This is one Beatles song, Because, looked at up close. Three Beatles sing it together and record their voices three times over, so it sounds like a whole choir made of just John, Paul and George.
The dreamy chords came from a Beethoven piano piece. John heard Yoko play it and asked her to play it backwards, and that upside-down sound became the song. It floats along slowly, like lying back and looking up at the sky.
1969 forward 路 Abbey Road, Let It Be, and the late singles 路 the own-words edition 路 every claim is a fact about the music, restated in my own voice 路 no score or essay is reproduced
This edition reads the Beatles from 1969 forward. The 1963 to 1968 catalog lives in the companion, the early edition (1963–1968).
Hold the harmony against the words, then read what the chord choices do to the feeling. Each chapter follows one song and traces how its key, its cadences, and its voice-leading act out what the lyric is about. Every chord is given twice, Roman numeral and letter, so the function and the sound both stay visible. Every harmonic observation pays off in a feeling, because a theory point with no emotional read is only half a sentence.
Everything here is a fact about the music, put in my own words. Published analysis and a published score were read to learn the facts, the key, the chord functions, the phrase endings, the vocal spacing. None of their notation or prose is reproduced on this page. A note-level engraved figure like the believeyoume sheets requires a self-made transcription from separated audio, which is not available for this catalog, so this edition carries its close reading in words and leaves the engraving out by design.
| 01 | Because | Chapter 1 路 in this edition |
| 02 | Something | Chapter 2 路 in this edition |
| 03 | Carry That Weight | Chapter 3 路 in this edition |
| 04 | Come Together | Chapter 4 路 in this edition |
| 05 | Dig A Pony | Chapter 5 路 in this edition |
| 06 | Don't Let Me Down | Chapter 6 路 in this edition |
| 07 | For You Blue | Chapter 7 路 in this edition |
| 08 | Get Back | Chapter 8 路 in this edition |
| 09 | Golden Slumbers | Chapter 9 路 in this edition |
| 10 | Her Majesty | Chapter 10 路 in this edition |
| 11 | Here Comes The Sun | Chapter 11 路 in this edition |
| 12 | Oh! Darling | Chapter 12 路 in this edition |
| 13 | Octopus's Garden | Chapter 13 路 in this edition |
| 14 | I Want You (She's So Heavy) | Chapter 14 路 in this edition |
| 15 | You Never Give Me Your Money | Chapter 15 路 in this edition |
| 16 | Sun King | Chapter 16 路 in this edition |
| 17 | Mean Mr. Mustard | Chapter 17 路 in this edition |
| 18 | Polythene Pam | Chapter 18 路 in this edition |
| 19 | She Came In Through the Bathroom Window | Chapter 19 路 in this edition |
| 20 | Let It Be | Chapter 20 路 in this edition |
| 21 | The Long and Winding Road | Chapter 21 路 in this edition |
| 22 | Two of Us | Chapter 22 路 in this edition |
| 23 | The Ballad of John and Yoko | Chapter 23 路 in this edition |
| 24 | One After 909 | Chapter 24 路 in this edition |
| 25 | Old Brown Shoe | Chapter 25 路 in this edition |
| 26 | The End | Chapter 26 路 in this edition |
| 27 | Maxwell's Silver Hammer | Chapter 27 路 in this edition |
| 28 | I Me Mine | Chapter 28 路 in this edition |
| 29 | I've Got a Feeling | Chapter 29 路 in this edition |
One chapter per pass, each written on its own turn so it gets checked and done right. No chapter is bulk-completed.
1
C# minor, played as slow ripples 路 three voices sung three times over 路 1969
Because moves in slow, broken chords and a wall of voices so thick you would swear it is a choir, when it is three men multiplied. Nothing is strummed; every chord is unspooled one note at a time, climbing, and the harmony reaches you as a slow rise rather than a strike. Underneath that stillness the chords keep sliding sideways by half steps, into rooms you did not know were there.
Each chord is taken apart into a slow upward climb, note after note. The electric harpsichord starts alone and lays down the pattern, a rocking lilt grouped in threes and twos that carries the whole track. Nothing hurries. Those unspooled chords are the source of the song's floating, underwater calm, the sensation of lying back and staring up at the light.
