What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?

Posted byEthan

Asaf Peres recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in “Let Me Love You” by Ariana Grande.

When I went to listen to the song, I immediately heard all kinds of weird things in the rhythm: that the chords were falling on weak beats, that the downbeat was displaced, that the drum pattern was misaligned somehow. I wasn’t alone in hearing these things. Asaf was puzzled, since he was confident in his hearing. Finally, I put the tune into Ableton and carefully transcribed it. I was totally wrong! But in fairness to me, the song is a rhythmically unconventional one, especially its opening few bars.

Here’s my transcription of the intro, first verse, prechorus and chorus.

There is a lot going on here! First, as Asaf points out, the roots of the chords go a half step above the tonic and then a half step below it before resolving again. This isn’t very exotic for jazz or 19th century classical music, but it’s not something you hear in pop. I mean, pop hardly ever uses leading tones, much less double ones. To my ears, though, the really remarkable thing here is the harmonic rhythm. The change from Em to F falls on the “and” of 3. Putting a chord change on a syncopated beat is standard practice for pop styles descending from the African diaspora, but usually you do it on the “and” of 2, not of 3. This strange placement is the reason I heard the entire rhythm being displaced by a beat.

When the vocals enter, they contribute to the confusion. In the first line, “I just broke up with my ex,” I originally heard the word “ex” as falling on the downbeat. Since there are no drums under the verse, just those metrically ambiguous synth chords, that’s an easy mistake to make. A few bars later, there’s the line “I know they’ll be comin’ from the right and the left, left left.” That’s a weird phrasing, and I would believe any of those “lefts” as falling on the downbeat if I heard them out of context. I knew the chords were syncopated somehow, but I couldn’t tell how immediately, and that added to my confusion.

Finally, in the prechorus, the drums enter, playing a style that Wikipedia calls “trap lite.” Here the rhythm is more conventional, but there’s still some oddness. Check out bar 13, the line “And if it feels right.” On the word “right,” the melody goes down to C. That note would fit well over the F chord, but the melody lands on it a quarter note before the chord changes. To further destabilize things, there’s a kick under the backbeat in bar 16, which is rare in hip-hop. In the chorus, the vocal phrasing is more conventional, but it’s easy to be distracted from it because of the weird stuttering sixteenth notes. The kick drum pattern is strange too, with some unexpected triplets in it.

Once I got the song onto the grid and transcribed it, I could see how it’s not really all that complicated. It’s still strange though! How does a person write a song like this? It isn’t something you’d just organically arrive at through scat singing; it feels more like something you’d work out intellectually. I don’t know how the writers worked, but I’m 99% confident that they did it by moving audio and MIDI around on the screen. The kick drum pattern sounds like something you’d get by putting the kick sample in an arpeggiator and twiddling the rate knob around while randomly poking the pad until you get something cool semi-accidentally. Those repeated “left left”s sound like copying and pasting. The song might be intended to be romantic, but it’s so chilly and posthuman sounding that it could be a love song about robots. Pop music is weird right now!