Sails opens on a Db pedal for 16 bars before the C minor floor arrives. The singer parks on C, the root of the key that has not landed yet, so his root note is the leading tone of Db underneath. The whole song trades between that b2 pedal and the C minor family.
Sails · Hooray For Earth
C minor · 112 BPM · intro pedal on Db (bII) for the first 16 seconds
The intro sits on Db for eight two-second windows. Bass anchors Db, chroma sits on Db. When the vocal enters, it lands on C and holds. In Db terms that C is a major 7th, the sound leans dreamy. In the C minor terms the song is actually in, that same C is the tonic itself. The singer names the home the band has not decided to visit. Bass Db appears on 10.9% of frames across the song, but on 100% of these opening windows, so the pedal is a real block, not a scatter.
favorite momentVocal C over bass Db, an open leading tone. The singer states the tonic before the harmony agrees to it.
The verse floor · bass walks C, Eb, Ab, Bb (i, bIII, bVI, bVII of C minor)
Once the pedal drops, the verse floor is the C-minor natural family. Bass histogram over the whole song: C 24.2%, Eb 17.0%, Bb 13.5%, Ab 12.2%. That is a C, Eb, Ab, Bb walk, no fifth of C in the top four, so the bass names the minor triad and its flat-side extensions rather than the classical i-V axis. The singer, meanwhile, keeps his top three pitch classes as C 24.4%, Eb 22.7%, Db 18.3%. Vocal C plus Eb is the C minor root and third, agreeing with the floor. Vocal Db is the intro pedal note carried into the verse, a b2 sung against a i chord, that is Phrygian color leaking forward.
favorite momentThe singer's Db in the verse. The intro's chord becomes the verse's blue note.
Chord windows report · 43 C-anchored windows, 28 G, 22 Db (bII), 19 F (iv), 16 Eb (bIII), 15 Bb (bVII)
The 2-second chroma-anchored chord-root count for the whole track: C: 43, G: 28, C#: 22, F: 19, D#: 16, A#: 15. In C minor that reads as i, v, bII, iv, bIII, bVII. The v (G minor) at 28 windows is the second-highest anchor, and the bII (Db) at 22 is the third. Together the i-bII pair carries the Phrygian pull the intro announces. The absence of anything on E or A in the top six means the natural-minor scale holds throughout, no chromatic upper-neighbor from major, no borrowed Picardy third.
favorite momentThe i-bII pair. C and Db carry the song's whole harmonic tension.