Herman's Hermits' "Ooh, She's Done It Again"

Listening to original albums is sometimes weird because half of the songs I've never heard before and the other half I'm quite familiar with.  I hadn't heard Herman's Hermits' "Ooh, She's Done It Again" before, but I found something to say about it.

Two thirds of the way through the last verse, the time signature changes from 4/4 to 3/4, right before the line "Such beauty takes their breath away."  That same line is in the first verse too, but that time signature change emphasizes it here.  Along with the breath taken away, there's a beat taken away from each measure.

Herman's Hermits' "Jezebel"

One of the reasons I wanted to get this CD set of original Herman's Hermits albums is because it has "Jezebel."  I'd heard a live version of theirs a few years ago, so I wanted the studio version.

This is just a minor point, but they include the riff from "Peter Gunn" in the instrumental backing.  I have two other versions of "Jezebel" (by Edith Piaf and Gene Vincent), and neither has that feature, so I'm assuming that it was the Hermits who first put the two together.

Herman's Hermits' "Saturday's Child"

Along with working my way through my existing collection, I'm still listening to a CD a day of the CDs I got for Christmas.  To-day, it's the second disc of a two-disc set of all of Herman's Hermits' U.K. albums, so it has There's a Kind of Hush All over the World and Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.

There's a Kind of Hush All over the World has "Saturday's Child" on it, which I was sort of surprised to discover is the same song as the "Saturday's Child" on the first Monkees album.  I think I might like Herman's Hermits' version better, but the only specific thing I can point to that I think is better than the Monkees' version is the melisma'd "wild" in "She drives me wild."  Instead of only one syllable, there are five.  It provides a greater sense of the wildness, where in the Monkees' version, that "wild" doesn't have a melisma at all.

Herman's Hermits' "Smile Please"

I just listened to the second disc of that Herman's Hermits compilation album.  I'd previously noticed a few interesting things in the lyrics of "Smile Please," but listening to it this time, I found more that ties the whole song together.

In (what I think is) the second verse, there's the line "Don’t be quite so negative, I’m positive they’ll turn out fine."  I'd noticed the internal rhyme with negative and positive and also how they're opposites, but it wasn't until now that I really understood the context.  The first verse explains how the singer/speaker and the girl he's addressing are in a photo booth.  So negative works in the pessimistic sense, but it also hints at the photographic sense.  (The next line is "The scene will soon develop if we stay in here a little time.")

The internal rhyme of negative and positive also has a precedent in the first verse: "We’re sitting in this cubicle, it’s beautiful to get you alone."  It's more of a slant rhyme (cubicle and beautiful), but it still works in the song because there's also the line "Things are getting better all the time."  So it's as if the rhyme itself is improving (from slant to perfect) along with the situation (or at least the assertion that the situation is improving).

Herman's Hermits' "Show Me Girl"

I just listened to the first disc of a compilation album of Herman's Hermits.  Even before I listened to it, I got thinking about the lyrics to "Show Me Girl."

Just from what I remembered, I thought the first line is interesting:  "A one-way love can hang you up awful bad."  Specifically the phrase "awful bad."  It seems like it should be "awfully badly," but while both words in "awful bad" look like adjectives, they function as adverbs.  They're actually flat adverbs, which Merriam-Webster has an informative video about.  I just thought it was interesting that they're both flat adverbs for the sake of syllable count in the line and - in the instance of "bad" - so that it will rhyme with "the only kind of love I had" at the end of the next line.

But a more interesting thing about the song is the backing vocals in the third verse:

Oh, I’d love to love you, you know I think you’re out of sight
(I’d love to love you, but you’re out of sight)
But first I’ve got to be sure you’re gonna treat me right
(You’re gonna treat me right)

Taken individually, the main lyrics are "Oh, I’d love to love you, you know I think you’re out of sight / But first I’ve got to be sure you’re gonna treat me right," and the backing vocals are "I’d love to love you, but you’re out of sight / You’re gonna treat me right."  The primary concern of each set of lyrics is different.  The main lyrics are concerned with the potential lover's treating him right (incidentally an-other flat adverb), where the backing vocals seem to be concerned that a difference between the singer/speaker and the potential lover will keep them apart and that he is lower than she is according to some hierarchy that isn't fully explained.  (Appearance is the most obvious if "out of sight" is taken somewhat literally, with the emphasis on the visual nature.)  And the line "you're gonna treat me right" as it is in the backing vocals seems to be an idealization of the relationship, whether it's an actual relationship or just an imagined one.  At the end of the line, there's a descending melisma on "right," which sounds a bit like a sigh and makes it sound more like an idealized fantasy.