Dear Prudence

John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was his best song. I agree. I have spent more time playing and remixing it than anything else in the Beatles catalog, and I continue to find new layers.

Here’s my transcription:

And here it is in guitar tab:

The tune’s most conspicuous harmonic feature is the D that drones under almost all of the chords. Lennon and George Harrison have their guitars in drop D tuning, and they continually play Ds in octaves to create a tambura-like effect. Lennon wrote the song in India, and it shows.

The main groove is a cousin of lament bass. However, it’s more likely that Lennon was inspired by the blues. Here’s a chord chart for a basic twelve-bar blues in D:

| D7 | D7 | D7 | D7 |
| G7 | G7 | D7 | D7 |

| A7 | G7 | D7 | A7 |

You commonly embellish this template by adding a chord progression with a descending bassline to the second-to-last bar, landing on the final A7. This progression, which I think of as “blues lament bass,” goes like this:

If you slow down the harmonic rhythm of the blues lament bass progression, you get the core harmonic idea behind “Dear Prudence.”

Here’s a transcription of Paul McCartney’s killer bassline:

The riff consists of four little mini-phrases. Each mini-phrase has the root note twice, then D, then the root note one more time. McCartney reinforces the tune’s floating, timeless feeling by starting the bassline on A rather than D. Rock songs use the root of the chord on the downbeat of a phrase 99% of the time. By starting on the fifth of the chord instead, McCartney throws off your sense of where exactly the loop starts and ends. Harmonically, the A feels like the conclusion of the phrase, while rhythmically, it feels like the beginning. This ambiguity combines with the song’s slow tempo and its top-line melody consisting mostly of empty space to create a beautifully meditative feel.

I have played “Dear Prudence” in many bands, and have worked it up on everything from ukulele to baritone guitar. And in putting together this post, I realized that, all this time, I have been playing the chords wrong. I was thinking of them as a slowed-down version of the blues lament bass:

||: D | D7/C | G7/B | Gm7/Bb :||

Most people who cover the tune use these changes, as do many of the chord charts and guitar tutorials that you find online. However, this is not how the Beatles play it. Lennon plays a prominent F-sharp over all four bass notes. This implies some very different chords:

||: D | D7/C | Gmaj7/B | Gm(maj7)/Bb :||

That last chord is an especially weird one in a rock context. I’ll unpack it below.

The opening chords in “Dear Prudence” are from D major. They include a lovely A/D chord, which sounds like Dmaj9 with no third. Most of the tune is in D Mixolydian mode, meaning that its seventh scale degree is C natural rather than C-sharp. However, the B-flat in the bassline takes you temporarily out of Mixolydian, and into a more exotic modality, D Mixolydian flat six. You can think of this scale as being the fifth mode of G melodic minor, with the B-flat bass note implying a rootless voicing of this scale’s sublimely weird tonic seventh chord. Melodic minor modes are more characteristic of 1960s jazz than 1960s rock. Lennon may not have arrived at that sound deliberately, but he obviously liked it when he heard it.

In the bridge, Lennon resumes playing in D major, looping D, G and A chords over the D pedal. George Harrison’s lead part is not in D major, however. It’s in D minor pentatonic, implying D blues tonality. The band heightens the harmonic conflict between Lennon’s and Harrison’s guitar parts by panning them hard to opposite sides of the stereo field. When you listen with headphones, you have D major in one ear and D blues in the other. That is hip!

The end of the bridge is a one-and-a-half measure phrase that cycles through F/D, Ab/D, and G/D. The F/D chord implies a move to parallel D minor. The G/D implies either D major or D Mixolydian. The Ab/D is the real standout, a hair-raising dissonance. It suggests the sharp fourth/flat fifth in the D blues scale, but with a full major triad in place of the note. I imagine Lennon sliding that major chord shape up and down on top of the D pedal, and liking the mysteriously bluesy feel of it.

Alan Pollack wrote a thorough analysis of “Dear Prudence” as part of his exhaustive music-theoretical study of the Beatles’ entire repertoire. Pollack observes that the tune shows Lennon borrowing two characteristics of Harrison’s style: the droning pedal tone and the melancholy mood. “Rain” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” show a similar influence. While most Lennon tunes have an arch shape to them, these three tunes are also more riff-oriented.

“Dear Prudence” has not only a static harmonic profile, but even a formally flat floorplan; a steady stream of harmonically identical verses interrupted only once at the formal mid-point by a simple bridge which, itself, is as harmonically single-minded as the rest of the song.

The impressive accomplishment is that such a satisfying build up of tension and its release is achieved in spite of all stasis… The challenge is to create a sense of build up without relying much at all on either harmony or melody. Instead, the strategy is to carefully sustain an atmosphere within which texture and dynamic crescendo are developed over the long run.

This tutorial video is a good one, and it’s unusual in that it gets the guitar part right:

The most famous cover version of “Dear Prudence” is the one by Siouxsie and the Banshees. However, I prefer the version by the Jerry Garcia Band. Jerry plays the tune slow and contemplative, with a gospel flavor from his backup singers and organist.

Brad Mehldau does a beautiful funk version of the tune on his album Largo. The recording of Matt Chamberlain’s drums is especially sweet. It was done with just two mics, and the result sounds more like garage rock than polite jazz drums. I love the groove in Brad’s version, but unfortunately, he omits the bridge.

(Brad is a creative interpreter of other Beatles tunes too. It’s well worth checking out his versions of “She’s Leaving Home” and “Martha My Dear.”)

The Five Stairsteps, Graham Central Station and Jaco Pastorius have also covered “Dear Prudence,” with varying degrees of success. My old jazz band regularly performed my arrangement of the tune, which combines Brad Mehldau’s spacy funk vibe with Jerry’s closer adherence to the structure of the original. During a particularly good New Year’s gig, we did “Dear Prudence” in the third, after-midnight set. The solo section stretched way out, a Miles-Davis-flavored open-ended groove on a D pedal. We must have played it for twenty minutes. The band members who weren’t soloing went out into the room and danced. It was a good time.

Here’s a mashup of my five favorite versions of “Dear Prudence,” enjoy.