The Beatles · from Abbey Road (1969)
A study in minor-blues weight and a coda that will not resolve.
Two stark blocks trade off in D minor, then a long riff cell repeats and builds until it is severed mid-phrase instead of ending.
This is a slow, heavy Beatles song in a dark home key called D minor.
It keeps switching between two very different chunks, a moody sung part and a crushing guitar riff.
The chords slide downward by tiny steps, a move called a chromatic descent, which makes it feel like sinking.
The long ending riff repeats over and over and gets louder, but it never arrives at a nice finishing chord.
Instead of ending, the song just gets cut off, so your ear is left hanging on purpose.
To see the exact chords and key, open Pollack or Isophonics.
The whole track stays around D minor, and its weight comes from staying dark rather than using major relief.
That fixed minor center is what lets the chromatic slides and the unresolved ending feel oppressive rather than merely sad.
The harmony relies on lines that creep downward by half steps, chords sliding a semitone at a time beneath a minor-blues vocabulary.
That descending chromatic motion is the engine of the dread, pulling the ear down without ever settling.
Confirm the exact descending chords at Isophonics and BeatlesFC.
The song sets a brooding sung section against a heavy instrumental riff and cuts between them with almost no transition.
The form is built on that hard juxtaposition, two moods bolted together rather than eased into one another.
The long outro is a single repeating cell that thickens and rises but is denied any closing cadence.
Harmonically it is a circle with no exit, so the tension has nowhere to release.
Confirm the coda's exact chords at Pollack.
The track does not end on a tonic or any final chord; the repeating coda is simply stopped in place.
Cutting the loop mid-phrase, rather than cadencing, is the boldest structural choice on the record and the reason the song feels bottomless.
| Degree | Chord | Nashville | Roman |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dm | 1m | i |
| 2 | E° | 2° | ii° |
| b3 | F | b3 | III |
| 4 | Gm | 4m | iv |
| 5 | Am | 5m | v |
| b6 | B♭ | b6 | VI |
| b7 | C | b7 | VII |
Chords sourced from a public transcription. The verse centers on A minor; the heavy riff on D minor.
Reading the numbers: each is a scale degree in D minor. Plain = major, m = minor, ° = diminished, (7) = a dominant-seventh coloring, b-degrees are chromatic steps.
The anchor chord is a plain minor triad, so no special diagram is needed.
The chromatic descent and coda use moving shapes best read from a full transcription at the sources below.
Prose analysis of the D-minor center, the chromatic descent, and the non-resolving coda.
Open Pollack mirror →Downloadable chord and key files: the exact descending chords and the coda cell in seconds.
Open Isophonics →Roman-numeral function and melody for the sung block, if a community tab exists.
Open the Beatles index →Tonic, predominant, and dominant labels for the minor-key chords at phrase level.
Open the paper →