Hey there everybody,
There’s a new song I want to talk about. Billie Eilish just released “my future” and a lot of my students are taking interest in it. They’ve described it as different from her previous work. I decided to investigate it in order to discuss why it feels different than her past efforts. There are a couple of components that really drive this song. Primarily, the harmony is pretty sophisticated. The way that the harmony functions are typical, but the chord qualities are more detailed than what we often find in her music. This will take more time to elaborate on, so I’ll save that for later.
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The other fact worth noting is the harmonic rhythm. The first portion of the tune is without drums. Once the drums enter into the mix we enter what is called double-time feel. In order to get clarity here, we need to talk about the tempo. The song starts at 52 bpm (beats per minute) which is pretty slow. We can count most of the chords with 4 beats in that tempo, but once we get the drums the tempo feels as though it doubles. The chords last the same amount of time. If you’re counting from the perspective of the drums you’ll now get 8 beats per chord. This is how double-time FEEL works. The tempo is really the same and the harmonic motion stays the same, but the rhythm section acts as though they're playing twice as fast.
It could look something like this:
Original tempo
Eb Eb7
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Double Time Feel:
Eb Eb7
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Remember that the backbeat (the snare drum placement) is a factor in how we count music. In double-time feel we have twice as many 2’s and 4’s even though the chords last for just as many seconds.
The last piece of the harmonic motion would be the measure of 2/4 inside of the pre-chorus. We have to shift our counting from 4 to 2 for one measure. This is actually a really old trick but has been underutilized in modern pop.
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Now let's look into harmony. The first thing to see is that we have a number of extended harmonies. These are notes within the chords that are not part of the triad (root, third, and fifth.) Major 7s, Dominant 7s, and minor 7s are pretty common in popular music, but here we’re seeing a few other kinds of extensions.
To create a 9 chord of any type we’ll spell out a scale in two-octave to see how it works. The first 9 chord to appear is Eb9.
Eb F G Ab Bb C D Eb F G Ab Bb C D Eb
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Remember that to build chords we skip every other note in a scale. Root, 3rd, 5th 7th. We can continue this to add extensions like the 9th, 11th, and 13th.
When we see a chord like Eb9, that implies the 3rds underneath it. We get Root, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th.
The other element we have to integrate to spell this chord correctly is that it’s dominant, otherwise we’d see a notation that it’s a major 7. That means we need to lower the 7th (D) to Db.
All together we get Eb G Bb Db F to spell the Eb9 chord.
------ Another component we need to look at is the influence of diminished chords.
The A diminished chord is obvious. Dimisnhed chords are spelt with minor thirds (1 and 1/2 step intervals). A, C, Eb. It normally appears as the 7th chord in a major scale ( or the 2nd chord in a minor scale).
In this case the chord is extended by adding a lower third, which is F. We end up with F, A, C, Eb. This spells a F7 chord. A nice treat to see a diminished chord turned into a dominant chord.
The other dimished chord is hidden within an extension. It’s the G7b9 chord. Here we see the same type of extension as in the Eb9, but spelt with G. The alteration is the 9th being lowered by one half step.
G, B, D, F, Ab
When we look at this we can see a series of minor thirds. B to D. D to F. F to Ab. All together this is what we call a B fully diminished 7 chord. It's a fully symmetrical chord. As we discovered with the F7 above, there are diminished triads inside of dominant 7 chords. Our b9 extension here adds another minor third on top of the diminished triad creating the fully diminished 7 chord and totaling our G7b9.
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I’d like to point out that we’re seeing some “hybrid” chords in this song. What I mean by this is that we end up with a minor triad with major extensions. The two that are blaring are the Abm6 and the Abm Maj.7.
If we spell an Ab minor scale we get:
Ab Bb Cb Db Eb Fb Gb which is pretty hideous. This is tricky because the song is pointing towards Eb major. This makes the enharmonic equivalent almost as undesirable. Eb to G# is not fun to read.
We’ll need an Ab major scale to draw from as well.
Ab Bb C Db Eb F G.
So to make a minor triad with a major 6 we make F natural.
Ab Cb Eb F
To make a minor triad with major 7 we make G natural
Ab Cb Eb G
Both of these chords have a very distinct sound. Ambiguous, mysterious, and odd.
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There's a lot more we could cover here about the harmony. I would encourage you to label all the chords in the key of Eb. What you'll discover is that there is a whole slew of chords in this song that step outside of the key, which are called "borrowed chords." We can attribute those and the complicated chord qualities as the reason why this song sounds so different from her previous repertoire.
Enjoy the song. Explore the chord shapes. Keep playing!
Christopher
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