The Decemberists' "Don't Carry It All"

Download my interpretation of the song here. 

Ah, the day a new Decemberists album comes out. Pretty high up there as far as days go for me. Time to jump into a different time period with new pirate vocabulary to learn, characters to meet, and awesome chord changes to untangle. Right? Weirdly, less so this time around. The King is Dead sees a group with a deep instrument playing bench and an even deeper stylistic diversity adhere to some good ol' stripped down folk rock. I wasn't sure what to make of it at first without tales of chimney sweeps, duels to the death inside of whales, and the ghosts of unfortunate infants haunting their mothers for the rest of their time on earth. Luckily, my ears knew what to do. In under a month I probably made my way through this album over 40 times!

Over those plays I used the following steps, albeit faster, to understand what is going on in the song. Here is a slowed down method I always use in feeling out the possibilities for a song if no musical rules are broken. 

Note: Being that this is my first post on this blog in this new format, I will be showing you a slowed down process of how I approach figuring out a song. This may seem laborious, and it is the first or even fifth time you use it, but eventually it becomes second nature and helps so much in guessing what may come next in a chord progression. In future posts I will be linking to a general process of how to find the notes in a given key from the list of all notes using the methods below. 

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. 

Getting back to our song, "Don't Carry it All" kicks off the album with a stop/start rhythm in the key of G (I), which descends to it's vi, Em and then to the V, D. When I first sit down to listen to and figure out a song, upon hearing each chord, I always think to myself "now is that a major chord (happy sounding) or a minor chord (sad sounding)?" In either case, there are three possibilities: I, IV and V, or ii, iii, and vi. Bringing it back to this song specifically, in this opening segment I heard, in order: (Major) (Minor) (Major). The first chord felt like the chord that whole piece centered around, so I started calling that the I in my head (a guess, but an educated one) and I knew the second chord was either ii, iii, or vi, and the last chord was either IV or V since it did not sound like I repeated again. This is the way in which you can drastically cut down your variables when listening to music and trying to figure out a song. On to the music: 

Verse: 

G                                                               Em D

Here we come to a turning of the season 

G                                                               Em D

Witness to the arc towards the sun 

G                                                                     Em D

A neighbor's blessed burden within reason 

G                                                              

Becomes a burden borne of all and one 

        Em         D

And nobody, nobody knows...

The falling crest of the I down to the vi is one of the most classic moves in rock music, so much so that the move itself calls to mind 1950's doo-wop. (Because I am used to hearing this move, it jumped out at me. It will take you working out a few songs by ear to hear it, but it's one of the most recognizable in music.) But The Decemberists don't dawdle; they immediately hit the V chord of the key prompting a strong resolve back to the I. Anytime a V chord is struck in a song, it's a good bet that the chords will be making their way back to the I most of the time. This is because the V chord, D major, contains the note F# within it which is the 7th degree of the scale we spoke of earlier and removed from our chord list. In a way, we removed it because it is so powerful that it is quite unstable to use as the basis of a chord, but it plays a very important supporting role in other chords in the scale, named for other notes. So here it is: the V chord always contains the 7th degree of the scale, and that 7th degree makes the V chord always wants to resolve upward one half step to the I. There are exceptions we will come across later but for now this explanation will suffice. 

From there, The Decemberists reveal the soft chorus-y underbelly of the song, showcasing the IV chord: C. If the I chord feels like home, then I tend to think of the IV chord as a vacation home; stable, sweet, and comforting to the ear. For this reason you often will see songs darting back and forth from I to IV or vice-versa, it's a subtle way of conveying movement without changing the dynamics of a song too much. 

Chorus:

C                                               G

      Let the yolk fall from our shoulders 

C                                                      Em  D

      Don't carry it all, don't carry it all 

C                                             G

      We are all our hands and holders 

                     Am                         C

Beneath this bold and brilliant sun 

                               G

And this I swear to all 

A nice tool in songwriting is establishing a reliable motif for the listener, breaking that expectation with a new section, only to hint at the original idea again later. In the second line of the above, a deftly chosen C chord leads to the Em - D change we saw in the verse section. This IV - vi - V re-orients the listener to the first section's hook of I - vi - V, where IV replaces I for a nice variation on a theme. Following another IV - I change, we see an Am - C (ii - IV) used to build a bit of tension for the inevitable return to the stop start G riff that is the song's hallmark. So we have covered Verse and Chorus, two of the three most often-used parts of song DNA. Let's tackle the Bridge next: 

Bm                                                   C

And there a wreath of trillium and ivy 

Bm                                   Em

Laid upon the body of a boy 

Bm                                                 C

Lazy will the loam come from its hiding 

Am                                                        D

And return this quiet searcher to the soil 

Typically in songwriting, the Bridge section often deviates from the usual song structure, or sometimes even changes key completely in more complex songs. Thankfully, this is a rather simple Bridge for our first song write-up. Despite adhering to the rules of simple major key music theory, this Bridge still deviates enough to give the listener a break from the main structure of the song and creates an air of unexpectedness. By the time the listener catches on and  figures out what to expect, they are launched back in the familiar main G vamp of the song and it seems fresh and new, but familiar in comparison. 

Here's another tip: the closer two chords are to each other in our diagram for the key, the more tension there will be between them if used adjacent in a song. On this tip, the iii - IV move in the first line above is a dead giveaway when listening as the chords are heard moving upward tonally, and you can almost hear the tense gears of the chords grinding against each other. Immediately I know in my head that these are two upward moving adjacent chords in our scale diagram, and that only happens twice in our formula: W W H W W W H (you can tell by the number of Half Steps in the formula; each Half Step forms an adjacent chord as we do not skip a note for those transitions). Check out the diagram below to see what I mean: 

Fret Distances:          W                W          H          W                W             W           H

Intervals:          I               ii               iii          IV            V                vi             vii*         I

Notes:              G              Am            Bm        C              D               Em           F#*       (G)

So the change has to be either a vii* - I (which we know it is not since we agreed to not use vii* since it is so unstable, and also because my ears tell me neither of the chords sound like home like the I does) or it has to be a iii - IV. Yet another way to establish contrast with the main verse/chorus structure of the song, which has been using wider, non-adjacent intervals like I - vi and IV - vi, is to utilize these adjacent chords to get the listener's attention in a fresh, tense way and then break that new sound by returning to the loose, wide intervals the listener is already familiar with from before. 

On another layer, the C and the Em both contain an E note within them, as the major 3rd of the C chord and the Root of the Em chord. The Bm alternating in resolving to either of them form a nice swaying progression as the minor third of the Bm, D, resolves to an E note but in very different settings thanks to the chord choice.

Following that, the familiar Am - D (ii - V) brings us back to the I again. This is another very classic move in western music; in fact it's so powerful that jazz musicians use the ii - V as a telltale "roadsign" to let all the players in a group know that the song is changing key. Though it is used in a standard way here, simply invoking the ii - V borrowed from another key will strongly suggest a key change! In this case, the ii - V used is native to the key of G, so back to G major we go for the final verse. 

One more verse and chorus after the bridge concludes, and that's the whole song! 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email or tweet any questions you may have to me, would love to have your input!