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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On "A Rose for Emily"

I've run across this enough times that I feel something needs to be said about it.  The first line of the Zombies' "A Rose for Emily" is "though summer is here at last."  I think that every time I've seen the lyrics written out - even in the sheet music I have of the song - it's rendered as "the summer is here at last."  And while just listening closely enough will reveal that it's actually "though," looking at the rest of the lyrics provides sufficient evidence.

The first stanza sets up the contrast between summer and loveless Emily, which the rest of the song develops.  Summer is usually seen as one of the best times of the year, but despite that fun connotation, Emily's life is sort of dismal.

She watches her flowers grow
While lovers come and go
To give each other roses from her tree
But not a rose for Emily  

Emily, can't you see there's nothing you can do
There's loving everywhere but none for you

And while much of the song talks about this by illustrating the contrast between Emily and the other lovers, it is also illustrated by the contrast in the weather:  "Though summer is here at last / The sky is overcast."  Summer is usually a time of enjoyable weather, but here "the sky is overcast."  The though indicates the opposition between the first two lines.

"The summer is here at last / The sky is overcast" does not have that opposition, and it seems choppy and contradictory.  Though signifies a subordinate clause, which improves upon both of these shortcomings.  It illustrates that the two lines are grammatically connected and intentionally opposite.

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