Beneath the calm, the harmony never holds still. A diminished chord turns up, tense and rootless, pointing nowhere in particular, free to dissolve in any of several directions. Then a chord from a distant key, a D major set down inside a C-sharp minor world, swings open a door on a room that should not be there. Theorists call that borrowed chord a Neapolitan. It lends the whole song a faint dizziness, loveliness with something uncanny moving under it.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
John, Paul, and George sang the three-part harmony, then doubled it twice over, and nine vocal tracks fuse into one shining block. What catches the ear is the openness of the spacing, three distinct lines with daylight between them where an ordinary pop group would blend into mush. That transparency gives the harmony an edge of glass, something nearer carved than sung.
2
C major, with a bass line that walks downhill by half steps 路 a bridge that steps into a new key 路 1969
Something is built on one gorgeous idea: a bass line walking slowly downhill. As Harrison holds the melody, the lowest note keeps easing down a half step at a time, and every step recolors the chord standing over it. The song never shows off. It is patient, certain of itself, and every chord pays its way.
The verse runs on that descending bass. Beneath a nearly still melody, the bottom note drops a half step at a time, and each new note tilts the chord above it into something a shade different. The device is centuries old, and it always carries the feel of a slow, unstoppable settling. The verse eases downward toward rest, which is right for a lyric about being sure of someone.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The middle lifts into a brighter, higher key and opens the whole song out. The pivot is neat: the chord that served as the plain dominant back home is reused as a different chord in the new key, and the door swings wide with no bump. The bridge is where Harrison stops describing her and starts asking, and the fresh key hands that turn its lift.
Everything tips toward calm. The bass keeps sinking, the chords shift under a melody that barely stirs, and even the surprises resolve softly. Nothing snatches at you. That is late-Beatles craft: a band so sure of the song it can leave every part plain and let the harmony do the quiet work.
3
C major, a rough singalong that opens a door back into an earlier song 路 1969
All four Beatles bellow Carry That Weight together in rough unison, plain as a pub singalong, and then the floor opens. The middle hauls a whole passage out of You Never Give Me Your Money, an earlier song on the same side, and replays it transformed, so a simple refrain suddenly carries the weight of the whole record. The ending drifts on an unsettled chord that hands the baton to the next track.
The refrain could not be simpler, the home chord and its dominant traded back and forth, the kind of thing a crowd can bellow on first hearing. That plainness is deliberate. It gives the ear a clear, sturdy anchor, then the harmony grows more searching in the middle.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge lifts older material back in, a passage from You Never Give Me Your Money reset here in a new light. The chords walk a smooth circle of fifths through a minor key, and the melody bends into a darker, minor shade. Hearing it return stitches the two songs together, part of why the album's final side plays like one long piece.
4
D minor, a swampy one-chord groove that leans major only at the turn 路 1969
John Lennon builds Come Together on almost nothing, a single murky chord the verse barely leaves, set over McCartney's slithering bass riff and a snareless drum part that thuds low and dark. The trick is the chord that breaks the spell. When the harmony finally moves, it jumps to a bright major chord where a minor one would be natural, and that one swap makes the track seem to swing between dark and light more than it really does.
The verse holds a single minor chord for bars at a time, a static vamp over a slinky bass riff. Nothing needs to change because the groove is the point, a swamp you sink into. The snareless drums thicken the murk, all low toms and no crack.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
When the song does move, it swaps in a bright major chord for one that would naturally be minor. That single lift throws a bar of unexpected light across the dark groove. It is a small choice that makes the whole track feel richer in contrast than a one-chord vamp has any right to.
5
A major in a rare rock waltz 路 built on the flattened seventh and a backdoor cadence 路 1970
John Lennon wrote Dig A Pony for the Apple rooftop, a loose, shambling rocker that lopes in three-time, one of very few Beatles songs with a true waltz swing. The harmony keeps returning to the flattened seventh, a chord from the flat side that gives the song its raw, modal edge, and it comes home through a side door, two soft cadences stacked where a strong one would stand.
The song swings in three, unusual for a rock band, and the chords rely on a flattened-seventh chord borrowed from a bluesier scale. That flat chord colors nearly every phrase, so the bright key keeps tasting of something rougher and older. A chromatic bass creeps upward under the riff to sharpen the edges.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The song resolves with a double plagal cadence, two gentle amen-style moves stacked in a row, flat-seven to four to home. It sidesteps the strong, expected pull entirely and slides home softly instead. That backdoor approach is a big part of why the song feels loose and unbuttoned rather than tightly resolved.
