get you back: an harmonic analysis

as fond as i am of idaho's more recent work, nothing will ever top 'three sheets to the wind' for me.  it seems to be the perfect balance point in jeff martin's career..  the band's distinctive sound feels fully-developed, but unlike the subsequent releases, harmony is still given as high a priority as texture.  and given his recent shift towards piano-based songs, it seems likely that the world will never hear anything like it again.

one of the most memorable tracks for me is the closer, 'get you back'.  despite the fact that it clocks in at about 55bpm, its dynamics and intensity are enough to keep even the most ardent slowcore skeptic interested.  and as it turns out, the tempo is part of what makes this song worth looking at.

it opens on a DbM7, and stays there long enough to make you think it's the tonic.  but it's not!  the second chord of the verse moves up a fifth to the Ab, and suddenly you realize that what you thought was the I was actually the IV, and Ab is the real tonic.  but it's not!  because then it moves up to the Bb, and it turns out that the Ab was actually a VII all along.

except, of course, that it wasn't.

on its face, this probably seems ridiculous.  all three chords can share Bb as a tone center, given a modulation from the parallel minor, something rock songs do all the time.  so why isn't this just III/i VII/i I?

because musical cognition is affected by tempo.  in particular, the longer you hang out on one chord, the less relevant the previous chords are to the way your mind parses the music.  this song would simply not be possible if it were faster.  try it yourself:  play these three chords at twice the tempo, and see if it still sounds even remotely similar.

having said that, not every chord in the verse is its own tonic.  on the second iteration of the verse progression, the Db does feel like a IV, whether or not it did previously.  in fact, once you've listened to the song enough to become familiar with it, the initial Db probably will never sound like a I again.  the effect is similar to the way people tend to hear the first measure of debussy's 'clair de lune' as a fifth-less f instead of a root-less Db the first time they encounter it, but not the second.

the chorus continues in a similar fashion, just more overtly.  the harmonic rhythm doubles in pace, and this time Ab is more clearly established as a tone center by the iis and IVs..  at least until it modulates to Bb at the end, the same way the verse does.

after the verse and chorus repeat, though, things start to get particularly interesting.  we hang out on a d with a pleasantly-dense 13 voicing for a while, and then we move on to the song's climax.

there are a number of factors that contribute to the incredibly spacey feel of this section.  there's the fact that it's littered with augmented fourths, which tend to sound mysterious enough on their own.  there's the near incomprehensibility of the chord sequence:  the tritone jumps, and the fact that no two consecutive chords fit in the same key.  and of course, the unmistakable tenor guitar textures don't hurt.

most significant to me, though, is the vocal melody on the second iteration.  over the first two chords, he follows a descending whole-tone scale from A to Eb..  over the next two, he shifts a half-step and starts outlining another whole-tone scale (well, the other whole-tone scale, seeing as there are only two), this one descending from D to Gb, wrapping up an octave on the Bb.  and finally, the last phrase is built out of a diminished/octotonic scale based on the third of the AbM9.

whole-tone and diminished scales are both based on simple patterns:  consecutive whole steps, and alternating whole and half steps, respectively.  i think that's part of why this is so effective;  we're presented with this chaotic chord progression that seems to completely lack any sort of structure..  but when the vocals come in, they guide us through it, showing us that there is an order to everything that we just couldn't see before.  and the moment we find our way out of the woods, a suspended augmented fourth resolves, and everything goes away, leaving us wondering what the hell just happened.