Domestic Left #98: One, four

A paean to my favorite chord progression

Since discovering the Weird Studies podcast about a year and a half ago, I’ve been working my way through their back catalog. (The podcast began in 2018.) On my recent drive to Narrowsburg, New York, I listened to Episode 38, “Style as Analysis”, which concerns an essay of the same name published in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis by one of the co-hosts, the musicologist Phil Ford.

In setting the stage for talking about his essay, Ford made an interesting point: that academically-trained musicologists, people who know music theory inside and out, have generally been loathe to bring their expertise in, well, how music works, to the analysis of popular music. In Ford’s telling, at least, this is because the domain of popular music criticism has been so thoroughly dominated by people (e.g., music journalists) who would not know an E-flat half-diminished seventh chord if it came up and tweaked their voice leading. (Not that there are many half-diminished seventh chords in popular music.)

I found this surprising, because I, with just a few college courses’ worth of music theory, actually find theory to be very helpful in understanding what is going on in a rock, pop, country or folk song. Maybe this is just because I like showing off the few things I do know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and all, but I dunno, I like knowing more about how things work. And I’d like to think other people (and especially you, dear readers) might also like that.

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If you’re a fellow music-theory nerd, you may want to skip this next section. In fact, please do — I’m probably about to get a bunch of things wrong (but hopefully not too wrong).

For the rest of you: the main thing you need to know, for the rest of this post to make sense, is that the Western harmonic system, the way composers scored harmony from the Baroque to the late Romantic period, essentially boils down to a journey from the I chord (the “tonic”) to the V chord (the “dominant”) and then back again.

In Western music theory, chords are written in Roman numerals, using uppercase letters for major chords and lowercase letters for minor chords (in minor keys, the basic progression described above would be written “i-V-i”). The I chord is based on the first note of the scale, the V chord on the fifth note — do and so respectively in the “do-re-mi” system, which is known as “solfege.” Using a numerical system, instead of the more common way of talking about chords — “D minor,” “G seventh,” “C major,” etc. — allows music theorists to do the classic analytical trick of abstraction, to describe common musical structures across different pieces of music, regardless of key.

When we hear a V chord, our ears want it to resolve to a I chord. This is due in part to being trained to hear this way by centuries of musical tradition based on the I-V-I structure, but there are physical-biological reasons for it as well. If a V chord is augmented¹ with a “seventh” (the seventh note of a scale based on the chord’s root note), it becomes a V7 chord, which includes a tritone — one of the most dissonant intervals in music, known as the “devil’s interval” at least since the Late Middle Ages. (An “interval” describes the relationship between two notes; three or more notes make a chord. The most well-known use of the tritone in popular music is probably first two notes of the theme from The Simpsons.)

But more relevant, I tend to think, is how the I-V-I harmonic structure supports the resolution of melodies to the tonic — which is a feature of many if not most musics made by humans. Just like we like a story with a beginning, a usually complicated and conflict-filled middle, and a ending that resolves those conflicts, we like a melody that starts somewhere, goes somewhere else, then comes back. I, V, I.

One of the things that makes the I-V-I structure especially amenable to supporting melodic resolution is that the notes closest to the tonic (do) are both part of the V chord. When we hear re near the end of a melody, our ears want it to resolve down to do; similarly ti, famously, “brings us back to do.” When music students are first taught how to write four-part harmony, most of the examples actually consist exclusively of I and V chords and their inversions; every note of the scale can be found in either a I chord or a V7 chord. A V to I resolution in the harmony perfectly supports a re to do or ti to do resolution in the melody.

You can hear this in the first two lines of the “Ode to Joy.” Although Beethoven’s actual scoring is no doubt far more complex, the melody begins on mi (a component of the I chord); the first line ends with the four syllables of “Elysium,” in that majestic da-dah, da-dum rhythm, descending from two mi’s to two re’s — and re is a component of the V chord. The last four syllables of the next line, “dein Heiligtum,” repeat the same rhythm, but in this case a step lower: re re, do do, bringing us back to the I chord.