6
E major, three chords and a melody that leaps an octave and a half 路 a plea sung from the edge 路 1969
John Lennon wrote Don't Let Me Down for Yoko and sang it from the edge, a raw plea built on almost nothing, three chords, that draws its power from the melody rather than the harmony. The tune vaults over the chords in huge downward leaps, more than an octave and a half, dragging the voice toward a cracked, yelping delivery. Even the phrases start away from the home chord, so the song stays perpetually on edge.
The harmony is spare, three chords with a hinted-at fourth, so the melody carries everything. It uses a five-note pentatonic scale and takes wide, plunging leaps, and it does not politely fit the chords, adding a seventh to a chord that would rather be plain. The voice rules, the chords just hold the ground.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
Both verse and refrain open away from the home chord, so the song never starts from rest, it starts mid-lean, unsteady. Slow triplets drag out the title plea from the first bar, and the wide leaps push the voice to the breaking point. It is the sound of asking for something you are not sure you will get.
7
D major, a sunny twelve-bar blues with a slide guitar grinning through it 路 1969
George Harrison wrote For You Blue as a happy, loose twelve-bar blues, the plainest and most cheerful frame in music, with John Lennon grinning through it on a lap-steel slide. There are no tricks here, just the three blues chords and real warmth, blue notes bending the tune so a bright major key picks up a down-home twang.
The whole song is the classic twelve-bar blues, the same three-chord pattern that carries a thousand songs, run through six times. Blue notes, a flattened third and seventh, bend the melody against the major chords for that familiar bittersweet twang. A chromatic bass climbs into the turnaround to nudge each verse forward.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The color comes from the playing, and the harmony stays plain. A slide guitar swoops around the tune with a lazy, joyful whine, and the whole band settles back into an easy shuffle. It is a song with nothing to prove, a warm blues played by friends.
8
A major with a flattened seventh, a stylized blues on three chords over a fixed bass 路 1969
Paul McCartney wrote Get Back, and the band cut it live on the Apple rooftop with Billy Preston guesting on electric piano. It sounds like the oldest blues in the world and quietly is not quite. Three chords run over a bass that holds the home note like an anchor, and the usual dominant gives way to a flat-seven chord, so the whole thing rings in the open, modal light of a jam rather than the tidy pull of a pop song.
The song is built on a three-chord blues frame, and there are two quiet twists. It runs in short eight-bar sections in place of the standard twelve, and where a blues would use the dominant, it drops to a flat-seven chord instead. That flat-seven, held over a droning home note in the bass, gives the groove its loose, modal color.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bass plants the home note and mostly stays there, a pedal that keeps the song rooted while the chords move above it. The melody circles the fifth of the scale, and the minor third is avoided entirely, which locks in the bright, open Mixolydian color. It is a band playing live in a room, and it sounds like it.
9
A minor verses easing into C major, its bright relative 路 a lullaby that soothes by resolving 路 1969
Paul McCartney built Golden Slumbers on a lullaby text from 1603, Thomas Dekker's Golden Slumbers, setting new music to words he found in his stepsister's songbook. The verse opens in a minor key, wistful and unresolved, then eases into its bright relative major for the soothing refrain, the same notes turned warm. The whole thing moves through a gentle cycle of chords with one sweet, biting dissonance held across the phrases.
The verse begins in a minor key, tender and a little lost, and the harmony walks a smooth cycle of fifths, chords stepping around a circle. Then the refrain arrives in the relative major, the sunny key that shares the minor's notes, so comfort feels like coming home. One chord holds a savory added note that rubs sweetly and never resolves, the catch inside the lullaby.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
There is nothing chromatic or tricky here, six chords moving diatonically around a circle, the plainest and most consoling motion in music. The melody arches in gentle sixth-leaps like a rocking arm. The whole song is built to comfort, and its harmony does exactly that, resolving where the earlier songs on the album do not.
10
D major, a twenty-three-second scrap packed with borrowed dominants and a walking bass 路 1969
Paul McCartney recorded Her Majesty alone, just his voice and one acoustic guitar, and it became the shortest thing the Beatles ever released, a twenty-three-second scrap that crams a startling amount of harmony into the blink. It walks a bass line down under the chords, borrows a whole string of out-of-key dominants for spice, and cuts off mid-thought on an unresolved chord, a throwaway with real craft inside it.
