Author: Steve

Songbooks are great

 

If you have interests in songwriting I highly recommend songbook collections for the Beatles, Hall & Oates, Billy Joel, Elton John, David Bowie, and Nat King Cole or Christmas ballads for dipping a toe into postwar jazz harmony. Formal textbooks are just not going to have perfect and complete songs with adventurous chord progressions and memorable melodies.

The Beatles don’t have my favorite songs but arguably every vital lesson is somewhere in their 1964 to 1967 output. If these aren’t cool, hide them under your bed or discard as completed homework.

After a few months of digesting songs, build a habit of figuring out the key of each section, writing the chords using Roman numeral analysis, and maybe writing the melodies using scale degrees. Like, Happy Birthday ends with:

       I            IV           I        V  I
Happy birthday dear David. Happy birthday to you.
5  5  ↑5   3   1    7 6    ↑4 4  3    1   2  1

The goal is to think relatively to allow combining techniques (stealing) from any key and to be able to learn something from every song you hear.

I   vi    iii         V7/IV IV        I6
Somewhere over the rainbow  skies are blue.
1   ↑1    7 5  6   7   1    ↓1    ↑6  5

I      bVII V/ii                 ii
3  ↓5       6  #1 3   ↑6  5   3  4   6
Crazy.      Crazy for feeling so lonely.

We’re all being cooked

 

I believe nearly every American who follows politics or has political opinions at all is being “cooked” by a set of pressures caused by the media, social media, and bad voting systems; and it’s all making us a little weirder and way more tribal than we arguably should be under more natural conditions.

If you need to solve a thorny problem outside of American politics, I think you can take ten people almost at random, put them in a private room with a good lunch and basic rules, and end up with a solution that’s far better than nothing. Some days will have more contentious and heated debate, but lunch will come, they’ll at least bite at the sides of the problem if they can’t tackle it all, and they’re not going to spend their time being righteous in front of cameras.

Instead, legislatures are arenas for grandstanding, insults, owns, and walking out with glaring problems unfixed, with most everyone likely to be re-elected to do it all over again. One side can on occasion become dominant enough to get everything they want, but it will swing back and forth to please one side and anger the other. Hard problems—that only Congress can fix—don’t get addressed at all. “We’ll get everything we want next time, you have to vote harder!” What Congress really agrees on is hollowing out the legislative calendar so they don’t have to be around one another. Some of them can barely hide their disdain for Americans who think differently.

We’re putting the wrong people there and giving them bad incentives, and their behavior in the Capitol and in the media is routinely unreasonable if not loathsome, and it’s driving partisanship through the roof.

Reforming media and social media, even if we could, wouldn’t fix this. I believe there’s one path with the fewest barriers: Voting reform to get rid of First-past-the-post voting.

“You have to vote for the lesser of two evils because otherwise you’ll throw your vote away” is only true under this crummy system, which is why it’s proven to be terrible at capturing the will of voters. And, worse, it delivers candidates who don’t have to think about their duty to represent everyone in their district. So they don’t.

That system and the politics it’s created over decades has made most of us feel like we’re going crazy: Both sides are yelling “all the extremists are on the other side and how can they not see it?!”

We’re all being cooked—the people, the politicians, the media—and without powerful forces to reduce tribalism, it’s going to keep delivering more extreme, combative politicians; to keep distorting our perceptions of politicians, the media, our neighbors, and family members; to keep pushing us to pick a side on virtually everything; to keep compelling us to defend everything our team says and does.

I hold on to hope that most of the reasons we find to despise each other are caused by these forces, and that fixing voting systems can put in place some good incentives to mitigate those forces.

Let’s try that, please.

Voting Reform: The only fix I see for rising partisanship

 

The first-past-the-post voting systems we’ve been stuck with for too long create very bad incentives for politicians, even if they were “good people” that got into politics for all “right reasons”:

  • In negotiation, giving even an inch to the other party offers ammunition to your primary opponents, even if an available compromise would please the vast majority of citizens.
  • If your party’s base is strong enough in your district, you’ve little incentive to be nice to the other team when interacting with the media. Bad-mouthing the other team might even make you more-liked by your base.
  • The same goes for interacting with more fringe/partisan media outlets. Why not go onto some podcast or radio show that regularly demonizes the other side? The most partisan of your base will really love it.
  • Once you’ve alienated the other party’s voters completely, you need your base fired up hot to remain in office. Solving big problems does not fire up a base.
  • Your mantra eventually leads toward, “the other guys blocked us because they’re awful, but I’ll fight even harder next time!” and your base will keep sending you back.

