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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