For a scrap of a song, the chords are ambitious. It strings together secondary dominants, chords borrowed from neighboring keys to point at each next chord, and even drops in a diminished chord with sliding chromatic voices. A steady walking bass ties it all together under a held chord, a technique that makes a handful of seconds feel harmonically full.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The charm is the abruptness. The song ends on an unresolved chord, snapped off ahead of any finish, because it was famously a fragment spliced onto the tail of the album almost by accident. That accidental cut gives it a wry, tossed-off grace, a perfect miniature that never takes a bow.
11
A major, sunny and simple, with a bridge that scrambles the meter and slides down the flat side 路 1969
George Harrison wrote Here Comes The Sun in Eric Clapton's garden, skipping a Beatles business meeting, and it feels like relief itself, bright and open on the plainest chords, hiding one genuinely tricky passage. The verses run on the three basic chords with a warm, folk-fingerpicked ease, and then the bridge does something startling, sliding down a ladder of soft cadences through the flat side while the meter scrambles into odd, uneven bars. The simplicity and the complexity stand side by side.
The verses could not be more open, the three basic major-key chords ringing under a pentatonic tune, with one favorite Beatles reversal, a chord that would normally pull one way nudged the other. The bridge is the surprise, descending through a chain of gentle amen cadences, each a fourth lower, drifting out to the flat-three and flat-seven, a warm harmonic staircase down.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
Under that descending bridge the beat comes apart into uneven bars, groupings of eleven and seven, so the count keeps shifting even as the harmony glides smoothly down. The math deliberately does not add up evenly, which makes the bridge feel like a held breath, then the sun returns. Then the plain, sunlit verse comes back, and everything settles.
12
A major in a slow 12/8 sway, a fifties R&B pastiche with a German-sixth twist in the bridge 路 1969
Paul McCartney sang Oh! Darling raw, coming into the studio early for a week to wear his voice down to a scream, chasing the sound of a fifties R&B belter. The song sways in slow 12/8 over a doo-wop major key, blue thirds and sevenths rubbing it rougher, and the bridge slips in a startling chord, a German augmented sixth, that slides home on a chromatic contrary-motion pull.
The verse rolls through the warm changes of a fifties ballad, the home chord out to its dominant and the minor cousin and back, and blue notes bend it rougher, a flat third and flat seventh scraping the sweetness. McCartney keeps off the fourth degree of the scale almost the whole verse, saving it for the bridge, where it arrives as a sighing grace note.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge holds the real surprise, a lush chord borrowed from far outside the key, the German augmented sixth, its notes pulling apart in opposite directions to resolve. A descending chromatic line, F-sharp to F-natural to E, threads through the top of it. For one bar the sweet pastiche turns genuinely strange, then slides back to the dominant and home.
13
E major on the oldest doo-wop loop, its instrumental break floating up to the four 路 1969
Ringo Starr wrote Octopus's Garden, his second song for the band, after a boat skipper told him octopuses gather stones into gardens on the seabed. The music is just as innocent, built on the sweetest four-chord doo-wop loop in pop, its one real move sending the guitar solo drifting up into the key of the four chord, then settling home again for the last verse.
The whole song turns on the four chords every fifties ballad used, the home chord, its minor cousin, the four and the five, circling gently. One phrase swerves to the minor cousin where the ear expects home, a soft deceptive cadence. The melody keeps to a handful of pentatonic notes, plain and sing-song, with the bass doubling it in bare parallel fifths.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The instrumental break lifts the whole progression up into the key of the four chord, a bright modulation like the song surfacing for air, then it slides back home for the last verse. Lead guitar sings through the intro, the break and the outro, and layered scat voices bubble up behind, one of them burbled through water to sound submarine.
14
D minor, a heavy blues riff that switches between 6/8 and 4/4, ending on an abrupt tape cut 路 1969
John Lennon boiled a whole song down to seven words and a monstrous riff, letting the music carry what the words leave out. I Want You runs on an arch-shaped bass figure in D minor, heavy and portentous, and the meter keeps swapping between a rolling 6/8 and a driving 4/4. After nearly eight minutes it does not fade, it stops dead, the tape sliced off mid-swell.