All the above feed on each other, fooling voters into believing, “we can get everything we want once we finally demolish our opponents” instead of wondering about what could be achieved if negotiation were possible.

If any organization outside politics proposed problem-solving in a way that ran all negotiations into the ground with everyone left despising each other, it would seem absurd. That is what first-past-the-post voting yields.

One reform of many fine options is Approval Voting. The idea and implementation is simple: Same ballot, but you can vote for any and all candidates. The candidate with most votes still wins, but you no longer have to fear your vote “going to waste”. Every vote for every candidate counts.

Of course there are other solutions to reduce partisan animosity, but every other one I see faces extreme headwinds while alternatives to FPTP voting are gaining popularity. I think people are sick of choosing the lesser of two evils and ending up with someone in office that adopts more extreme measures that they’d like, or gets nothing fixed.

Really whether you can put in place Approval or STAR or Ranked Choice voting, any of these free voters to much better express their true preferences without fear, and they heavily incentivize a corner of politics to be less caustic and held hostage by extreme partisans and stalemates.

“God Only Knows” is less weird than it seems

 

This song’s strange chords become easier to make sense of if you keep in mind a few things:

  1. Brian leans hard on inversions to confuse us, and tricks learned from 40s jazz and classical.
  2. The key is E major, but the verses begin “in the ii key”.
  3. The whole instrumental vocal section is just transposed up to A major.

The intro ends with a taste of the chorus.

IV  I     ii    IV
A   E/G#  F#m7  A/E

Brian then slides this A/E up to D/A, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in E major; he’s heading to the ii key (F# minor).

He starts with b6, 2, 1 in F# minor, then he returns to the home key of E major with a more standard jazz ii – V – I, but with more inversions to make unusual bass voice leading:

f#: bVI    ii        i
                  E: ii     V       I
    D/A    G#ø7/B    F#m    B7/A    E/B

Those inversions are key here to keeping up a bit of tension, and he won’t release that tension with a root-position chord until the chorus. Let’s carry on:

I    vii       I    vi
E/B  D#dim7/C  E/B  C#m/A#

Almost everyone calls this second chord “Cdim7” but really this is the leading tone °7 chord of E with notes D# F# A C. Mostly diatonic to E major. Even though the bass rises, the harmony is really dipping down into the vii° and back to the tonic.

(Now consider “Cdim7”. It has the notes C Eb Gb Bbb because it’s the vii of the nasty key Db minor (Db Eb Fb Gb Ab Bbb Cb). All the flats alone should be a clue this doesn’t make sense in a sharps key like E major. I’ve found naming dim7 chords correctly has helped my understanding of them greatly. YMMV.)

That last chord is sometimes written “A#ø7”, but here it’s not really functioning as A# half-diminished, which would move to D#7 – G#m. This is really just a C#m chord with the bass on the 6th to give it extra flavor (hear C#m – A – E vs C#m/A# – A – E). This 6th-in-the-bass is done all the time on minor chords in 1940s standards to add tension that can then be released, just as Brian does when A# falls to A for the chorus.

The verse repeat is followed by a full transposition up a 4th, playing the whole verse and chorus in A:

B: bVI  ii       i                                       
              A: ii  V     I    vii       I    
   G/D  C#ø7/E   Bm  E7/D  A/E  G#dim7/F  A/E 

A: vi      IV  I     ii     IV
                        F#: bVI  ii
   F#m/D#  D   A/C#  Bm7    D/A  G#ø7/B ...

Notice when Brian ends up at D/A, he seizes the opportunity to jump right back into the original F# minor bit of the verse. That’s how he manages to end the song in E major.

Crunchiest Steely Dan chord? “Fire in the Hole”

 

The pre-chorus is in, well, we can say 3 flats. First there’s an Ab Eb/G resolving to Bb (which sounds like the tonic), then a little Abmaj7/C Bb/C Cm build up that ends with Abmaj7 Ebmaj7/G Ab (the key sounds more like Eb here).

Then things get weird.

