On the face of it, A Rose for Emily by the Zombies seems an odd song choice to end each episode of the acclaimed, record-breaking podcast S-Town – the appearance of the William Faulkner short story that shares its title in the first episode notwithstanding. S-Town deals in real-life southern gothic: it is filled with chewy, sometimes incomprehensible Alabama accents and small-town intrigue and tragedy. But it is hard to imagine a more English record than Odessey and Oracle, the album from which the track originates, with Zombies frontman Colin Blunstone’s cut-glass enunciation, and its songs about parks in Hertfordshire and harmony vocals that sound like the Beach Boys, had the Beach Boys hailed from the home counties and met in a public-school choir. If you didn’t know your Faulkner, you would never guess A Rose for Emily was based on a story set in Mississippi. In the Zombies’ hands, the titular heroine sounds like an Eleanor Rigby-ish spinster pining away somewhere in the British suburbs, a spiritual sister of downtrodden Sylvilla in the Kinks’ Two Sisters or the BO-afflicted lady hymned in the Who’s Odorono.
And yet, you can see why it works. For one thing, A Rose for Emily possesses an eerie melancholy; for another, the Zombies’ retelling of Faulkner’s tale concentrates on the heroine’s otherness, her isolation, her sense of chances missed, her frustration, her pride – themes also found in the life of S-Town’s central figure, John B McLemore. Even the song’s own backstory seems weirdly fitting. By the time Odessey and Oracle was released in April 1968, demoralised by the failure of the two advance singles taken from it, the Zombies had split up. It attracted virtually no attention for another year, when its final track, Time of the Season, became an unexpected hit in the US. With no one to enjoy the fruits of its success, promoters hastily assembled fake versions of the band – featuring none of the actual members – to tour the country. Odessey and Oracle, meanwhile, took another 25 years to start showing up in best-albums-ofall-time lists. By 2008 it was legendary enough to warrant a live performance in full by the band’s surviving members – the group are doing a live tour of the album this year, including a show at the London Palladium in September. Like McLemore, it was long after its moment had passed that the record became known and hailed as the stuff of genius. Now, millions of podcast downloads later, both he and the album are suddenly more famous than ever.