The verses run in a 4/4 blues, and the intro, refrain and outro roll in 6/8, so the song keeps lurching between two feels. The harmony is spare and minor, circling the home chord, the flat-six, the dominant and its own dominant, and the verses open oddly in a different minor and slide home to D. Blue notes, a flat fifth and flat seventh, keep it menacing.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The outro hammers the arch riff around fourteen times over a rising wall of white noise, building and building with no release valve, and then the tape is simply cut, chopping the song off mid-phrase. It is one of the boldest endings the band ever committed, a slammed door in place of a goodbye.
15
A three-part suite that shifts key with every section, A minor to C major to A major 路 the door into the Abbey Road medley 路 1969
Paul McCartney built You Never Give Me Your Money as a suite in miniature, three unrelated sections in three different keys strung end to end, and it swings open the long medley that closes Abbey Road. A wistful piano ballad in A minor gives way to a boogie-woogie shuffle in C, then to a bright, chiming refrain in A major that rings out into tape loops of crickets and bells.
The first section walks a full circle of fifths in A minor, a slow chain of chords each pulling to the next, coloring the money-troubles lyric with quiet dread. It pivots into C major for a boogie-woogie middle, the harmonic rhythm doubling as the chords trade twice a bar, and a flat-seven gives that stretch a rolling, barrelhouse tilt. Then a chromatic run of diminished chords hoists the song up into A major for the shining final refrain.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
Nothing returns the way a normal song's chorus returns, each section simply hands off to the next, so the piece keeps moving forward like a story rather than circling. That restless, sectional build is the template for the whole medley to come, and the final two-bar refrain repeats into a fade of sound effects that carries straight on into the next song.
16
E major slipping to C and back on pure third-relations, dressed in jazzy sixths 路 a dreamy medley panel 路 1969
John Lennon built Sun King on a guitar tone he lifted from Fleetwood Mac's Albatross, all languid tremolo and reverb, and set it over some of the most luxuriant chords the band ever played. The home key of E slides down to C and back by bare third-relation, skipping any smooth pivot, and every chord carries an added sixth that makes it shimmer. The song melts into a coda of nonsense mock-Romance syllables.
The chords are soft and jazzy, sweetened with added sixths so the harmony stays plush rather than resolving hard. The key drops a major third from E down to C for the middle, an abrupt sidestep with no pivot chord to smooth it, and climbs back through an F-major Neapolitan. Downward chromatic licks trickle through the keyboard.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The intro drifts in on the tape-loop crickets carried over from the previous song, so the medley feels seamless, one panel dissolving into the next. At the end Lennon sings a string of invented words that only sound like Italian and Spanish, pure texture over the plush chords, meaning handed over to pure sound.
17
E major roughed up with two borrowed flat chords 路 a fragment that speeds up and hands off mid-stride 路 1969
John Lennon wrote Mean Mr. Mustard in India and left it a fragment, a fourteen-bar sketch that never grows into a full song. It runs on four chords in E, two of them borrowed from the parallel minor to rough up the brightness, over a fuzz bass that crawls chromatically. At the end the meter itself shifts gears, sliding from 4/4 into 6/8 so the tempo seems to accelerate, and the fragment hands straight off into the next song.
The harmony is plain on the surface, the home chord and its dominant, and two darker chords slip in from the parallel minor, a flat-four and a flat-seven, souring the bright key. A syncopated bass crawls up and down by half steps underneath, and a flat-six cross-relation grates in the third phrase, one note bright in one chord and flat in the next.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The last phrase pulls a rhythmic trick, a metric modulation, the beat regrouping from 4/4 into 6/8 as the underlying eighth notes hold steady, so the music seems to speed up without anyone playing faster. A chromatic bass lick climbs to a D major chord that opens the door straight into Polythene Pam.
18
E Mixolydian on a flat-seven riff, coming home by double plagal in place of the dominant 路 1969
John Lennon sings Polythene Pam in a broad, put-on Scouse accent, hamming up a rocker built on a flat-seven riff. The song lives in E but tilts to the flat side, a D-A-E figure ringing over a held home note, and it never comes home the usual way, sidestepping the dominant for stacked plagal cadences and a deceptive turn to the flat-six. A twelve-string acoustic cuts through the wall of sound.