Another example you might be familiar with: Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Each line of the verses, and the first line of the chorus (“Left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping,” “the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming,” “I'm not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to”) ends on a C chord — the V of the song’s key, F major. As Dylan sings “sleeping,” “dreaming,” or “going to,” we feel anticipation, motion — because he has just landed on the V chord, and we are waiting for it to resolve. The final line of the chorus follows almost the same chord progression as the first one, which gets us, once again, to the V chord under “following.” He stretches the word’s three syllables out over a full measure, and then on the last word of the chorus goes to the I, an F major chord. As he sings “follll-ow-ing you,” our ears follow his melody and his harmony home, finally resolving the sense of restlessness that his boot heels, wandering where there are no fences facing, have filled us with.

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The chord progressions I find the most fascinating are the ones that play around the edges of our expectations, such as the repeating I-IV-V chord progression found in “Twist and Shout.” (Most of Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s In Love With The Boy” and the chorus of “I Love Rock’n’Roll” are also I-IV-V progressions.) It’s obviously a simple chord progression, and fits within the I-V-I formula (which would more accurately be described as “I > some other chords > V > maybe some other chords > I”). But because the return to the I doesn’t come until the first beat of the next measure, it creates a sense of perpetual motion — yes, you are back to the I, resolving the tension of the V, but you’re also stepped right back onto the staircase that is taking you up to the V again.

Other songs create this sense of endless cycling by being somewhat ambiguous about their actual key. The C major > G major > D major progression of the chorus to the Kinks’ “Celluloid Heroes” (“You can see all the stars as they walk down Hollywood Boulevard”) could be described, relative to the song’s initial key of D major, as ♭VII-IV-I. (C natural is the “flatted seventh” of the key of D major, whose ti is C-sharp. In solfege, the flatted seventh would be sung as te.)

However, in the song’s final two minutes, as that chord progression repeats over and over again, one could be forgiven for thinking that the song had simply modulated into G major, and the progression we are listening to is IV-I-V, setting up an endlessly repeating cycle where the V creates tension, but never resolves directly to the I.

This tonal ambiguity is even more pronounced in songs that simply repeat a ♭VII-IV-I/IV-I-V progression with no other chords, like the Magnetic Fields’ “The Dreaming Moon” (according to Spotify, my seventh-most-listened-to song of 2021), where it does, in fact, create a dreamy lunar soundscape. The melody implies that E is the root, the tonic, but the ground keeps collapsing beneath it as the harmony keeps falling down to D major (the ♭VII in the key of E major) on the downbeat of the first measure of each phrase.

(The ♭VII-IV-I/IV-I-V progression also seems to be used quite frequently in contemporary country music — for example, Gary Allen’s “Right Where I Need To Be” or Keith Urban’s “Stupid Boy.”)

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But my favorite chord progression, alert readers may have already surmised from this post’s title, is the absurdly simple I-IV chord progression.

There aren’t a lot of songs that stick exclusively to a strict alternation of I and IV (Modern English’s “I’ll Melt With You” being a notable exception), I think because the I-IV chord progression creates its own kind of tension. I-IV is a tease; we keep expecting it to get somewhere and it refuses.

It also, like the progressions discussed above, had a certain amount of tonal ambiguity; C major to F major could be a I-IV progression in the key of C ... or it could be a V-I progression in the key of F. Until another chord is introduced, we can’t quite tell. The IV chord is known as the “subdominant” — we could be alternating between the tonic and subdominant forever, or perhaps the first chord is really the dominant one.

Most commonly, songwriters will employ a I-IV progression in the verse, then break the tension in the chorus, whether by going up immediately to the V as U2 does in “Running to Stand Still” (the bit where singer Bono starts singing “ha la la la de day”), ascending from the I through the ii and IV to the V as Lou Reed does in “Walk on the Wild Side” (“Plucked her eyebrows along the way / Shaved her legs and then he was a she”), dropping down to the ♭VII as Buffalo Springfield does in “For What It’s Worth” (on “what’s that sound”), or some other change.

The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” takes a different tack: the verses, with their halting, stuttering rhythm, mostly hang on the I chord, the piano decorating the end of each line with a IV, culminating in a series of syncopated piano and horn blasts on the V as they transition into the chorus. The chorus, in which lead singer David Ruffin pleads with a lover not to leave him, becomes a churning, unstoppable locomotive rhythm of I-IV, repeating under the saxophone solo and fading out at the end of the song.

