"East Harlem" by Beirut

I first heard this simple but beautiful little song in an amazing and intimate Williamsburg, NY concert performance BaebleMusic posted a while ago. I soon discovered the concert was for purchase on iTunes as well as for streaming on their site and purchased it immediately! 

With the news that Beirut is coming out with a new album on August 30 this year, I decided it was time to sit down and figure this great little tune out!

Supposedly Zach Condon wrote this song when he was 17 according to the short intro he gives before beginning to strum his ukulele. Wilting and somber or triumphant and declarative, Zach's voice soars above the many instruments that accompany him once the full band joins in. 

While this song's structure is strictly arranged in two distinct sections, it lacks a chorus or bridge and features only verses repeated as mantras. Let's get started.

Four steps to finding the key you are in, and what chords will work in it: 

First, we start with all the notes that exist in the musical universe, 12 in all: 

A Bb B C C# D Eb E F F# G G#

From there, we re-order them to have the key we are in, G, come first. 

G G# A Bb B C C# D Eb E F F# 

The next trick I am going to apply, you can think of as a template. This template helps us select the notes that are relevant to playing in the key we have chosen. It uses two terms: Whole Step and Half Step. These simply refer to fret distances in guitar centric language, but they can be applied to any instrument you like. In our diagram of all the notes, a Whole Step (W) means 2 notes distance, and a Half Step (H) means a distance of 1 note. You can also think of it as a Whole Step meaning you skip one note and select the next one, and a Half Step meaning you take the adjacent note and do not skip any. 

Our formula is: W W H W W W H

So applying these distances to the list of all notes looks something like this, where the bolded notes are the notes we are keeping:

Fret Distances:          W               W          H          W                W             W           H

Notes:              G      G#      A      Bb      B      C      C#      D      Eb      E      F      F#      (G)

(You can see that when a Whole Step (W) falls above a note, we skip it as described above, and if a Half Step (H) falls between two notes, we take the note and do not skip.)

 

This gives us a major scale for the key of G. All the notes we can solo with are listed in this scale, and by applying Roman Numeral Intervals to them, we can conjugate these notes into the chords, either major or minor, that we can play. These numerals always work the same way for major (in lamense terms, happy sounding) keys. Memorize the order and they will serve you well (where uppercase tells us the chord is major, and lowercase tells us it is minor):

Notes:         G       A       B       C       D       E       F#

Intervals:   I         ii       iii      IV      V       vi     vii*

Chords:     G     Am     Bm     C       D      Em   F#*

*One more peculiarity: in pop music we almost never see the vii* degree used, hence the asterisk. So let's just remove it! Bam. Three major and three minor chords, ready to hash out the possibilities for our song.

Even better: when listening to a song and trying to figure it out, we have taken the possibilities of what any one chord could be down from seemingly endless combinations to just six: three major chords, and three minor chords. 

Now that we have established what key we are in and the chords (both major and minor) that we can use to assemble our song, it's time to deeply listen to the song, and play each of the chords as we listen. Pick up your instrument of choice and queue your song up.

When we hear a somber, sad sound we try the ii, iii, or the vi and see if it fits, and when we hear a happy, triumphant chord we try our I, IV and V to see if they fit over it.

This gets easier over time, but you must press through it and you will start to have premonitions about what chord might go where, and you will also start to see patterns. 

One of the most recognizable patterns that you grow to recognize is the I - IV - V - I progression, and it's many variations. As the songs ukulele intro begins, my ears picked up four major sounding chords, and none of the first 3 sounded like a repeated chord. Immediately, I know that we only have three major chords to play with so it must be the I, IV and the V arranged in some order. Since the song starts off feeling like home to my ear, I assume this is the one and play a G chord. Bingo. I then try a C and a D over the second chord, and sure enough it is the IV (C). This leaves the V (D) as the third chord.

When we come to the 4th chord, there are a few things I might take for granted from practicing transcribing that might aid you in guessing what it is. The following is how I know it is the I chord, besides the fact that it sounds suspiciously similar:

Whenever a progression makes it's way to the V chord, there is a strong chance the chords are pointing the way home to the I. This is because each chord contains three notes: the Root, the Third and the Fifth. Each of these notes forms a upward or downward melodic pathway when it comes to the next chord in the sequence. Notes that move upward in Half Step or Whole Step amounts are the most engaging magnetic to the ear. For instance, check out the orange melody pathway below.

As you can see, the pathways above all move upwards note by note in either one or two note intervals.

The Green path from the Root moves 0 frets staying at G, then 2 moving to A, and then another 2 to B. While a tonic harmony can add great consonance as a backdrop to changing chords around it, this harmony is not the most compelling in pushing the progression forward.

The Blue path from the Third moves 1 note from B to C, then 2 notes from C to D, then stays on D for no movement in the 4th chord. The ear will perk up when hearing the movement of 1 fret, and this solidly anchors the IV chord (C), but the it then becomes less engaging as the progression moves on. 

