It’s modulation week in aural skills class, and that means we get to talk about my two favorite pop song key changes, both of which are from the same Michael Jackson song.
The song was written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett. Michael and Quincy Jones produced. Glen Ballard also co-wrote and produced “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips and “Hand in my Pocket” by Alanis Morrissette. The man has a way with an indelible earworm.
The gospel choir arrangement is by Andraé Crouch, who also arranged the choir on Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”.
Before we get to the key changes, let’s talk through the song’s chords. The intro and the verses go like so:
| G D/F# | Em D | C | C |
Every note in these chords is from the G major scale. The prechorus continues the diatonicism and the scalewise bass movement:
| Am7 | G/B | C | G/B |
| Am7 | G/B | C | D7sus4 |
The chorus stays mostly diatonic until the end, but then there are two interesting departures from G major.
| G G/B | C D | G G/B | C D |
| G G/B | C C#°7 | D7#9 | D7#9 |
The C#°7 is a secondary dominant, functioning as the V7 chord in the key of D. You could think of it as a rootless voicing of A7(b9). The D7 chord has an F-natural on top of it, which jazz theory calls the sharp ninth, though it might be more clear to call it the flat tenth. Either way, it moves us out of G major and into the “key” of G blues.
The first key change comes at 2:52, the end of the third chorus. It’s an elegant bit of text painting. The line “make that… CHANGE” resolves not to G, but to Ab, a half step higher. It’s not exactly subtle, but it works. Up until this point, all the vocals have been by Michael and Siedah Garrett, but the key change introduces the gospel choir and more exciting playing from the backing musicians.
The second key change comes at the end of the song. After the last chorus, there’s an outtro using more or less the same changes as the verse, though now in A-flat:
| Ab Eb/G | Fm Eb | Db | Eb7sus4 |
| Ab Eb/G | Fm Eb | Db...
That last Db chord doesn’t resolve back to Ab via Eb7sus4, it just hangs. And hangs. And hangs! The song continues that Db chord for a minute and a quarter. That is a long time! After about four bars, I hear the key center move from A-flat to D-flat. After eight bars, I can’t even aurally remember that we were ever in A-flat. This is wild! The key changes without the chord changing! All the notes in the vocals and the instruments in this extended coda are from the A-flat major scale, but now we’re hearing D-flat as the tonic. This means the key has moved from A-flat major to D-flat Lydian, just through musical time passing. Michael ends the song on a big Db chord to really drive the point home.
Music theory people: is there a name for this phenomenon? I can’t possibly be the first person to describe it, but I’m not deep enough in the literature to know who was. I don’t even know what search terms to use in Google Scholar. Your recommendations are welcome.
Meta note: this is going to be a podcast episode. I haven’t been reading from scripts, I would rather just freestyle and then edit from there, but my freestyling is a lot more cogent if I write everything out like this first. Apparently people would much rather listen to me talk than read my prose, and that’s fine, I’m happy talking. But the prose will continue to come first.