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.

---&---

{YouTube}{Twitter}{Tumblr}{Bandcamp}

Shallow, Instrumental Beauty

A few days ago, there was an article on NPR about whether music or lyrics are more important.  At the time, I read the article and pretty much agreed with what the author says:  "When judging a song based on first impressions, my primary concern is that 1) the music is done right; and 2) the words, whether in content or presentation, aren't done wrong."

But last night, I got to thinking about things, and I realised that - for me - the point of music is that it sounds good.  I don't usually pay that much attention to lyrics, and I don't spend that much time analysing them.  They only start to sink in if I listen to a song incessantly.  I started writing a post about this and wrote "For me, it’s not so much what a song says as what it sounds like," but then I realised that that's a pretty shallow view. If you substitute visuals for audio, you end up with "It's not so much what a person says as what she looks like."  With that kind of logic, you end up listening only to people you perceive as beautiful and neglect everyone else based on only one criterion.  And the ugly people you ignore are likely to have something important to say.

And while that analogy offers an iron-clad argument to take a deeper look at music (or, more accurately, a deeper listen), problems present themselves.  What about nearly all classical music?  Symphonies and concerti don't have lyrics.  Does that mean that liking them is shallow because that preference is based on only one factor?  If liking a person because she looks beautiful is shallow, is liking a symphony because it sounds good also shallow?

I'm undecided about this.  While the music/person analogy is useful in some cases, I'm not sure it always applies.  If you take the art for art's sake approach - which I'm prone to - appearance and effect are the extent of a piece's content.  The point is no-thing more than to sound nice.  I suppose that's why most of my music has been instrumental lately.  I have no other goal than to make things that sound nice.  (Though, based on how many people are listening, I'm evidently not doing a very good job.)  But I also realise that making only things that are meant to sound nice is kind of a shallow goal.  It's certainly a limited one.

I do have some plans on presenting ideas within my songs and getting back to lyric writing.  But I find writing lyrics much harder than writing music, and I think part of that is because I find it much easier to play an instrument than to sing lyrics.

---&---

{YouTube}{Tumblr}{Bandcamp}