One of the longest anticipatory teases in a I-IV song is the Cure’s “Pictures of You,” which doesn’t really have a traditional verse-chorus structure. After a long instrumental, in which interlocking guitar melodies move stepwise up and down the major scale, Robert Smith introduces the song’s conceit with a simple quatrain:

I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel

After an instrumental break, he follows this with two longer “verses,” each twice as long as the first, full of long, loping remembrances of this lover now gone. Eight lines, another instrumental break, then another eight lines, all over a rolling sixteenth-note rhythm and a steady, predictable A major to D major.

Then, immediately after the last line in the third “verse” (“open my eyes, but I never see anything”), a full four and a half minutes into the song, the band finally moves up to an E major, the V chord, and over eight measures which alternate between the V and IV, Smith sings the song’s emotional climax, a kind of counterfactual imagining:

If only I'd thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I'd thought of the right words
I wouldn't be breaking apart
All my pictures of you

And with the final word of that fifth line, the song and the singer’s hopes come crashing back to reality, to the I-IV. The song continues for another two and a half minutes on a I-IV and variations thereof, and there are some desultory lyrics, but they are just a heartbroken denouement, just the singer walking emptily through repetition, knowing he will never again know the intensity he once did.

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When the oldest member of my high school friend group turned 21, during the summer of 1992, we had a small party to celebrate his now being able to legally acquire alcohol for us. We were all in college by this point, of course, scattered from Berkeley to Bronxville, but were home in Kansas for the summer. It wasn’t a particularly wild affair; I think we just got a case of Rolling Rock and sat around drinking and talking about the kind of things 19- and 20- and 21-year-olds talk about.

At some point fairly late in the evening one of my friends, who was a huge U2 fan,² picked up an acoustic guitar and began playing “All I Want Is You.” He wasn’t a virtuoso guitar player, but he could play an A major and a D major — the I and IV chords that form the bulk of the song — and an F# minor, the vi chord (often called the “relative minor” to the tonic) that replaces A major when Bono sings “promises we make” and “cradle to the grave” in the chorus.

I don’t remember if I had heard the song before — I wasn’t a big fan of Rattle and Hum, the album it is on — but it was one of those times when you first really hear a song, even if it has technically played in your presence before. It quickly became one of my favorite songs, and the memory of J³ singing it that night one of the defining memories of that period of my life: the emotionally intense lyrics over the simple chords, the light buzz of watery beer and the peculiar blend of nostalgia and sanguinity that characterizes the border between late adolescence and early adulthood.

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U2 is undoubtedly the king of the I-IV chord progression. In addition to the other songs discussed in this post, “Numb,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” “Hawkmoon 269,” and probably others that escape me at the moment are all based around a I-IV structure.

I was first introduced to U2 when my aunt bought me a copy of The Unforgettable Fire as a birthday or Christmas gift, sometime in the mid-80s. She was my cool aunt, a dancer and phys-ed teacher who lived in an artsy neighborhood in Hartford, CT at the time.

At the time, I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, still relatively new to popular music. The first record I purchased was The Cars’ Heartbeat City, and I was still listening to Top 40 radio. I was familiar with, but didn’t yet really love or understand, the album’s first single, “Pride (In the Name of Love).” The album cover was strange and sombre, a black and white photograph of an ivy-covered, ruined⁴ castle with the band members small, obscure figures. The enigmatic lyrics of the opening track, “A Sort of Homecoming,” were printed on the back in gold type on a maroon background, and the music was atmospheric and moody.

But, over time, it grew on me, especially its centerpiece, the six-minute long “Bad,” perhaps the song on which the band commits most strongly to the I-IV chord progression. Virtually the entire song consists of guitarist The Edge’s chiming, echo-enhanced guitar repeating two measures of A major followed by two measures of D major.

Chord progressions based on a I-V-I structure tend to dictate the contours of the melody. With a I-IV progression, the singer has a lot more freedom, and Bono takes full advantage. Like “Pictures of You,” the song doesn’t exactly follow a standard verse-chorus structure. Over the first several minutes, Bono’s vocal lines mostly alternate between eight measures of a rising melody and eight measures of one that dips below the tonic — but he doesn’t follow a rigid melodic pattern. Based on the first verse, you would expect the first line of the second verse, “If I could throw this lifeless lifeline to the wind,” to also rise — but it doesn’t, appropriately for a lifeless lifeline. By contrast, in the third verse, when Bono sings “I’d lead your heart away, see you break, break away” his voice rises above where it was in the first two verses. This sets the stage for what is arguably the song’s “chorus” (in that it repeats a second time at the end), in which his voice rises even further, until he crescendos on “I’m wide awake” over the single instance of a ♭VII chord in the song, then comes back down to the tonic with “I’m not sleeping” — a concluding lyric that draws its conclusory power not from the meaning of its words, nor from a harmonic resolution, but from the sense that Bono’s melody has been to the mountaintop and come back down to tell us something.⁵

