Please give me some examples of songs with chord changes that really thrill you. Thank you!
Listen to **Burt Bacharach **- his stuff with Dionne Warwick like *Walk on By *- that’s a guy that knows his chords.
Paul McCartney’s **Yesterday **has always struck me as deceptively complex in its chords.
Paul Simon does a lot of cool chordal stuff. Take a look at “Still Crazy After All These years,” for instance.
Trower’s Long Misty Days.
Seconded.
The most beautiful modulations I’ve ever heard occur in “Body And Soul.”
Best appreciated in instrumental versions; the subpar lyrics detract from the music.
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As much for the quirky melody as for the cool changes I suggest a listen to Claudio Chiara, “Zingaro” A.C.Jobim and other renditions of the song that also goes by the names Retrato em Branco e Preto and Portrait in Black and White (possibly even others).
And if the changes do anything for you, look at more of Jobim’s bossa nova tunes and the bossa nova genre as a whole.
Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” always blows my mind. It’s all over the map in terms of the chord progression, but it all sounds natural because of the spectacular melody.
I’ll go ahead and pick something with hip changes, like “Nefertiti,” one of my favorites, but I mostly prefer simpler chord changes with a little something different about them. Allen Toussaint wrote a lot of good ones in this vein.
I’ll also go ahead and put in my vote for any number of Great American Songbook tunes – diatonic, usually, but with enough there to keep it interesting. I always liked that Porter tune “I Love You,” and since it’s Spring again, I’ve been playing it more. What with them birds on the wing again, and all. That one’s a neat tune cause you can use a pedal tone over the first eight or so bars that meshes nicely with the whole dissonance of the melody. ETA it’s not really dissonant exactly as a tune – it’s a surprising leap to make in the lead voice, though.
Also in that group, one of my favorites, is “Blame It On My Youth” – Oscar Levant I believe wrote the book or the tune, I can’t remember, but it’s simple and shocking in how good it can sound, being so simple.
They say it’s wonderful (someone did!).
“Goodbye Porkpie Hat” – of course! Sorry about 2x post, but that and so many others Mingus wrote have the coolest changes IMO. People say it’s “just a blues” a lot of times, but that’s not what it is, also IMO. It’s deeper.
Everything by Todd Rundgren and Carole King, but I’m very partial to Major 7 chords.
Recent song sung by Norah Jones, Black, from the album Rome by Dangermouse. This one has good chords too. Reminds me of Radiohead, which is another band with interesting changes.
Go ahead, say it one more time motherfucker! Say that fucking chord quality again and “It Could Happen To You.”
(kidding – i thought it was sort of funny. good call with ms. jones, btw. she’s an excellent keyboardist and wouldn’t [and didn’t] play anything without something hip going on harmonically.)
I like the chords to Lou Reed’s “Halloween Parade”. While the individual verses (there is no chorus as such in this song) follow a fairly typical chord progression (cool nontheless), what’s especially cool is how at the end of repeating the pattern the second time, the song then modulates to the key that is the IV chord of the preceding key. For example:
A D A D Bm G Bm G - first time
A D A D Bm G Bm G A - second time, that leads into
D G D G Em C Em C
D G D G Em C Em C D
etc, going next to the key of G, then C and finally F. I figured the chords out on my own and was surprised to find this modulation taking place, as I had no idea until then that the song did not stay in the same key all the way through. It is fun as hell to play too!
Nothing exotic in terms of the chords used, but I always enjoyed this version of Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right by Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls. It flows beautifully.
Okay, two great ones that I love -
Argent Towers mentioned Todd Rundgren above. When I started playing guitar, I walked into my teacher’s room on about the third visit and begged him to teach me the chords to:
And then there’s another killer chord song for you, to whit:
- YouTube - specifically, if you can hang on until the 1:38 to roughly 2:00 minute marks, the descending, lilting chord changes there just kill me (and it happens again later, too)
And hey, just for a bonus tune from the 70’s, this is another song which, at first listen might strike you as a cheesy tune from that era, but is really an amazing musical tune. Just listen to the chords and harmonies sweeping you along…
I just have to say that “Hello, It’s Me” is the finest pop music recording ever produced.
It represents a master musician, composer and producer at the top of his craft writing a simple love song while using instinctive chord progressions to achieve a masterpiece.
Of course, Rundgren had recorded it before, and it was crap. It’s majesty, though, was taking the original crap and making it sublime.
Did I mention I like this song?
Here’s three more:
Beatles - “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (The song that made me want to learn guitar). The bridge goes to the tonic chord, but it’s a minor. I didn’t know anything about music structure at the time, but this chord change really got my attention when I first heard it. Comes in about 52 seconds into the clip.
Another Beatle song. “Hey Bulldog”. Chord progression in the bridge, some kind of ascending pattern in minor chords that I’ve never heard anywhere else from anyone else. Begins 52 seconds in:
Leslie Gore “It’s My Party”. I wasn’t really into teen girl songs, but the chords in this one seemed pretty sophisticated for 17 year old Leslie Gore who wrote it:
There are so many. One that typically comes to mind for me is “All the Things You Are”.
I’m a sucker for good pop songs with simple chord changes… Dylan, Lou Reed, and the Stones did a lot of great things with three or four chords. But it’s interesting sometimes to note songs that have really unusual changes and yet still seem accessible. One example, I think, is “My Wife”, from Who’s Next.
I like a lot of Neil Young’s chord changes. He’ll do the first half of a verse with standard changes and then go off into a different dimension.
I have always loved Education by Pearl Jam… not a complex set of chords, just moving an E chord up the neck and leaving the other strings open… makes a very cool sound:
(Em)0.2.2.0.0.0
(A*) 0.7.7.6.0.0
(C*) 0.10.10.9.0.0
(D*) 0.12.12.11.0.0
(B*) 0.9.9.8.0.0
Too many in the jazz world to mention, but the first one that come to mind for rock is The Stones’ “Let It Loose”…I don’t really know another song like it. Goes one way, then another; no bridge - just a big circle, and it all works.
F F/Eb Bb Dm/A C C/Bb 2x
F F/Eb Bb Dm/A Gm Bb 2x
Paul McCartney, “Hold Me Tight”.
The verse is interesting enough:
A Bb6 Bm7 C C#dim7 D D7
Then in the chorus (someone must have shown him the circle of fifths and he got all competitive):
G C F Bb Eb Ab Db F# B E E7 (arriving back to the verse and A major).