Seventh Chords

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, one of my on-going musical projects is learning all of the songs by the Zombies.  Lately, I've been putting a fair amount of effort into the middle of "Care of Cell 44."  (I'm hesitant to call it a "bridge" or a "middle eight" because I have no proper understanding of either of those terms.)

In any case, I came up with some chords that sounded right, and I wrote a short post about it on the blog where I document my process.  I wrote that I thought it was G A7 Cm G / G A7 Cm Dsus4 D.  And then I clicked "publish."

But then I got thinking about it.  I don't know my scales as well as I should, but I do know the A major scale and that it contains G#.  But when I played what I thought was A7, I was playing A C# E G.  That was the whole point of that particular post - just like the bass part in "This Will Be Our Year," the bass part in the middle of "Care of Cell 44" plays a note (G) that is in all of the chords played on top of that note (or at least I think so).  So then what I played couldn't be A7 because A7 is A C# E G#.

I looked it up to find that I was actually playing Adom7.  This led to the realization that I've been confusing major sevenths and dominant sevenths for pretty much as long as I've been playing them.  So this whole experience has told me two things - 1) I need to learn my scales better (or, you know, just learn them in the first place) and 2) I need to learn chord spellings beyond just major and minor.

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On Lyric Transcription of Odessey and Oracle

At the end of October, I got (yet an-other) copy of the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle - the 30th anniversary edition put out by Big Beat that includes the whole album in both mono and stereo.  As I've mentioned before, Odessey and Oracle is one of my favorite albums, and I've been working on learning how to play all of the songs from it.  I've also been transcribing all of the lyrics.  However, I was actually a bit disappointed when I discovered that this edition has all of the lyrics written out in the liner notes.

Mostly, it was the lyrics for "A Rose for Emily" and "Changes" that caused this slight disappointment.  These liner notes claim that the first line of "A Rose for Emily" is "The summer is here at last," and yet - when compared to the rest of the song - it makes so much more sense if the first line is "Though summer is here at last."  I wrote a more in-depth post about that here.

I'd been trying to figure out the exact lyrics for "Changes" for a long time.  I'd seen people writing them as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sad how brown her eyes."  Yet, I often heard it as "I knew her when summer was her crown / And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  I had been thinking about that particular line - whether it was "sad" or "sighed" - for months.  To come up with an answer, I looked at the rest of the lyrics.

  

There is more than one instance in Chris White's writing where he takes the grammatical structure of one phrase and inverts it for the next phrase.  For instance, in "Friends of Mine" - "That's something to see / That's nothing to hide."  So I took this parallelism approach and applied it to the lyrics of "Changes."  If the one line is "In spring her voice she spoke to me," it made sense to me that the complement was "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  Both of those lines are linked by breathing (speaking and sighing) in the same way that the other two lines are linked by the concept of seasons as wearable items (summer as crown and winter as cloak).

That's how I interpreted the lyrics, but then I find that in the liner notes, it's listed as "And autumn sad how brown her eyes."  Which is the very line that I had decided against based on parallelism.

I'm not sure where the lyrics in these particular liner notes came from - whether Rod Argent and Chris White were consulted or whether it's someone else's transcription, but I'm still going to hold to what I heard - "Though summer is here at last" and "And autumn sighed how brown her eyes."  Based on the other lyrics of the songs, those make more sense to me, and - ultimately - give the songs more meaning for me.

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