Why You Feel Nostalgia from this Angsty Chord

Radiohead, David Bowie, and even Steven  Universe use a simple technique with their chord progressions that make their  music more impactful and emotional. The trick is to use chords that don't actually  belong there, and in this video I'm going to focus on one chord in particular that even theBbeatles  used in their first number one hit in the US. I recently made a video about a  book called Japanese Music Harmony, which is not as unrelated as  it sounds.

Just bear with me. In the book Kayano Chino lays out  a theory for why Japanese anime and J-Pop and video game music has a unique sound. The book is basically about how  to mix and match different keys and Kayano outlines three different  categories for how to do that.

Today I'm going to focus on the first and simplest  one which is called relative multipolar tonality. But to show you that it's not  just Japanese composers who do this I'll be using examples from  American and British pop music. Usually when you play a song all your  notes and chords come from a single key.

So in C major these are our notes. . .

and these are the chords. Here's an example by the Postal Service of a song  that uses only chords from the key of F major. Pay attention to the iii chord here  because we'll be coming back to that.

With relative multipolar tonality you mix and match the chords from your relative  major and minor keys, hence the name. Relative keys are the major and minor  keys that share all the same notes. For example C major and A minor which  both have no flats and no sharps.

The exception, and this is the main point, is  that in minor you can raise the seventh tone, called the leading tone, to lead more satisfyingly  back to the tonic or the home of the key. When you do this you also  change the fifth chord of the minor key from a minor chord to a major chord. So continuing with a minor, that would  change the e minor to an e major.

Technically this is called the  harmonic minor scale because of how it's used to control the harmony,  but you'll find this five major chord being used in pretty much any  flavor of minor fairly often. So in a normal major key we're supposed to have  a minor chord as the third chord from our key, like in that Postal Service song or  like in this example from Aerosmith. But if we mix the chords from the relative major and minor keys we end up with  a three major chord instead.

So here's Don't Look Back in Anger from  Oasis which uses the same chord progression, but a three major instead of a three minor. What ends up happening is that wrong note,  that raised leading tone from the minor key, gives us this unexpected dissonance and this  desire to pull forward into the next chord. I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles the  first two chords are the one and five from the major key, the second two chords are the  one and major five from the relative minor key.

That B major chord does not  belong in the key of G major. And even if you know some  more advanced music theory, this is not like a secondary dominant  because the order of the chords is all wrong. This is a very clear example of  relative multipolar tonality.

The Beatles are using both the relative  major and relative minor keys together. So we've seen that it's this wrong note  that gives us the extra spice and yearning. Now i'll show you a few more examples  that use that and take it up a level.

This is beyond relative multipolar tonality  but i still think it's pretty cool. So if raising into this accidental gives  us this feeling of lift and energy, lowering into that same accidental  actually gives us the opposite effect. It ends up being more melancholy or  nostalgic or even kind of depressing.

In the song Creep by Radiohead the first  and third chords in the progression act like these stable tentpoles, but the second  chord here borrows from the relative minor, just like we've seen in the other examples. And the last chord goes in the opposite direction, lowering into that same wrong note and giving  us the four minor chord from the parallel minor. Space Oddity by David Bowie, which is probably  one of my favorite songs ever, does this too.

He even flips back and forth a few times  between the four major and the four minor so it keeps playing with that question of "Is it  happy or is it sad? Is it hopeful or hopeless?