"The Ghost of You and Me"

I was thinking about Colin Blunstone's "The Ghost of You and Me" recently and realized that the phrase "all these blues" in the first line ("What am I supposed to do with all these blues") is sung to notes of all different pitches (A B C).  While the span here is only a minor third, this articulation does give something of a sense of breadth or entirety.

"The Ghost of You and Me"

A few days ago, the Zombies posted the track listing of the new album.  The title "The Sun Will Rise Again" seemed familiar to me, and I suspect that this is a re-recording of a song from Colin Blunstone's solo album The Ghost of You and Me (the Zombies also re-did "Any Other Way" from the same album for Breathe Out, Breathe In).  It had been years since I last listened to the album, and when I listened to it a couple days ago, I found some small features to note.

In the lines "What am I supposed to do with all these blues / Haunting me ev'rywhere no matter what I do" in "The Ghost of You and Me," "ev'rywhere" is sung with a melisma (F# B B C B A G), musically giving a sense of that breadth.

"The Ghost of You and Me"

I recently started transcribing the lyrics from the liner notes of Colin Blunstone's The Ghost of You and Me.  While copying the title track, I remembered something I'd noticed a long time ago, but apparently I neglected to write about it.

In the bridge, there are the lines "I hear the voices call / Following footsteps down the hall," which are fairly similar to the second verse of the Zombies' "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself":

Late at night I hear footsteps sound down the hall
And I kid myself that you're coming back after all
Telephone rings, but there's no one on the line no no no
When I stop and think, I know it's all in my mind

Both portray a lost love's imagined "footsteps down the hall."  There seems to be a bit of a connection between "the voices call[ing]" in "The Ghost of You and Me" and the "telephone ring[ing]" in "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" too.

However, neither of these songs was written Blunstone (or the other Zombies).  "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself" was written by Clint Ballard Jr. and Angela Riela, and "The Ghost of You and Me" by Jon Lind and Richard Page.  So while it doesn't seem that the resemblance is meant to be a reference, it does seem to say something about Blunstone's sensibilities and what sort of songs he records.