You are correct about Whiter Shade Of Pale. The song was included on their debut album, American version only, released in September 1967.

The way I have been handling singles is to wait for the week it broke into the Top 40 which means it was getting some airplay by then, before posting a video for it. If the song reaches #1, I wait until the week that it had done so. Songs that made the Top 100 but failed to break the Top 40, if I feel they deserve attention, wind up in my Odds and Sods post or possibly in the Cringe Worthy Circle Of Purgatory Post.With Whiter Shade Of Pale, it broke into the Top 40 during the last week of June and peaked at #5. A tippy top favorite song of mine for that year and a fantastic debut album

Writing credits-I attribute that to lyric writing. I also usually assume individual band musicians came up with their own arrangements for their instruments without hearing something elsewise. So it's the entire band that gets credited with arrangements, generally speaking, without other evidence.

Keith Reid was Procul's main lyric writer. Garry Brooker also got credit for that song . Matthew Fisher sued for co-credit and won in 2009. I'm not clear on what grounds and what the writing assist was.

As for the meaning-here's what Wikipedia posted:


Reid got the title and starting point for the song at a party. He overheard someone at the party saying to a woman, "You've turned a whiter shade of pale," and the phrase stuck in his mind.[11][12] The original lyrics had four verses, of which only two are heard on the original recording. The third verse has been heard in live performances by Procol Harum, and more seldom also the fourth.[13] The author of Procol Harum: beyond the pale, Claes Johansen, suggests that the song "deals in metaphorical form with a male/female relationship which after some negotiation ends in a sexual act".[12] This is supported by Tim de Lisle in Lives of the Great Songs, who remarks that the lyrics concern a drunken seduction, which is described through references to sex as a form of travel, usually nautical, using mythical and literary journeys.[14] Other observers have also commented that the lyrics concern a sexual relationship.[11]



Contrary to the above interpretations, Reid was quoted in Uncut Magazine, February 2008, as saying, "I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs."



Structurally and thematically, the song is unusual in many respects. While the recorded version is 4:03 long, it is composed of only two verses, each with chorus. The piece is also more instrument-driven than most songs of the period, and with a much looser rhyme scheme. Its unusually allusive and referential lyrics are much more complex than most lyrics of the time (for example, the chorus focuses on Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale"). Thus, this piece can be considered an early example of progressive rock.



The phrase a whiter shade of pale has since gained widespread use in the English language, noticed by several dictionaries.[15][16][17] As such, the phrase is today often used in contexts independent of any consideration of the song. (See [18] for many annotated examples complete with links to original sources.) It has also been heavily paraphrased, in forms like an Xer shade of Y, to the extent that it has been recognised[19][20] as a snowclone – a type of cliché and phrasal template.