Harmonically speaking, “With Or Without You” is a simple four-bar loop that repeats unchanged for the entire duration of the song. This loop-based structure is standard for electronic dance music and hip-hop, but it was less common in rock back in 1987. The extreme repetition makes the song less of a linear narrative, and more of an open-ended mood. It’s no accident that the song was produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois–Eno coined the term “ambient music,” and he and Lanois produced some defining works of the genre.
The “Without Or Without You” bassline is an extremely simple one. It plays the root of each of the four chords eight times each in a steady even pulse. How can such a predictable and repetitive groove not get boring? There’s something magical about the song’s I-V-vi-IV chord progression. You may not be familiar with that term, but you are most certainly familiar with the sound it refers to. It’s one of those boilerplate pop tropes that is always in circulation. Axis of Awesome explains:
Why is the combination of these four chords so popular? To find out the answer, first we’ll need some music terminology.
“With Or Without You” is in the key of D major. The left diagram below shows the D major scale on the chromatic circle. The right diagram shows it on the circle of fifths. The blue arrows show the roots of the “With Or Without You” chord progression.
You make chords by following the arrows around the scale like so:
Here’s that same diagram on the circle of fifths, which is maybe harder to read but has an attractive symmetry to it:
The chord based on the first note in the scale is called the I chord, logically enough. The chord based on the second note is the ii chord (it’s lowercase because the chord is minor.) The third based on the third note is iii, and so it goes up to vii. There is no VIII chord, because now you’re just back on I. Referring to chord progressions by their Roman numerals is a handy and widely used shorthand. When I say that “With Or Without You” uses a I-V-vi-IV progression, I mean that the chords start on the first note of D major, then the fifth, then the sixth, then the fourth.
So what is so special about I-V-iv-IV? Let’s take the chords pairwise and try to figure it out.
- I – V (D – A): This the reverse of the V-I cadence, the most basic building block of Western classical and folk harmony. The word “cadence” comes from the Latin word for “falling.” Think of the end of any Mozart or Beethoven piece, the big dun-DUNNNN. The “dun” is the V chord, which makes you feel like you’re dangling precariously. The climactic “DUNNNN” is the I chord, which feels like landing back on solid ground. I-V has the opposite effect: you start on solid ground, and move to a feeling of suspension.
- V – vi (A – Bm): Western tradition conditions us to expect that the V chord (A) will be followed by the I chord (D). But this progression doesn’t do that; instead, it surprises us by landing on B minor instead. B minor is the “evil twin” of D major. They share most of the same notes, but they arrange them to create very different moods. Where D major is happy and resolved, B minor is sadder and more uncertain.
- vi – IV (Bm – G): The interval between the notes B and G is a major third. (In G major, B is the third note of the scale.) Roots in tonal music usually move by fourths or fifths. Sometimes they move by seconds. Moves by thirds are more rare, and when they happen, they create a feeling of epic drama. Alternating back and forth between B minor and G makes you feel like you’re in a disaster scene in a movie.
- IV – I (G – D): This progression is called a plagal cadence, is the most common chord change in rock. The move from IV to I has a similar quality of tension being resolved, but it’s milder and less final-sounding than a “real” V-I cadence. The IV-I doesn’t feel like a period at the end of a sentence; it’s more like a semicolon guiding you into the next phrase.
It’s rare to find a V-I cadence in loop-based music, and that is very much by design. When you’re trying to create an open-ended groove, you don’t want the narrative closure that a cadence gives you. The harmony in “With Or Without You” barely functions at all in the classical sense. It doesn’t create structure or narrative; it’s just kind of… there. Philip Tagg thinks that the point of harmony in a rock song is to help you keep track of where you are in the groove. The chords aren’t supposed to create the kind of drama they would in a classical composition; instead, they just need to create enough contrast from one bar to the next to signpost what position you’re at in the loop.
Everything in “With Or Without You” supports the sense of timeless floatation you get from the chords. For example, listen to The Edge’s guitar part. He doesn’t play the chords of the song at any point. Instead, he plays simple riffs using long single notes that fit over all of the chords equally well. This is not an ordinary guitar; it’s a custom instrument called an Infinite Guitar designed to feed back so that notes sustain indefinitely. The Edge uses volume swells to gently fade the notes in from silence, so they don’t have any clear beginning or ending. When he does pick the strings more conventionally, he uses digital delay to make the sound ripple psychedelically through time.
It’s traditional to think of production, effects and mixing as a way to decorate the “real” music made of notes and chords and rhythms. But a song like “With Or Without You” is all about the soundscape. The chords and melodies and rhythms are there to help establish the sonic environment. The texture of the sound is the music. If you strum I-V-vi-IV on an acoustic guitar and sing the words, you can do a version of “With Or Without You” and it might even sound pretty good. But you won’t be making the same piece of music as the one that exists on the recording.