Notes and Quotes: "Look through Any Window"

They recorded this follow-up to "I'm Alive" employing the same sound to build recognition. However, while the follow-up did not quite do as well as the first song, it demonstrates an increasing mastery of their recording art. They have double-tracked all of the vocals and the guitar part. The vocals are a complex web of voice doublings, syllabic joint harmonies, and sustained supporting vocalise.

The song features a two-part refrain. The first part continues the feel of the verse by commenting on what either the pedestrians or the drivers are doing as they pass by the viewer's window. The second half of the refrain is perhaps part of a daydream in which the observer begins thinking about children and women and.... The text and musical mood of the song at first suggests a fairly happy walk through a busy metropolitan street. However, the observer remains separate from the action and wonders about the "sly ways" of the drivers. The whole song begins to take a subtly disquieting perspective.

The chanson noire finishes with what may be a rejoinder to the crashing chord at the beginning of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." In "Look through any Window," one guitar part plays and sustains a D minor chord at the same time that a second guitar plays the damped notes of what is probably open guitar strings.

Composer Graham Gouldman would have many other hits with the Hollies, the Yardbirds, and others. Unfortunately, he failed in the sixties to achieve any hits for himself. He would have to wait until the seventies when he was part of 10cc.

Schedule

15 February, 2012