27 key changes

In a seasonal change from the usual format, this post contains 27 songs, interspersed with writings—all about the supposedly dying art of key changes.

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin Pan Alley songwriting). We write about music and share our own collaborations.

KATE
So… last time, we talked about the key changes in our song Cloud Cuckoo Land. And since then, I’ve been campaigning relentlessly for us to do a post about notable key changes—good, bad, ugly. It’s especially timely given this recent study, which suggests that key changes in pop music are in decline.

Perhaps it’s worth clarifying: when we say ‘key change’, we’re talking about a moment when the music shifts from one place to another via some change in pitch—usually, the song seems to move up or down. In pop, it’s almost always up, which gives the music an emotional and literal ‘lift’ (like when Westlife get off their stools). But I wanted us to look at examples that are a bit more interesting. How about:

• The ‘extra mile’ key change

Key changes in pop often mean moving up a semitone, like in the Westlife example. Or sometimes it’s a whole tone, which is two semitones—see Whitney’s I Will Always Love You or the Backstreet Boys’ I Want it That Way (karaoke classics both).

But Stacy’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne jumps three semitones. At the guitar solo, the music pivots on the note E—this is the root note of the original key E major, but also the third note of C major, which is the chord that leads us into the new key of G. The change really registers when the vocals come in for the final chorus. Joyful.

• The ‘just kidding’ key change

Surely one reason key changes are in decline: they became a cheap trick, clunky ‘gear shifts’ executed without style, and began to sound formulaic and cheesy.

Which is why I enjoy Vulfpeck’s New Guru, which includes a shift at 2:31 that’s reversed a few bars later. (OK, maybe it’s not sustained enough to be a ‘real’ key change—but I like that the band plays with a musical trope and rejects it.)

• The ‘more-the-merrier’ key change(s)

No list would be complete without Beyoncé’s Love on Top, which moves through FOUR key changes to a) show off her incredible range, and b) create that feeling of almost delirious happiness.

On the hunt for other songs that visit several keys, I discovered this (charming), and this (erm), both from the capital of key changes: Eurovision. Also, remember Dizzy? That one constantly shifts keys, helping create a sense of lurching instability…

• The parallel key change

Sometimes, a song doesn’t feel as if it moves up or down. Instead, it might move from major to minor, or the other way around, while keeping the same root note—which might feel more like lightening or darkening.

There’s Runaway, by Del Shannon, which starts minor but switches to major at the chorus. Or While My Guitar Gently Weeps, by the Beatles, which does the same.

Or, if you’re looking for something more high-brow, how about I Saw the Sign by Ace of Base, whose instrumental moments are minor and verse / chorus are major…

NICK
OK, so before I launch into key changes, I have to admit I sometimes get confused by them. The Westlifes are easy enough to spot, but the more complex ones sometimes leave me wondering if it’s actually a key change or just a complex chord structure. My basic understanding is that it involves a fundamental shift, so that all the chords start revolving round a different root note.

In my head, I visualise it like Irving Berlin’s piano. For the uninitiated, he was the father of Tin Pan Alley and a Russian Jewish immigrant who more or less invented American popular music (White Christmas, Puttin’ on the Ritz, God Bless America). But he was a pretty limited, self-taught musician who doggedly stuck to the black notes on the keyboard—to the point where he had a special ‘transposing piano’ made for him, so that he could shift from one key to another by yanking a big lever. That’s my kind of key change—these days, we can do it with a setting in GarageBand.

• The indie key change

I tried to think of a few indie examples—REM’s Stand comes to mind, where the key change reflects the lyrical message about seeing familiar things differently. There’s also All Around The World by Oasis, where the key change only serves to make the song longer and more turgid—not their finest hour.

Then I remembered Cannonball by The Breeders. It’s one of the coolest song openings I know, and the coolest part is the casual key change in the bass at 0:29—almost like she changes her mind about which key to play it in. But it’s such an unusual way to deploy the key change trick. Combined with the rest of the opening, it’s like the band is gradually stirring itself to play the song, culminating in the vocal sliding in around the 0:51 mark.

