Here’s a simple-seeming song that is a subject of a lot of music-theoretic controversy. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac only has two chords (plus a third chord that only appears once), so it seems like it would be easy to analyze its harmony. And yet, no one can agree what key it’s in.
The two chords are F and G, repeating endlessly for one bar each. During the choruses, you could call them Fmaj7 and G6. There’s also that lone Am chord in the instrumental break after the first chorus. The vocal melody is all on the A minor pentatonic scale. That would seem to settle it: the song is in A minor. So why all the controversy?
Is the song really in A minor, though? If it is, why does it repeat F and G the whole time? Those are the bVI and bVII chords, which are pretty common in minor keys, but not as the entire harmonic structure of the tune. Yes, there is that Am chord in the middle of the song, but it’s not at a point of strong harmonic closure, and it goes by fast. If you play the song on piano or guitar and end it on Am, it doesn’t sound wrong, exactly, but it doesn’t sound right either.
Some people say that the tune is actually in C major. You could hear the vocal melody as being in C major pentatonic just as easily as A minor pentatonic. By this logic, the F to G chords are acting as the IV and V chords. That makes sense, but I don’t buy it. There are no C chords anywhere in the song. If you want a chuckle, try inserting one somewhere. For example, end the song on C rather than F; it will sound very silly, much worse than Am does.
“Dreams” is also frequently described as being in F Lydian mode. I myself used to include it on my list of Lydian songs. The harmony would seem to support this interpretation. The F chord is in the metrically strong position in the loop, and the song ends on a clear F chord. But there are problems with this hearing. Stevie Nicks’ melody carefully avoids the note F. The other characteristic note from F Lydian mode is B-natural, and Stevie doesn’t ever sing that either. Compare it to “Possibly Maybe” by Björk, which is unambiguously in Lydian mode. Björk sings that Lydian sharp fourth as the very first note in the vocal melody at 0:42, and accents it frequently after that.
Music theory teachers want “Dreams” to be in Lydian because it’s hard to find well-known songs in that mode. But it just doesn’t add up.
There is one additional possibility: maybe the song is in G Mixolydian. If I “squint my ears” at the opening loop, I can hear G as the central chord rather than F. The guitar riff in the intro doesn’t strongly indicate G Mixo, but then, it’s not like it clearly indicates any other key either. The vocal melody sometimes treats the notes G and D as destinations, though not as often as A or C. I don’t really think the tune is in G, but ending on a G chord does sound better than ending on C or Am.
Here’s my transcription, not that I found notating the song to be very enlightening:
What does the academic literature say? Matthew Hough analyzes the song in an article on Music Theory Online. He examines Stevie Nicks’ original demo, which has the same top-line melody and chords as the finished song, but in a sparser arrangement. Hough points out that the chords and melody don’t agree, making it a classic example of pop’s melodic-harmonic divorce.
The resultant clashes between Nicks’ vocal melody and the local harmony intensify the detached emotion in the lyrics, particularly at the downbeats of measure 6 (C in the melody against a G-major triad) and measure 13 (G in the melody against an Fmaj7 chord), where such a clash occurs in a metrically accented position at the end of a line of text. With the exception of measures 12–13, the melody’s insistent, stepwise D–C descent concludes each line. This seems to strongly suggest that the tonic of this passage is C, and that the harmony in the accompaniment should be described as IV7–V–IV–V. This alternation of progression and retrogression does not break throughout the “Dreams” demo, leaving the tonic harmony as a vertical sonority out of the piece entirely. This omission reinforces the disconnect from reality suggested in the lyrics. Just as “what you had” is now “lost,” Nicks’ vocal line, repeatedly driving toward a melodically conclusive 2ˆ–1ˆ descent, is not granted the closure potentially provided by a stabilizing tonic chord (C major).
I agree with this read. Once you are looking or listening for conflicts between the vocal melody and the chords, you notice them everywhere. Melodic/harmonic divorce certainly is an apt musical metaphor for the relationships within the band at the time Stevie wrote the song, as Tom Breihan explains in his Number Ones column.
Infamously, Rumours is an album borne from chaos. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the two Americans who’d joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 and who’d been together for years before that, had just broken up, and they were constantly fighting bitterly. John and Christine McVie, the married couple who’d been in Fleetwood Mac, had just divorced, and they were refusing to speak to each other about anything other than music. Mick Fleetwood was going through a traumatic divorce of his own. Everyone was writing slick, bitter songs about everyone else. Everyone was also ingesting vast quantities of cocaine and alcohol. It was bedlam.
Okay, but so, who cares? You don’t need to know what key “Dreams” is in to play or enjoy it. However, this is a worthwhile line of inquiry if you want to write your own songs with a similar vibe. Stevie Nicks is great at expressing a lack of closure, both lyrically and musically. Maybe you have some feelings to express like Stevie’s, and you want to try to find a melody and chords that deliberately avoid closure. Thinking about how her song works can help you find some musical ideas that work the same way.
In the post, I come to the same conclusion Schoenberg does. However, I do think that the question is worth asking, and trying to answer, because it has larger implications. Pop songs have traditionally been in a key, even if that key changes here and there. But recently, ambiguous key centers have been getting more common in the mainstream. It’s interesting to look at an early example of that floating, drifting pop aesthetic, and to wonder what its larger meaning might be.
I know you’re not a fan of the Germanic tradition
But Schoenberg was very clear in his theory of harmony that tonality as such cannot really be established with a mere interchange of chords
Meaning this is not a question that has an answer or needs an answer
Unless you want to assert that everything has to be in a key