feature in "She Loves the Way They Love Her."  In the line "Smile on her face, just taking in their ev'ry glance," the phrase "ev'ry glance" is sung to notes of all different pitches (C Bb G), giving a sense of breadth or entirety.

This feature is also present in the Rod Argent-sung versions on Zombie Heaven and Into the Afterlife.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

I was reviewing the bass part in the Into the Afterlife version of "She Loves the Way They Love Her" recently, and two days ago, I was thinking specifically about the line "Dreaming dreams of future time when she and me are all alone."  This may be just coincidental (the contexts are quite different), but a similar cognate accusative construction occurs in Joel 2:28, later cited in Acts 2:17:  "your old men shall dream dreams."

While verifying the lyrics yester-day, I also realized that since "lie" in the line "She loves ev'ry sweet-talkin' lie" is sung with a melisma (A E), there's a sense of number (for "ev'ry").

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

I listened to One Year yester-day and noticed a small feature in the line "Dreaming dreams of future time when she and me are all alone" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her."  The words in the phrase "all alone" start with the same sound, so there's a sense of the exclusivity of being alone.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her" [Into the Afterlife]

A couple weeks ago, I re-learned and notated the bass part in "She Loves the Way They Love Her," specifically the version that appears on Into the Afterlife.

What I have now is more accurate than what I had before, but I still wouldn't guarantee complete accuracy.

*These two notes are played as Cs in the recording, but based on previous sections, they should actually be Bbs.  A bit of dissonance between the bass and the piano can be heard there in the recording.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (16 December 1968), "She Loves the Way They Love Her" was recorded at Trident Studios in London.

"Say You Don't Mind"

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Collection Audit:

A couple days ago I listened to Colin Blunstone's One Year (on vinyl, even), and I noticed some things about "Say You Don't Mind."  I knew there are melismas during certain parts of the verses, but I found connections with the lyrics that I hadn't noticed before.  The two melismas in question are for "growin'" (E D# C# C#) and "goin'" (E D# C# C# B A, I think) in the lines "I've been doing some growin' / But I'm scared of you goin'."  The melisma for "growin'" sort of indicates the breadth of experience or knowledge that the singer/speaker claims he now has, and the melisma for "goin'" portrays the leaving of the titular "you."  Both encompass a distance in pitch rather than a single note, which would imply staying the same or staying of a stationary sort, respectively.

Here's a thing about "Say You Don't Mind" I noticed while doing my Collection Audit project.  An-other thing I noticed (which I think is just coincidental) is that "dying" and "whining" are in the lyrics of the first and last songs on the album.  They're both in the line "Crying, dying, sighing, whining, shining in the microphone" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her," and they're in the lines "I've been doing some whinin'" and "I've been doing some dyin'" in "Say You Don't Mind."

There doesn't seem to be a connection between them, but there is an interesting sort of book-ending going on there.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

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August 5 was apparently the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Revolver album, so I skipped ahead in my Collection Audit project (I'm currently in the Ns) to listen to it.  I wrote a rather lengthy post about some things I noticed, but rather than reblog the whole thing (this is a Zombies blog after all, although I am doing this same sort of thing with the Beatles), here's a thing I noticed about "Here, There, and Everywhere" that's relevant to this project:

The line "Running my hands through her hair" sounded familiar to me, and it wasn't too long before I placed it.  There's an identical line near the end of Colin Blunstone's "She Loves the Way They Love Her" (on One Year).  Both Blunstone and his former Zombies band mate Rod Argent (who wrote "She Loves the Way They Love Her") have listed the Beatles as an influence, and between that and both songs' rhyming "hair" with "there" ("There / Running my hands through her hair" in "Here, There, and Everywhere" and "Running my hands through her hair / And knowing she'll always be there" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her"), I think this is more than just a coincidence.  At best, it might be an instance of subconscious influence.

Odessey and Oracle

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I listened to Odessey and Oracle to-day (with bonus tracks), and I discovered a lot of new things!

"Care of Cell 44"

The last three lines of the first verse all start with words that end in "-ing," but their meaning is sort of ambiguous.

Good morning to you I hope you're feeling better, baby
Thinking of me while you are far away
Counting the days until they set you free again
Writing this letter hoping you're OK

The "thinking" seems to go along with the "you're" from the previous line, so: "I hope you're feeling better [and] thinking of me...."  (Although the "thinking of me..." could also be a participial.)  The subject of "counting" could be either the "you" or the singer/speaker.  "I hope you're... counting the days..." or "[I am] counting the days."  (Again, "counting the days..." could be a participial too, modifying either the "you" or the speaker/singer.)  The subject of "writing" is clearly the speaker/singer.  Things could be divided a couple different ways there.