• The country music key change

A few country and folk music examples come to mind. Earlier on, you mentioned I Will Always Love You. Disappointingly, the Dolly Parton original doesn’t contain the epic key change.

But there is a subtler one in Islands in the Stream—at the start of the second verse, around 1:24. I think there’s a tradition in country and folk music of using key changes to vary up what might otherwise be one-level songs (not the case with Islands in the Stream, which would be great either way). But there are other examples like the Pogues version of Dirty Old Town, or 100 Unread Messages by Gruff Rhys, which in turn pays homage to…

…I Walk The Line, where Johnny Cash traverses various keys throughout the verses, eventually returning to the original key in the final verse, only an octave lower. In some performances (not this one), he hums the root note to set himself before starting on each verse—which makes it feel like he’s dramatising the lyric and holding the line for the music itself. I like it when key changes reflect the theme of the song like that.

I want to enthuse about one of my favourite Beatles songs later. But first I want to hear more from the person in this conversation who actually knows what they’re talking about.

KATE
I don’t blame you for getting confused, key changes can be tricky. And definitely tricky to write about—am sure I’ll trip myself up at some point. I think the main thing is, a key tells you where the music’s harmonic ‘home’ is. So, in the key of C major, a song will revolve (mainly) around the notes of the C major scale. And, even if it dances off around some distant and complex chords, the music will feel as if it has arrived ‘back home’ when it lands on C major (which is why it will likely end on a C major chord).

However, just to show how nuanced this stuff can be, Sorry by Justin Bieber is in the key of E flat major… But there is no E flat chord in the song. Ha! We feel that the song is in E flat because of how the other chords behave, pulling towards there but always being frustrated. It gives the song a slightly maddening feel, a craving for resolution…

Of course, Western classical music is full of key changes. One that sticks in my mind is in the opening movement of Schubert’s 8th Symphony (the Unfinished), as it’s such a ‘moment’. After we’ve heard the first theme in B minor, the horns alone play a sustained D… This is the third note in the B minor scale, but also the fifth note of the G major scale, which is exactly where that D takes us next.

Perhaps more so than key changes, I love those moments where music feels harmonically unstable and disorienting. Like the opening of Chopin’s incredible Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, which must be one of the most thrilling pieces in the whole piano repertoire. From the opening octaves, you might think we were in A flat major, then—hang on, a bit of chromatic misdirection—is that C minor? But no, finally, we get to G minor. The perfect opening for this volatile, twisty, seat-of-your-pants piece.

Before we hear your Beatles thoughts, let’s go back to that study, heralding the death of the key change in pop… There are those who would link it to a more general decline in the quality of pop music. However, I actually get quite frustrated at people like Rick Beato, who complain that music is getting less interesting—when, really, perhaps it’s only getting less interesting if you look at it as a guitarist focused on chord changes. Maybe, if you look at the wild world of production and timbre opened up by digital audio workstations, it’s getting super interesting.

Do you have any thoughts on that? And why do we as humans so often feel the need to prove that the art of our youth was quantifiably better than the stuff of today? Is this a thing that happens in poetry too?

NICK
Yes, I definitely think it’s simplistic to equate key changes with music being more ‘interesting’.

Sideburns #1, Tony Moon, January 1977. Courtesy of The Mott Collection.

I always like the punk ethos of ‘here’s three chords, now form a band’—and of course, blues music has always found endless variation in three basic chords. There are so many elements that determine how ‘interesting’ a song is—lyrics, melody, rhythm, texture, instrumentation, attitude. That’s why I think there’s no real limit on how many great songs can be written—any more than there’s a limit on how many great poems, novels, paintings or buildings can be created.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t debates to be had about the relative interestingness of certain periods. In pop music, I think the 1960s to 1990s will be looked back on as a kind of Renaissance period: an unrepeatable explosion and acceleration in innovation, caused by converging cultural and technological changes. But the 2000-2050 period could be equally interesting as the technology continues changing, just as the 1900-1950 period was fascinating and ripe for rediscovery. (In poetry as in music, it’s probably only in retrospect that you see the shape of the period you’re in. It seems to be part of the human condition that we yearn for the good old days, without ever quite realising that we’re living in the good old days, from the perspective of some future nostalgist.)

