"Smokey Day"

Recently, I was thinking about "Smokey Day" and noticed some features in two of the lines.  In comparing the two versions (one sung by Rod Argent with backing by the band that would become Argent and one sung by Colin Blunstone on his One Year album), I discovered that there are slight differences in the two lines I was considering.  In the pre-Argent version, the lines are "Dulcet vesper voices / Calling gently for the night," sung to a melody something like:

but in the Colin Blunstone version, the lines are "Dulcet vesper voices / Calling gently through the night," sung to a melody something like:

These are small differences, but I'd never noticed them.

All of the words in the line "Dulcet vesper voices" come from Latin (dulcis, vespere, and vox [gen. vocis]), so there's a sort of linguistic coherence to the line.  Additionally, each word is two syllables (although Blunstone sings "vesper" with a melisma, so it has three syllables), and the first syllable of each word falls on a downbeat, so there's a sense of balance.

The line "Calling gently for/through the night" is sung to a melody that, despite some accidentals, is entirely conjunct (just three pitches: D#, C#, and C), and these small intervals match the adverb "gently."  (It's the same feature that I recently noted in "Hung up on a Dream.")

Recording Session

According to the Zombie Heaven liner notes, fifty years ago to-day (18 December 1968), "Imagine the Swan," "Smokey Day," and "I Could Spend the Day" were recorded at Morgan Studios, Willesden.  The liner notes also explain that these songs "featured the personnel of the soon-to-be named Argent" along with Mike Vickers on flute for "Smokey Day."

"Smokey Day"

Yester-day, I figured out the vocal melody for the first two verses of the Zombies' version of "Smokey Day," by which I mean I not only figured out the notes but I also notated them.  There are some interesting connections between one musical phrase and the lyrics that are sung to it.

The last line of the first two verses is something like:

I was having some trouble distinguishing the lead vocal from the harmony vocal, so this might be something of an amalgamation, but when I played what I notated, it sounded right.

The last two lines of the first verse are "Weave the spell of evening / Into patterns of my life," so that wave-like figure - particularly in the second bar of what I've notated - represents the weaving (although "Into patterns of my life" is what's actually sung to that phrase).

The last two lines of the second verse are "Soft, serene she dances / Moving sweetly through my life," so again, that wave-life figure represents the movement.  "Life" - in both this verse and the previous - is sung to an A note, and the phrase passes through A notes in its rising and falling, so if that pitch is taken to represent life (which seems appropriate since the song is in A minor), it's almost a literal "Moving... through my life."  During this line the harpsichord track moves through the stereo channels, so that movement is represented in an-other way too.

I referenced Colin Blunstone's version (on One Year), but there are some differences in the melody.  (I think the voice that's panned right has the melody and the voice that's panned left has the harmony.)  At the end of the first verse, this phrase has some different pitches.  The phrase at the end of the second verse is the same, but the rhythm is a bit different.

"Smokey Day"

About a week ago, I submitted some questions to the Zombies Fan Club Q&A for Chris White and Hugh Grundy.  One of my questions was something like "What's the line after 'Hear the call of plaintive voices' in 'Smokey Day'?"  I'm currently listening to Colin Blunstone's One Year, and - of course - after I askt that question, I finally deciphered it on my own.  I'm pretty sure it's "Dulcet vesper voices / Calling gently for the night."  If anything, I can just have that confirmed.

(Also inevitable was that a couple days after I submitted my questions, I realized that I should have said "principal writer" instead of "principle writer.")

"Smokey Day"

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---&---

It's been almost a month since I recorded anything for this project; it's been too long.

After I wrote about "Smokey Day" recently, I figured out some more of it.  At first, it was just the introductory flute phrase, but then I got the rest of the guitar part (it turns out I already had the difficult part with the 6th chord and the weird E7; the part I was missing was much easier).  Like last time, I got a blister from playing this, but it took only two takes this time, rather than seventeen (it's not perfect though).

Before I recorded this, I got thinking about the bass part and realized it sounded pretty easy.  As it turns out, it's only, like, five notes.  That should have been pretty obvious, because it was after listening to Colin Blunstone's version and noticing the simplicity of that bass part that I figured out the first section of the guitar part in the Zombies' version (although it was recorded with Argent personnel, plus Mike Vickers).

My recording ends just before the line "Hear the call of plaintive voices" because at that point, the rest of the instruments stop, and it's just harpsichord for eight measures.  And I still can't understand what the line after that is.  It picks up after that section with the same parts, but it resolves to Bb major, which is weird since the rest of the song is in either F major or A minor (I haven't figured out enough to be certain).

Since I figured out a flute part for this, it seems relevant to say that I'm about halfway to having enough money to buy one.  I could actually buy one now, but I'd like to have some money left in my bank account, so I'm doing the fiscally responsible thing and waiting until I have twice as much as it costs before buying it.  I'm hoping that the price will go down a bit after Christmas (when I'll probably reject responsibility and buy one anyway).  That's what happened with my twelve-string guitar.  On Christmas Day 2012, the price dropped something like 30%, and that's how I got my Burns Double-Six, which is the same guitar Paul Atkinson had.

"Smokey Day"

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Collection Audit:

This morning I listened to the second disc of the Zombies' Zombie Heaven (which is the last album I have to listen to before completing Collection Audit this year).  I'm pretty sure I'd noticed before that the harpsichord in "Smokey Day" is panned through different channels about halfway through the song (starting at about 1:00), but this morning I realized that that effect is connected to the lyrics.  The harpsichord moves from the left channel to the right channel after the line "Soft, serene, she dances," and during the next line "Moving sweetly through my life," it moves back to the left channel.  Both of those lines deal with movement, and the harpsichord somewhat literally underscores that movement through that panning.

I've been going through Zombie Heaven again for my Collection Audit project, and I noticed something about "Smokey Day."

"Smokey Day"

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I listened to Colin Blunstone's One Year a couple days ago (there's a post about it from my Collection Audit project in the queue), and I noticed that the (upright) bass part in "Smokey Day" is pretty simple (it's mostly just three notes: A, G, and F).  That got me thinking about the other version of "Smokey Day" - the one recorded in December 1968 in the nebulous post-Zombies/pre-Argent period.  I was figuring out a lot of parts last night, so I thought I'd give that a go too (I'm not sure if I ever tried figuring it out before), and I got the opening eight measures of the guitar part.

Once the vocals start, the guitar part changes, but since it's obscured by the vocals, I haven't figured out anymore yet.  This itself was hard enough to record; it took me seventeen takes, and I have a blister on my finger.

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."

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."

—

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.