"Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)"

Last week, I figured out the chords for "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)."  A few days later, I was thinking about the song again and had a number of realizations about it, mostly about the bridge:

Here in the gloom

Of my lonely room

I hold her handkerchief

And smell her sweet perfume

In the first verse, the narrator explains that he's alone.  Here, he "hold[s] her handkerchief" almost as a substitute for holding her hand.  The two phrases start the same way.

The lines "I hold her handkerchief / And smell her sweet perfume" exhibit alliteration, and the euphony of this effect gives some indication of the pleasantness of either the situation the narrator imagines or his actual memories of the past.

The initial sounds of this pleasant alliteration contrast with the line-ending rhymes in the previous couplet, where the narrator's sadness and isolation are highlighted.  Their opposite positions emphasize this difference.

In the first verse, there's a slant rhyme between "alone" and "home" ("It's so bad to be alone / Oh, baby, come home"), and this imperfection indicates the narrator's lack of sufficient companionship.

"Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)"

According to Denny Laine's Instagram post, yester-day was the anniversary of the release of the first Moody Blues album.  I listened to it and found a couple things to note.  I still have some research to do on one song, but here's a feature I noticed in the first verse of "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)."  The lead and backing vocals both sing the first two lines ("I don't want to / Go on without you"), but the backing vocals and the instruments drop out for part of the next line ("It's so bad to be alone").  Since this leaves just a single voice, that "be[ing] alone" is illustrated musically.

"Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)"

In the line "It's so bad to be alone" in "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)," the "bad" is sung with a melisma (D C), musically giving a sense of degree, almost emphasizing the preceding "so."  (I'm not certain, but "so" in the line "My room is so blue" might have a similar effect.)

I previously noted that the "every" in the lines "I keep seeing your face / Whoa, every place" is sung with three syllables, but I noticed last week that those three syllables are each sung to a different pitch (Eb D C), which also gives a musical sense of number.  "Place" is sung with a melisma (C Bb), which extends this sense (because of both the extra syllable and the greater range of the phrase - a fourth from Eb to Bb).

"Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)"

The first two lines of the bridge in "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)" are "Here in the gloom / Of my lonely room."  These same lines also appear in the Ink Spots' "I'm Making Believe."  The two songs were written by different people ("I'm Making Believe" by Monaco and Gordon; "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)" by Berns and Wexler), but I think there might be a connection because these lines are so similar.  Apparently, "I'm Making Believe" is from 1944, and "Come Back (I Don't Want to Go on without You)" was originally released by the Drifters (as just "I Don't Want to Go on without You") in 1964.

The "every" in the second verse ("I keep seeing your face / Whoa, every place") is sung with three syllables rather than just two, which musically gives a sense of the variety of places in which the singer/speaker sees his girl.