"A Rose for Emily"

There's an extra line in the second and third verses (which I knew), but this time I realized the significance of the music's repetition there.  The chords under the second half of "The roses in her garden fade away" (A and Bm) are also used for the next line: "Not one left for her grave."  Musically, there's a return to "the roses in her garden," as if to check if there's one for her grave.

"Maybe after He's Gone"

There's some parallelism in the lines "I feel I'll never breathe again / I feel life's gone from me."  Particularly because both start with "I feel," "I'll never breathe again" is equated to "life's gone from me."

"Brief Candles"

I got thinking about the "tight" in the first line: "There she sits her hands are held, tight around her glass."  In that rendering, it's an adjective, but it could also be parsed as a flat adverb:  "There she sits her hands are held tight[ly] around her glass."  There's no real difference in the meaning, but grammatically it's different.

I also discovered a consistency in the rhyme scheme.  Each verse has a rhyme scheme of AABB, but the B's carry over: the last two lines of the first verse end with "stay" and "way;" the those in both the second and third verses end with "say" and "way."

I think I noticed this before but forgot to write about it: the vocals are double-tracked during Blunstone's verse (as are the others'), except for the second "say" in "He does not say a single word, no word of love to say."  It draws attention to itself because that second voice is missing, and it musically portrays the lack of a "word of love."

"I Want Her She Wants Me"

The continual repetition of "I want her she wants me" at the end mirrors the cyclical nature of the statement itself.  It just keeps going around.

"Butcher's Tale"

I noticed this earlier, but I've neglected to write about it:  the repetition of the "can't/won't stop shaking" line reflects the inability to cease.

A new thing I noticed though is the rhyme scheme of the first verse, which is different from all the others.  The first verse has ABAB ("trade," "fee," "stayed," "see") where the others are ABCB.  So as the speaker/singer looks back on his past life ("A butcher, yes, that was my trade...") things have a stronger coherence than they do once he goes to war.

"Friends of Mine"

I'd previously noted the parallelism in "That's something to see; that's nothing to hide," but I noticed a new one in the chorus:  "And they've got something it's so hard to find" parallels with "And they've got something you don't often find."  It's not as strictly parallel as some other instances, but it's pretty close.

—Bonus Tracks—
"I'll Call You Mine"

I've been meaning to mention this since 19 April:  although "I'll Call You Mine" is a bonus track, it works really well sequenced after "Time of the Season" (as it is on one of the Odessey and Oracle CD re-issues I have) because they're in relative keys.  "Time of the Season" is in E minor, and "I'll Call You Mine" is (at least mostly) in G major.

I did notice a new thing too.  During this section:

I couldn't chance to break the spell we had
The happy times we had, and yet the times were sad
Just for me, baby, you understood then
I was afraid to try to call you mine

Blunstone is singing the lead vocal, and Argent is doing the harmony vocal.  But Argent's harmony vocal drops out for the third line.  So there's only one voice (Blunstone's) singing "Just for me...."  It emphasizes the exclusivity.

"Don't Cry for Me"

An-other thing I've neglected to write about:  the "down" in the lines "Don't break your heart / Thinking you have let me down" is broken into syllables (a melisma), and the later notes are lower in pitch, so the word itself is going down.

"Smokey Day"

Like the "tight" in "Brief Candles," there are words here that could be either adjectives or flat adverbs:  "Soft, serene, she dances" or "Soft[ly], serene[ly] she dances."

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

Surely I must have noticed this before, but I don't think I've written about it:  in the first line of the third verse, there's a multitude of internally-rhyming words:  "Crying, dying, sighing, whining, shining in the microphone."

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

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I just figured out most of the chords for "She Loves the Way They Love Her."  And I'm sort of suspicious that some the parts I don't know don't really have chords.

And I wrote them down!  Because I'm prone to forgetting this sort of thing.

"She Loves the Way They Love Her"

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After "I Want Her She Wants Me," I thought I would be done with this for a while, but I was practising some of the other songs I know in a playlist with the shuffle feature on, and "She Loves The Way They Love Her" came on.

Way back in summer 2011, I learned most of this, but then I found two different spots where I wasn't exactly accurate (I should note that the version on Into the Afterlife has a slightly different bass part.)  Figuring it out has sort of been on hiatus for the past year or so.  But I knew so much of it that I had to figure out the rest.  So I did.

I'm posting this under "miscellaneous" in the catalogue because - while it was released on Colin Blunstone's One Year album (which is the version I used for this) - there are also versions from the nebulous post-Zombies phase.

Into the Afterlife

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I listened to the entirety of Into the Afterlife to-day, and I'm pretty sure I learned the whole bass part for "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."  I think I've figured out the little bass riff in "She Loves the Way They Love Her" too, which is the only part of that I had to figure out before I learned the whole bass part.