Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' "I'll Be Home for Christmas"

Last year, while listening to 20th Century Masters - The Christmas Collection: The Best of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, I noticed that their version of "I'll Be Home for Christmas" is unique in how it renders a phrase.  In all of the other versions of "I'll Be Home for Christmas" in my music collection, the lines are "Christmas Eve will find me / Where the love light gleams."  In Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' version, however, the grammatical number is changed so that instead of "the love light gleams" it's "the love lights gleam."

Because of this change (the lack of the S, specifically), the rhyme between "Christmas Eve will find me / Where the love lights gleam" and "I'll be home for Christmas / If only in my dreams" isn't as exact, although it certainly doesn't become a slant rhyme or anything like that.

Despite that, I prefer the plural "love lights."  The singular "love light" casts "I'll Be Home for Christmas" as something like a love song, but the plural "love lights" merely describes someone's endeavour to be with his family on Christmas.  The focus there is on familial love rather than romantic love, and that seems more appropriate for a holiday.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' Cookin' with the Miracles

A few months ago, I listened to a two-CD set of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, and recently I listened to it a second time so I could write about it.  It includes their first two albums, Hi... We're the Miracles and Cookin' with the Miracles, with some bonus tracks.  I noticed some interesting things about a few songs on Cookin' with the Miracles.

"Everybody's Gotta Pay Some Dues"

The opening part of this has a rhythm that's very similar to that in Ravel's Boléro (or, apparently, any boléro).  A month or so before I discovered it in this Miracles song, I also found it in a Jacques Brel song, so I just re-purposed the diagram I made for that:

(click the image to enlarge it)

(notation for Ravel's Boléro found here)

I'll include the same disclaimer from that Brel post:  it's entirely possible that I've done the notation wrong.  Also, I didn't mean to indicate B notes, but I couldn't format my notation like it should be for percussion (with only one line).

"You Never Miss a Good Thing"

I noticed the lines "I know you might miss your water / When the well runs dry," which I think might be a reference to an-other song, but I'm not sure which one.  I have two other songs in my collection that have titles (and lines) similar to those lines: Ray Charles' "(You'll Never Miss the Water) Until the Well Runs Dry" and the Byrds' "You Don't Miss Your Water" from Sweetheart of the Rodeo (with the line "You don’t miss your water til your well runs dry").  Obviously the Byrds' version (from 1968) post-dates this Miracles song, but as a song, "You Don't Miss Your Water" was apparently first released in 1961 - the same year as Cookin' with the Miracles.  If nothing else, all three songs use the same imagery.

"Embraceable You"

The Gershwins' "Embraceable You" is probably the most-performed song in my collection, but after hearing the Miracles' version I understood a different sense of the line "I love all the many charms about you."  I think the Miracles' slow tempo had something to do with perceiving it differently.  I'd always understood that line relatively plainly, where "about" has the sense of "pertaining to."  But it could also have the sense of "surrounding" - the same sense that it has in the next line:  "Above all, I want my arms about you."

With that "surrounding" sense, it becomes similar to a line earlier in the song: "Just one look at you, my heart goes tipsy in me."  In the same way that a look can make the speaker/singer tipsy, there's almost an intoxicating cloud of charm around the titular "you" that also affects the speaker/singer.

She & Him's "Never Wanted Your Love"

I don't remember when I first noticed this, but She & Him's "Never Wanted Your Love" from Volume Three seems to take some influence from Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' "You've Really Got a Hold on Me."

In "Never Wanted Your Love," there's a recurring section where the lines "I never wanted your love / But I needed it all" are repeated a few times.  It bears more than a little resemblance to Robinson's "I don’t like you, but I love you" or even "I don’t want you, but I need you," which employs the same verbs (albeit with a slightly different negation and in a different tense).

I'm more confident in venturing this influence than I would some others because She & Him covered "You're Really Got a Hold on Me" (with a slightly different title: "You Really Gotta Hold on Me") on their first album Volume One.  Whether the lyrical resemblance between "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" and "Never Wanted Your Love" was intentional or not, "You Really Gotta Hold on Me" proves that She & Him are familiar with Robinson's song.