Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this: …
Tag Archives: harmonic minor
Ultralight Beam
The first song on Kanye West’s Life Of Pablo album, and my favorite so far, is the beautiful, gospel-saturated “Ultralight Beam.” Say what you want about Kanye as a public figure, but as a musician, he is in complete control of his craft. See a live performance on SNL. The song uses only four chords, but they’re …
Hit Me Baby
The most appalling song that appears on Mad Men is over the closing credits of the fifth season episode “Mystery Date.” It is not Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s finest work. It’s easy to cluck your tongue at 1962. They were so primitive back then! Surely we’re doing better now. Right? Well…
How do you know what key you’re in?
It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can …
Intro to minor keys
Minor keys are way more complicated than major keys. But the effort is worth it; all that complexity gives a richer array of expressive possibility. The best place to start with minor keys, paradoxically, is with the major scale modes. The pitches in E-flat major are the same as the ones in C natural minor. …