"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

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!