Ab is followed by Ab7/Gb, but while it sounds like the bass is heading down toward a Db/F chord (which would sound like this), at 0:42 the bass jumps back up into into this striking Ab13#11 with no 3rd:

The melody is also great here; just chord tones. It resolves to G7sus G7 Cm.

This Ab13 is basically a tritone sub for D7, but the 9th and #11 decorations also evoke the sound of a bVII dom7 “backdoor” chord in Bb. The key briefly sounded like Bb in the pre-chorus, so I think that resemblance isn’t accidental, but anyway… This was a tough one to figure out by ear. I could hear the embedded aug triad, but the recording is right in the cracks making playing along basically impossible. I had to retune an acoustic guitar with ancient, very dead strings.

The whole chorus is like 18 chords:

The time is right for Annual Leave reform

 

The United States is, save a few tiny islands, the only place in the world where employees have no guaranteed paid vacation or holidays, and there’s simply no great excuse.

The effect of this gigantic hole in our labor policy is that about 23% of Americans–over 30 million–work some of the hardest jobs without any paid time off, 1 in 3 have no paid sick leave, and the bar remains low for employers who do offer PTO. For people on their feet in waste and food service jobs, the access to PTO is abysmal.

I think most of us don’t realize what a scandal this is, and it’s the right time to fix it.

  • Unlike extremely hard problems like reforming our healthcare system or finding the ideal minimum wage in a nation of wide-ranging costs of living, this is an easy one with 187 existing plans to choose from. Canadians are guaranteed 16-30 days off a year. The British 28. Germans 29. Russians 33. Chinese 16-26. Japanese 10-20. Indians 24. The French 36. Brazilians 24. Italians 32. These are just the big economies. If Congress is concerned about the disruption, phase it in one day per year.
  • We haven’t had a significant labor reform in generations and polling shows this has wide bipartisan support. If Congress wants to really improve the lives of millions of Americans and be heralded for their efforts for decades to come, this is low-hanging fruit. Americans desperately need a reason to come together and this is one will benefit Americans across the political spectrum.
  • For the first time in their lives many millions of Americans will take vacations and get to travel the country they love. Americans already having PTO will benefit by many employers raising benefits to compete, and just through the new chances to join more friends and relatives on holidays and vacations.

This reform isn’t sexy but is super pragmatic, and as much as hardworking Americans deserve the benefit, we could use a national cause to celebrate.

Schubert’s Strange Path Home

 

Schubert’s Impromptu D.935, Op. posth. 142 – No. 2 is one of my favorite piano pieces. It has many delights, but what really caught my ear was the bombastic double forte section (m. 17-30 at 1:06). It takes us into the IV key and uses a clever trick to modulate back so that I barely noticed when we arrived back home.

Below are lead sheet-style chords under their functions, with simple inversion notation. I’ve transposed from Ab to G to get rid of the double-flats (I’m terrible playing/thinking in Ab). Continue reading  

Bury figured bass

 

Figured bass notation is already long dead, but musicians carry its corpse around to show off that they squandered valuable moments of their lives learning it. It also creates needless ambiguity. Is I7 a dominant seventh? Not in figured bass. Just try notating G7b9/B in figured bass. Yeah, let’s bury it already. And it can be so easy:

V9:2. You may have already guessed this is the dominant 9th chord in 2nd inversion. Easy.

ii7:3 is Am7/G in G.

I7 has a flat 7th on the tonic. Imaj7 is the diatonic variety.

You are freed to do Roman numeral analysis with some sanity.

About Steve

 

Steve is way into…

  • His wife, and his dog Rufus
  • Shallow, rocky creeks of the Appalachians; hollows; towns built on the side of mountains; abandoned roads, bridges, railways, and stairways.
  • Building web sites, apps, and frameworks with TypeScript, Node, React, GraphQL, and some PHP
  • Indiepop, dreampop, yacht rock, disco beats, 60’s pop, classic hip hop, Stereolab, Broadcast, ABBA, Deerhoof, Zombies, Innocence Mission…
  • Playing piano, guitar, bass, and drums if anyone will let him
  • Transcribing song chords
  • Nudging songwriters to embrace a wider view of harmony
  • Building little apps to share chords and keyboard snippets
  • Moose’s album Live a Little Love a Lot (all time)
  • Jorge Elbrecht’s album Here Lies (last decade)

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