The Beatles · from Abbey Road (1969)
A study in a plain I–IV–V made strange by meter.
Harrison hangs a sunlit three-chord tune on the simplest harmony there is, then trips the bridge into shifting, uneven bars.
This is George's warm, sunny song on Abbey Road, in a bright home key called A major.
The main part uses just three chords, the three friendliest ones in the key: home, and its two closest neighbors.
By the numbers those are 1, 4, and 5, which spell A, D, and E7.
The middle "sun, sun, sun" part does something tricky: the beats stop being even and the bars keep changing length.
That bumpy, shifting count is called asymmetric meter, and it makes the song feel like it is skipping forward.
To see the exact chords and counts, open Pollack or Isophonics.
The song lives in a clean A major with no borrowed darkness in the verse.
The whole charm is how much warmth Harrison draws from the plainest possible key center, which also makes the bridge's metric disruption stand out.
The verse and chorus run on the three primary chords, tonic, subdominant, and dominant, the oldest engine in Western harmony.
There is no trickery in the chords themselves; the interest is in the guitar figure that threads through them and in the rhythm.
Confirm the exact voicings and any added tones at Isophonics and BeatlesFC.
The dominant arrives as a seventh chord, so the pull back to the tonic is bright and unambiguous.
That textbook 5-to-1 close is what keeps the tune feeling settled and reassuring between the bridge's disruptions.
The "sun, sun, sun" bridge abandons steady 4/4 for a run of uneven bars that change length as they go, commonly counted as a recurring group that does not divide evenly.
That metric irregularity, not any exotic chord, is the famous idea in the song, a lopsided count riding otherwise simple harmony.
Confirm the exact bar groupings at Pollack.
The melody stays inside the A-major scale and relies on the recurring guitar riff to mark each section.
The form alternates the settled verse with the metrically restless bridge, so the structure itself dramatizes the rise toward the sun.
| Degree | Chord | Nashville | Roman |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | 1 | I |
| 2 | Bm | 2m | ii |
| 3 | C#m | 3m | iii |
| 4 | D | 4 | IV |
| 5 | E | 5 | V |
| 6 | F#m | 6m | vi |
| 7 | G#° | 7° | vii° |
Chords from the standard published chart, in A major (sounding; Harrison capos 7).
Reading the numbers: each is a scale degree in A major. Plain = major, m = minor, ° = diminished, (7) = a dominant-seventh coloring, b-degrees are chromatic steps.
The dominant is a seventh chord, so here is its shape; the 1 and 4 chords (A and D) are plain open triads.
Prose analysis of the A-major core, the guitar figure, and the bridge's shifting meter.
Open Pollack mirror →Downloadable chord, key, and beat files: the exact bridge chords and where the meter shifts.
Open Isophonics →Roman-numeral function and melody for the three-chord tune, if a community tab exists.
Open the Beatles index →Tonic, predominant, and dominant labels for the primary chords at phrase level.
Open the paper →