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.

"Shine on Sunshine"

Because of Jim Rodford's recent and unexpected death, I've been listening to Argent albums.  Yester-day I listened to Circus (the first Argent album with a song written by Rodford: "Trapeze"), and I noticed a small thing about "Shine on Sunshine."

In the second verse, after the line "The rain that breaks your heart" in the lead vocals, that same line is sung in the backing vocals to a melody something like:

(I guessed on the key based on the pitches in this phrase.)

The "breaks" is sung with a melisma (G# to A# in the second measure), giving a musical impression of the breaking.

I referenced the version that the Zombies recorded for Breathe Out, Breathe In, but it doesn't have this feature because the second half of the verse is re-written (along with other sections of the song).  In Argent's version, I think it's:

Better yet by far
The best I ever saw
The rain that breaks your heart
Won't bend our love for sure

But in the Zombies' version, it's:

Better yet by far
The best I ever saw
Each time the clouds start crying
She dries their tears once more

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.

"Shine on Sunshine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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According to Russo's Collector's Guide, Argent's Circus came out to-day in 1975.  I listened to it and worked on transcribing the lyrics, but I found only one thing to say about it.

There's an-other instance of Rod Argent's gray image in the first chorus of "Shine on Sunshine":

So shine on, sunshine
Paint my life of gray
So shine on, sunshine
Warm my life away

Ostensibly, this builds on similar lines in "Imagine the Swan" ("For the colors are gone / You've become kind of gray") and "In My Mind a Miracle" from As Far As I Can See: "You turned me 'round / And made the colors true."

In the BBC MasterTapes interviews, Argent mentioned that part of Odessey and Oracle was about color.  The first time I listened to that, I thought he was talking about literal color, like in the song lyrics (although I never actually looked to see if there are any), but in referencing it awhile ago, I heard that part again and started wondering if he was talking about instrumental color (like timbre).  One or both of those might have some connection here.

I also referenced the version of "Shine on Sunshine" that's on Breathe Out, Breathe In, and I discovered that those lines aren't present (I haven't gotten around to transcribing them, but the lyrics are in the liner notes).  Each iteration of the chorus is virtually the same:

Shine on sunshine
Chase the clouds away
Shine on sunshine
Into my life each day

The last repetition has a slightly different last line: "Into my life always."

EDIT: It belatedly occurs to me that - duh! - "Shine on Sunshine" predates "In My Mind a Miracle."  Even though I had the chronology wrong, the images are still similar.