In contrast, the Orange Path starting on the Fifth moves from D up two frets to E, then up two frets to F#, then one fret to our home note (and chord) G. Because the 1 fret change happens over the transition from V to I, it punctuates the change with a consonant return to our home and relief to the melody. Also notice that this melody line moves each chord in the process making it more dynamic and engaging, and the main voice you hear when listening to the four chords. The Green and Blue make excellent backing vocals or harmony lines as they don't attract that much attention because of their large moves and tendency to stay on the same note for two chords.  

For this reason, in any I - IV - V - I you hear, you can expect these melody lines to surface, and you can expect the F# note (the very dissonant vii degree of the scale) to want to press the song home to the I. We will see soon that it does not have to resolve to the I chord, but really any chord with a G in it. Think of it like this: resolving to a chord whose Root note is a half-step up from the current note is the strongest resolve you can reach. 

So there we have it, our chord progression: 

G C D G (x2)

G                             C

   Another rose wilts in East Harlem

         D                            

And uptown downtown 

   G

a thousand miles between us

                      C                     D

She's waiting for the night to fall, let it fall, 

     G                         

I'll never make it in time 

G C D G (x2)

The beginning of this song lulls us into a false sense of constancy, and surprises us with a change after the same verse over and over again. This change, while not jarring, is a pleasant surprise that some will not even notice. It's also a valuable trick songwriters use to refresh a stale progression and give it new life without changing much of the overall structure. Less work right? It will be easier for your melodies too. Let's check it out. 

While the first few chords feel the same as the initial section we figured out, the 4th chord is suddenly a sombre, sadder sound than we have have been used to. This descent refreshed the listen, and provides a new lift on the converse side of the chord when the progression loops and first chord comes around again.

Hit play on the track and listen to the changes when the new words start. When it hits the 4th chord in the progression, try each of our lowercase minor chords: ii, iii, and vi. You should clearly be able to hear that the vi is the winner. So why does this work? Doesn't changing the chords change the melody line? Let's find out.

We can see above that our harmonies shift as the chords change, the 1-fret distance in the Orange Path remaining intact from the third chord to the fourth chord (F# ---> G). The Blue Path adapts to move from D to E (the new root of the 4th chord, Em) and the Green Line remains unchanged as both the old chord G and the new chord Em contain a B. In fact, wait a minute; the only difference between G and Em is one note! Swapping the Fifth (D) out of the G and replacing it with an E (the new root) makes an brand new Em chord.

This close relationship teaches us something: 

The I and the vi are relative to each other. The vi is the relative minor of the I, and the I is the relative major of the vi. 

It doesn't stop there: every major chord has a relative minor, and every minor chord has a relative major. So in our key of G, we have two other majors and two other minors. Guess how they relate to each other? 

The IV and the ii are relative to each other. The ii is the relative minor of the IV, and the IV is the relative major of the ii. 

The V and the iii are relative to each other. The iii is the relative minor of the V, and the V is the relative major of the iii.

Wow. So there we go, the universe has gotten even smaller. When we started this journey, we had 12 notes, which we narrowed down to 7 using our template of whole steps and half steps: W W H W W W H. We then eliminated the vii for it's rarity of use, and conjugated the remaining six chords into major and minor using our upper and lower case roman numeral template: I ii iii IV V vi vii*. And now we know we have three pairs of happy and sad relative major and minor chords, that can be used together to great effect in songwriting. 

What's more, any of the majors can be swapped out for any of their relative minor counterparts and vice versa to change a progression. This is the change Beirut has used effectively after the instrumental break at the climax of this song. Without further ado, let's check out how Beirut uses the I - vi relationship.

G C D G (x2)

G C D Em

G                                C

Sound is the colour I know, oh,

D                                      Em

Sound is what keeps me looking for your eyes,

        G                                       C

The sound of your breath in the cold, 

                    D                             Em 

And oh, the sound will bring me home again.

So there we have it: a simple relative minor chord substitution for our I chord, G. Keep in mind that Beirut could have swapped out the IV (C) for the ii (Am), or even the V (D) for the iii (Bm) if they wished to.

If you don't believe me, try it! Choose a song you already know that uses G, C and D chords (there are a bajillion of them, trust me) and sing the melody a few times with the correct chords. Then making sure your voice sings the same melody, swap the majors out for their relative minors. Cool huh?

Want to do a cool alternate version of a popular song as a cover? Easy. Slow the tempo down, and then make everything that was a relative major into it's relative minor, and vice versa. If you stick to the original melody and lyrics, people won't know what hit them until they hear the first words or maybe the chorus, but they will be intrigued and wonder how you did it. 

Download my interpretation of the song here. 

Thanks for reading, ping me with questions on Twitter. 

Sean