The whole song runs on a three-chord riff, flat-seven to four to home, that plants the key without ever using the strong dominant. When the dominant does appear it dodges home, resolving deceptively to the flat-six. The double plagal move, two gentle amen cadences stacked, is the song's whole way of arriving.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The outro is nearly half the track, eight rounds of the flat-seven riff and a lead-guitar solo, and it does not close so much as pivot, the home E chord turned into the dominant of A to slide straight into the next song. Scat voices chant in parallel thirds through the whole thing, and the twelve-string keeps a bright acoustic edge over the din.
19
A major with bluesy dominant sevenths, its bridge swinging up to C on a flat-three relation 路 1969
Paul McCartney wrote She Came In Through the Bathroom Window about a fan who actually climbed into his house that way, and set it to a tight, bluesy groove. The verse rocks on plain dominant-seventh chords with a bluesy flat third and seventh smearing the major key, and the bridge lifts abruptly up to C, a bright key a flat third above home, the same A-to-C jolt that colors Sun King a few tracks earlier.
The verse runs a plain four-chord loop, the home chord and the four, and every chord is a dominant seventh, the melody bending flat thirds and sevenths across them for a bluesy tang. The rhythmic weight falls on the third beat of the bar rather than the downbeat, so the groove tugs slightly off-balance.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge swings up into C major, a key a flat third above home with no smooth pivot to lead there, then snaps back to A on a single chord at the last beat. It runs one bar short of the expected sixteen, and two descending bass lines thread under it, one of them grouped in that lopsided 3+3+2 skip. The whole song is over in under two minutes.
20
C major on four plain chords, coming to rest through gentle amen cadences 路 a gospel hymn in disguise 路 1970
Paul McCartney wrote Let It Be after dreaming of his late mother Mary, and gave it the shape of a hymn, four plain chords and a gospel piano. The verse rolls through the home chord, its dominant, the minor cousin and the four, and the refrain keeps coming to rest the soft way, a plagal four-to-one amen cadence in place of the strong dominant pull. Even the dominant, when it comes, slips aside to the four or the minor cousin, giving the whole thing a modal, churchy calm.
The whole song uses only four chords, all belonging to C major, and the melody keeps almost entirely to a five-note pentatonic, plain and hymn-like. The telling detail is how it cadences: the refrain settles through the gentle plagal move, four to one, the sound of an amen at the end of a hymn, in place of the hard dominant-to-home pull of most pop.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
For all its simplicity the harmony has a quiet modal streak. The dominant chord, which normally strains hardest toward home, keeps resolving sideways to the four or the minor cousin, so the song never feels driven, only carried. That softness is the whole comfort of it, a piece built to reassure.
21
E-flat major forever pulled toward its relative minor, dressed in jazzy ninths and elevenths 路 1970
Paul McCartney wrote The Long and Winding Road as a bare piano ballad, and its harmony carries an undertow it never quite gives in to, a constant pull from bright E-flat major down toward its sadder relative minor. The chords are dressed in jazzy ninths and elevenths, and one chord keeps pivoting between the two keys, so the song hovers between hope and grief for its whole length. Phil Spector later drowned it in orchestra and choir, famously against McCartney's wishes.
The verse rolls through a long chain of chords in E-flat, and nearly every one tilts toward the relative minor, C minor, a darker key hiding inside the same notes. The minor chords are everywhere, and the dominant that would firmly settle either key stays soft and minor, so neither key ever fully wins. The four chord acts as a hinge, one key's four and the other's flat-six at once.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
Ninth and eleventh chords give the ballad a smoky, jazz-club richness under the plain melody, and a deceptive cadence keeps sliding the bridge back into the verse in place of resolving. The song McCartney wrote ends quietly, a piano coda drifting toward the minor. What most people hear instead is Phil Spector's lush overdub of strings and voices, laid on after the fact, a grand finish stitched onto an intimate song.
22
G major, its bridge dipping into the parallel minor 路 the last close harmony Lennon and McCartney sang together 路 1970
Paul McCartney wrote Two of Us about long aimless drives with Linda, and John Lennon joined him to sing it in the close two-part harmony that had been their signature since the start, one of the last times they would. Two acoustic guitars strum a plain, sunny G major, the meter loosening into shorter bars here and there, and the bridge slips down into the parallel minor for a clouded moment, then the sunshine returns.
