Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented chords, tritone substitutions, and modal interchange at a nice slow tempo. I love when I can get this much juice out of a single tune.
This was a tricky thing to write, because I wasn’t looking for “popular songs that I personally find annoying.” That would be easy, I find most popular songs to be annoying. But there’s a difference between a song being annoying because it’s boring, lazy and predictable, and a song being annoying because it’s weird and counterintuitive. That’s the good kind of annoying!
The most common entry point for Grateful Dead listeners is the acoustic folkie material, especially “Uncle John’s Band”. That makes sense; the song is fun, memorable, and relatively accessible. It seems like it would make a good campfire singalong. But then you get in there to try to learn it, and the song turns out to be extremely odd. Like a lot of Dead tunes!
This excellent episode of the 500 Songs podcast tells how label executive Joe Smith was ecstatic when he heard UJB for the first time. He supposedly ran into the hallway and grabbed people, shouting “We’ve got a single! We’ve got a single!” UJB was the first Dead song that made it onto the Hot One Hundred, getting up to number sixty-nine. It sounds very little like “Touch of Grey“, the only Dead song to hit the top ten, but both songs share a kind of wry “what are you gonna do” attitude.
I needed a song with lots of secondary dominants in it for aural skills class, and I realized that Norah Jones’ adult-contemporary smash “Don’t Know Why” has a bunch of them. The song came out in 2002, though it could have been recorded at any time in the 50 years previous.
My NYU pop theory class is going from non-functional harmony to the most functional harmony there is, the ii-V-I cadence. It’s subdominant to dominant to tonic, Western tonal harmony the way God and Beethoven intended.
This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It’s so common, in fact, that my students are having a hard time hearing it. This is not due to any lack of musicality among my students; it has to do with their listening expectations.
My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song:
Here’s the acapella.
I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a good teaching example because it doesn’t have any. Also, the melody and chords are pretty simple without being boring.
Embellishing tones are non-chord tones that are still within the key or mode. Chromatic embellishments are notes from outside the key or mode. They are easy to spot because they sound characteristically “weird”, or, at least, more colorful than the other notes around them. Thus the “chromatic” part – the word comes from chroma, the Greek word for color.
Phil Lesh’s passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I’ve been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is “Cumberland Blues.” Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense musical oddness. Here’s the studio version from Workingman’s Dead. It includes Jerry’s only banjo performance on a Grateful Dead song, aside from the last few seconds of the “Dark Star” single.
There is a real Cumberland mine in Pennsylvania, and another in Kentucky. In his collected lyrics, Robert Hunter says in a footnote to this song: “The best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who’d worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, ‘I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would’ve thought if he’d ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it.'” I half suspect that Hunter made this story up, but the lyrics do sound legitimately folkloric. In his Pitchfork review of Workingman’s Dead, Steven Thomas Erlewine compares Hunter’s lyrics on the album to Robbie Robertson’s writing with the Band, because both of them have that plausibly timeless Americana quality.
Today in pop aural skills, we identified suspensions, that is, melodies that place unexpected non-chord tones on strong beats, before resolving to the expected chord tones. These are melodic suspensions, which are not the same thing as sus4 or sus2 chords, but they are related concepts.
Western European classical theory has a lot of clear and unambiguous rules for suspensions. Pop follows those rules to varying extents, but not strictly. There is less of an expectation that the chord tones will be on strong beats in the first place, or that the chord tones are even the main melody notes. So some (maybe all) of these examples are debatable.