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The I-IV progression also lends itself to stretching a song out. The “deluxe remastered edition” of The Unforgettable Fire includes a live version of “Bad” which lengthens the song from six to eight minutes, the band just vamping on that A major to D major, pulling out the song’s trance-like texture like saltwater taffy.

The band I was in during my “gap year,” Big Table, frequently closed our shows with a song that was also built around A major to D major. The bass line, a rumbling set of alternating octaves, stayed constant throughout the song; its structure was created as my guitar shifted from piercing, keening high notes to single power chords to rhythmic strumming, over the drummer’s rolling toms. Halfway through the song, we broke into a kind of disco-funk section, then back to the high notes, then into a kind of fake slide-guitar frenzy.

That part — the part with lyrics — was all pretty tightly arranged, and lasted a little over four minutes. Then, for another two, three, ten minutes, however long we were inspired to play, the bass player and drummer would continue their low thunder while I made whatever kind of devil feedback noises I could coax from my guitar, holding it up against my amp, slapping the strings with my hands, scraping them against whatever was handy. Eventually, after I was done, the bass and drums would continue for maybe another minute, slowly winding down, the drummer often standing up (at this point he was only playing toms and cymbals) until, our musical energy spent, the bass player would land back on a final low A, the drummer hit a final crash.

My most recent band, Secret Heliotropes, also frequently ended our sets with a song built around a I-IV chord progression called “Do I Not Deal With Angels?” Sometimes we would end it the way we recorded it, with a grand V7-I resolution, but sometimes we would return to the I-IV vamp, then segue into other I-IV songs. Most often we would play “For What It’s Worth” followed by Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” but at times we also incorporated the Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower” or Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright?”

I-IV songs don’t want to end. Perhaps this is why so many of them fade out (“I’m Waiting For The Man,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) or just peter out (“Numb,” the Cure’s “Plainsong”). Perhaps this is why so many of them are about a journey that never seems to end (“The Road Goes on Forever,” “Ramble On”).

The great finales of classical music, whether Bach’s graceful baroque constructions or Beethoven’s grand romantic climaxes, are fundamentally the resolution of a V chord to a I chord. The I-V-I structure echoes the three acts of our dramatic arts: an innocent beginning, a stormy middle, and an ending that brings closure. But the I and the IV just continue on with their dance, never resolving, never able to recover from the churning push-pull of their pairing.

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If you like this kind of close musical reading of popular music, and are new here, you might enjoy this piece from a couple of years ago, in which I go into great depth about how Ezra Furman’s “Forever in Sunset” (based on a I-V-IV progression, which I did not discuss above but which I also love for its perpetual-motion tendencies) works musically:

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Okay, okay, I know I said last week that I might take a break from my weekly schedule, and then I clearly wrote, um, over 3,000 words this week. But no promises for next week 😊.

1. Not to be confused with an “augmented” chord, in which the fifth is raised a half-tone. Fifth, here, referring to the fifth note of a scale based on the chord’s root. Confused yet?

2. He convinced me to go see the Joshua Tree tour with him in 1987, where we snuck down into the seating area just right of the stage. It was a pretty epic show.

3. For anyone reading this who is familiar with this particular friend group, and remembers that at least half of us had first names beginning with J, this was J.M.

4. Owned by a landlord and member of the British House of Lords, it was burned by the IRA during the Irish War of Independence.

5. “Bad” is supposedly about someone in the throes of heroin addiction, but if that’s true, it’s hardly clear in the lyrics — which are, I think, a good example of Brian Eno’s description of what he looks for in song lyrics: a “rich ambiguity of making it feel like there’s something there but you’re not quite sure what it is.” (Eno produced The Unforgettable Fire, along with Daniel Lanois. The band hired them, in part, because they were trying to get away from their largely-deserved reputation for bombastic message-rock.)