• The commonplace-to-cosmic key change

Speaking of nostalgia, you brought up the Beatles earlier, and I wanted to mention one of my favourite McCartney songs: Penny Lane. I believe he wrote it partly in response to John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields Forever, in which Lennon returned to his Liverpool roots and cast them in a psychedelic light. McCartney took the same idea and ended up with Penny Lane—it’s the best example of the two writers spurring each other on, and the two songs ended up as a double A-side. You could say it was one of the artistic peaks of that ‘Renaissance’ period.

There’s an analysis of the key changes here, so I won’t attempt the same thing myself.

But throughout the process of you recording Cloud Cuckoo Land, I kept being reminded of Penny Lane—there’s something similar about the key changes denoting this destabilising shift from the everyday world into a weirder place.

In verse 2, you achieved this brilliant percussive effect by (I believe) stomping loudly on your bathroom floor—which brings to mind commuters grimly stomping through a tube station in rush hour. Then it transitions to the bridge, with the bouncy piano feeling (to me) a bit McCartney-ish. And it all goes psychedelic with the key change up to the final verse, and the key-merging-singularity of the ‘reality is imaginary’ line.

So I’m going to claim there’s a similarity in spirit between Penny Lane and Cloud Cuckoo Land, even if it only exists in my head.

• The Terry Hall key change

My last thought before bouncing back to you… We’re writing this in the days following the sad news of Terry Hall’s death, where the one consolation is that it’s a chance to rediscover so much of the great music he made. I particularly love the way he never stayed in the same place for long.

I hadn’t listened to Thinking of you for decades, but have realised afresh what a great song it is—musically Burt Bacharachian, and lyrically very Tin Pan Alley-esque. The greats like Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter would nod appreciatively at the casually conversational rhyme of ‘sorta’ and ‘oughta’ in the opening lines. There’s a lovely morose romanticism about the whole thing—Terry Hall was so good at mixing the sweetness with a gruff realism: ‘Share moonlit nights / Breathing nothing but lies’.

Best of all, there’s a key change! You can hear it kicking in at the end of the bridge—at the lyrically appropriate ‘Let's open our eyes’ moment—allowing the whole last verse and chorus to shift up a tone. I love how the song nods to the Tin Pan Alley tradition (wordplay, internal rhyme, three verses and a bridge), but also adds in a proper 80s pop chorus. There’s a thesis to be written about how it ties together so many strands of 20th-century pop music in one three-minute song.

KATE
I love your point that we’re all unknowingly living in the good old days. You’d think there’d be some kind of evolutionary benefit to feeling optimistic about the future, about the new—an inducement to continue the species, maybe—but we humans seem inclined to forever complain that everything is crapper than it used to be.

(There is of course the idea that, instead of music being any less interesting, there’s no longer any such thing as a ‘mainstream’—and so, in this digital world, artists do fascinating things within their own niches and online communities, rather than just playing on MTV. Which means, if we can’t find anything exciting, maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place. To me, this feels like a way more compelling argument than ‘humans have, for the first time in history, forgotten how to create decent art’.)

I also love that you’ve wrapped things up with Terry Hall and those connections with Tin Pan Alley. Feels a bit like, after exploring some far-flung harmonies, we’ve arrived back home. Which in itself feels very apt at this festive time, when many of us revisit our roots (wherever or whatever they may be—for me, it’ll be the distinctive tonalities of Leytonstone and Burnley) before embarking on the adventure of another year.

So perhaps this is a good time to raise a glass to all the songs and writings of 2022, here and elsewhere—and to feel confident that things will be EVEN BETTER next year.

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Thanks as always for reading / listening / sharing. Our meandering adventures in writing and music-making will continue in 2023.