The verse keeps to a plain diatonic G major, the melody mostly pentatonic, warm and folk-simple, with a lazy touch where the four chord slides to the two rather than pushing anywhere. The count is the quiet trick: bars stretch and shrink, a 4/4 loosening into threes and twos, so the song ambles rather than marches, matching two people with nowhere to be.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge tips into G minor, the same home note turned dark, the minor barely confirmed against cross-relations with the major-key notes, so it feels like a cloud passing rather than a real change of weather. Then the verse returns to the sun. Underneath it all, McCartney and Lennon lock into thirds the way they had as teenagers, the sound of the partnership at its warmest even as it was ending.
23
E major vamping on the home chord with a bluesy flat seventh 路 a two-man record cut in a single session 路 1969
John Lennon wrote The Ballad of John and Yoko as breaking news set to a beat, a diary of his wedding week, and cut it in one afternoon with only Paul McCartney to help, Paul on drums and John on guitar, since Harrison and Ringo were away. The music is a bluesy three-chord rocker in E that mostly just hammers the home chord, flavored by a heavy flat seventh, plain as a skiffle tune under the tabloid lyric.
The verse barely moves, eight bars vamping on the home chord, which tips into a dominant-seventh version of itself to pull toward the four. The refrain adds only the four and the five, the three plainest chords there are. What roughs it up is the blues coloring, a heavy flat seventh and a lighter flat third rubbing against the bright key, and the dominant chord even sounds its major and minor third at once, a gritty cross-relation.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The whole track is just Lennon and McCartney, overdubbed into a full band in an afternoon, McCartney drumming and the two of them trading the vocal, a snapshot of the partnership still working smoothly even as the group came apart. A syncopated hiccup drops two extra beats into the bridge, and the outro rings out on a sweet added-sixth chord, the news bulletin signing off with a wink.
24
B major on four plain chords, one of the very first Lennon-McCartney songs, revived on the rooftop 路 1969
One After 909 was one of the first songs Lennon and McCartney ever wrote together as teenagers, and they dusted it off a decade later to play on the Apple rooftop, loose and grinning. It is a plain, bluesy rocker in B on just four chords, the verse content to hold the home chord for ten bars at a stretch, the melody bending bluesy minor notes against the bright major backing.
The harmony could hardly be simpler, the home chord, the four, the five and the dominant's dominant, no more. The verse plants itself on the home chord and stays there most of its length, ten full bars, so the song feels rooted and unhurried, and the phrases close neatly at both ends. Bluesy flat thirds and sevenths in the tune rough up the plain major chords.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge opens the harmony up where the verse held it closed, a small breath of contrast, then folds back to the home chord. There is nothing clever here, and that is the charm: a song the two of them wrote as boys, played by grown men on a cold rooftop as the band wound down, sounding like it never aged. Paul heckles John across the bridge, the old partnership still joking.
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Poised between C major and A minor, a fast bluesy rocker on a sprinting walking bass 路 1969
George Harrison wrote Old Brown Shoe and drove it with one of the fastest bass lines on any Beatles record, a sprinting triplet walk he and McCartney chased together. The harmony hovers between bright C major and its darker relative minor, sliding between the two, and a dissonant dominant-seventh home chord keeps everything bluesy and on edge.
The verse never settles on a key. It circles through C major and its relative A minor, ending on the minor as often as the major, so the ground keeps tilting. A flat-six chord borrowed from the minor side grinds against the surrounding chords in sour cross-relations, and the home chord is a bluesy dominant seventh that never fully settles. The whole verse keeps a pedal note held high while the bass sprints underneath.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The bridge finally plants the key, centering on the dominant to pin down C major, a firm ground after the verse's wobble. Everything moves at a breakneck clip, rapid triplets in the bass and piano, and Harrison and McCartney split the sprinting bass line between them to pull it off. It is the busiest, most restless track of the late period, hiding real harmonic slipperiness under sheer speed.
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A major closing on a modulation to C, the band's last word, with the only Beatles drum solo 路 1969
The End is the finale of Abbey Road and, near enough, of the Beatles, and it packs a farewell into two minutes. It opens as a hard rocker in A, breaks into the only drum solo Ringo ever recorded, then sets the three guitarists trading two-bar solos in turn, and finally lifts into C major for a piano hymn and the closing couplet, a symmetry as neat as a bow tied on the whole career.
The first part runs a bluesy eight-bar phrase in A with a dominant-of-the-dominant pushing it forward, and a sharpened passing chord brushing the home chord as a neighbor. Then Ringo takes his one and only drum solo, and the three guitarists, McCartney, Harrison and Lennon, rotate through two-bar solos over a plain plagal vamp, four to one, again and again, each in his own voice.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
For the ending the music lifts out of A and up into C major, pivoting on an F chord, and the piano rings out a slow, hymn-like cadence under the famous last couplet. A single borrowed flat-six chord brushes a touch of dark into the bright close, and strings swell behind. That the whole band's farewell resolves so plainly, a clean cadence into a fresh key, feels like the point.
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D major, a sunny music-hall romp threaded with secondary dominants under a grisly lyric 路 1969
Paul McCartney set a cheerful music-hall tune against a lyric about a serial killer, and the harmony plays it straight-faced sunny, all bright D major and bouncing secondary dominants. A Moog synthesizer burbles woodwind and brass lines around the melody, an anvil clangs on the downbeats where the hammer falls, and the whole thing grins while the words turn gruesome.
For all its bounce the harmony is busier than it sounds, driven by a chain of secondary dominants, chords borrowed to point at the next chord, so the music keeps stepping brightly sideways without ever leaving the home key. An added ninth sweetens the dominant, and the bass walks in tidy steps. Nothing modulates, but the chromatic push of those borrowed dominants keeps the sunshine moving.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The cheer is the whole trick, a bright, hummable romp scored like a children's singalong, complete with the clang of a real anvil on the beats where Maxwell swings his hammer. The Moog fills the gaps with mock-orchestral toots. McCartney famously drilled the band through take after take chasing this brightness, and the gap between the sunny sound and the murderous words is the point of the song.
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A minor swinging from a dark waltz into a blues-rock stomp 路 the last thing the four of them recorded 路 1970
George Harrison wrote I Me Mine as a jab at ego, and it was the last song the Beatles ever recorded as a group, cut in January 1970 with Lennon already gone. The music splits in two: a brooding minor waltz in three-time for the verse, then a hard blues-rock stomp in four for the refrain, the meter snapping between them by a precise rhythmic hinge.
The verse rocks slowly in three-time, a minor-key waltz that keeps sliding between the natural and harmonic minor so the harmony never settles, borrowing a bright major four chord from the parallel major and closing on an odd dominant-seventh a sixth above home. Then the refrain kicks into four-four for a blues, three chords stamping hard, and a clever metric trick makes the switch feel seamless, the waltz's beats regrouping exactly into the rock's.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
There is a farewell built into the form, a dark, circling waltz that keeps pulling toward its ego-weary lyric, and a rock refrain that never fully resolves, ending open on the dominant. It was recorded without Lennon, who had already quit, so the Beatles' last group session was really three of them, and the music's unfinished, open-ended feel fits a band running out of road.
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A major bluesy rock, two separate songs stacked into one at the end 路 a rooftop quodlibet 路 1969
I've Got a Feeling welds together two unfinished songs, McCartney's bluesy shout and Lennon's flat, chatty everybody-had-a-hard-year fragment, and in the last section stacks them on top of each other at once, an old trick called a quodlibet. It is a medium-slow, hard bluesy groove in A, cut live on the rooftop with the four Beatles and Billy Preston on electric piano, and the two halves fit together as if they had always belonged.
The harmony is a bluesy four-chord frame, the home chord, the four, the five and a flat-seven, the same modal-rock quartet that carries so many late Beatles songs. The verse alternates a vamp on the home chord, decorated by the four, with faster harmonic motion, and chromatic diminished chords slide over a pedal note to link the sections. McCartney sings and plays a busy bass line at once.
The harmony given as function. The engraving stays out by design.
The payoff is the ending, where McCartney's part and Lennon's part, written separately and never meant to meet, are sung simultaneously, two independent melodies locking into one counterpoint. It is a small emblem of the whole partnership, two very different writers stacked into a single track, still fitting even at the end, with Billy Preston's electric piano warming the rooftop chill underneath.