34+35 Chords

[Darci Carlton]

Weezerhas never quite made the same album twice. Over 25 years of making music and nearly a dozen releases, guitar rock has remained the band's core sound. But the moods and narratives, the production and frontman Rivers Cuomo's singing style have all shifted so dramatically with each album that it's sometimes hard for some fans to make sense of it.

With Pacific Daydream, Weezer's 11th full-length and third album in as many years, the band takes its boldest turn toward unapologetic, polished pop. Apart from the opening track, which was actually written for the group's previous release, 2016's self-titled "white album," the crisp guitar noise and power chords that have defined much of the Weezer's sound are almost nowhere to be found.

The result is a collection of songs that are breezy and celebratory, but tinged with a hint of melancholy and nostalgia. They radiate with the fading glow of a late summer sun setting on an empty beach, signaling not the beginning of something but the end.

For today's release of Pacific Daydream, Weezer singer and songwriter Rivers Cuomo and I sat down to listen to the entire album together and talk about the band's latest direction. As we dug into each track, Cuomo talked about how he "finally" eliminated power chords from Weezer's sound, why some of his lyrics may sound like nonsense and why he's embraced a cut-and-paste approach to songwriting.

"On one extreme you have a song like ['Mexican Fender'] where it's all about this two or three experiences with this one woman. Each verse is very literal. This is what happened. This is what what went down. And then on the other extreme there's a song like 'Feels Like Summer,' where every line is taken from a different source and a different experience and I'm just kind of piecing it together to create a story about something that never actually happened.

"I think I've gotten more into the idea of cutting and pasting. I remember reading when I was first starting out in my early 20s that Kurt Cobain was a big cut and paste-er and I was like, 'But then it's not really about anything.' Or, you know, it doesn't doesn't make sense. It totally worked, listening to him. But when I tried to do it it just seemed like I was pasting together random lines and it didn't add up to anything. But I've definitely evolved in that direction."

"The big theme on the record is alienation and loneliness and not feeling like I have a place to fit in. I grew up in New England, a small farm town. I really miss it sometimes and yet I recognize [that] as soon as I got out of high school I moved to L.A. And it was very exciting. I wanted to be a rock star. And as soon as I moved from Hollywood to Santa Monica I started writing the 'Blue Album' songs: 'Sweater Song,' 'Say It Ain't So,' 'My Name Is Jonas.' All those things just started happening as if by some kind of chemical reaction between me and my East Coast side and the West Side and and the Beach and Santa Monica. So I'm I'm almost superstitious about it. I don't want to leave. I'm very influenced by wherever I go. Like, I left Southern California for our second album. I went to Cambridge, I was at Harvard and it was cold and snowy and extremely lonely and I liked that. But it's just a totally different vibe in [the] music."

"Well, you know, we set out to make the 'black album' to follow the 'white album' and that's what this was going to be. And then it kind of morphed into another beach album. But it's like the beach mixed with black, and it's definitely got a darker sadder undertone to it relative to the 'white album.' This is true, I think, with a lot of the songs on this record."

"I am completely oblivious and confused and I have no idea. I never intend to be ironic. [On 'Happy Hour'] I was writing stream of consciousness or free association where the first image that comes in your head, that's what you have to write. And the first thing I thought of was the 20-ton weight falling on somebody and crushing them in Monty Python. And that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. And then of course when any other human hears that they're like, you can't sing about Monty Python on a pop-rock song, you must be ironic. ['Thank God For Girls'] is another example of free association. So maybe when I use that technique it hits people as ironic."

"I wouldn't say I'm studying a particular artist at the moment. It's more like a playlist. Recently I've been studying Today's Top Hits on Spotify which is their biggest playlist. And like 15-million people around the world listen to that. Or at least subscribe to it. And I'm checking in on that a couple of times a week and just looking at like, okay, how much lyrical repetition is in the chorus? Is the first note to the chorus higher than the highest note in the verse? You know those kinds of technical questions. Not that I'm necessarily copying what they do but sometimes it will just inspire me or remind me like, oh yeah, I don't have to follow this old rule in my head look everyone else is breaking it."

For those who come from a Mac or other OS background where Ctrl+E takes you to the end of the current line (the End key shortcut by default in VS), this is a really frustrating limitation when switching environments.

I found that in Visual Studio 2013 at least, you can remove all the shortcuts that use the Ctrl+E chord (none of which I will ever use) and set the Edit.LineEnd command to Ctrl+E. It just takes a few minutes tracking down the chords to remove (most of them are under the workspace designer).

Chapter 29, on mixture, explained how and why the diatonic third of a chord is sometimes chromatically altered to switch the mode from major to minor or vice versa. Alternatively, composers sometimes chromatically alter the fifth of a major triad or seventh chord, which retains the modal identity of the chord while heightening its urgency for continuation. Such altered fifths are frequently presented as chromatic passing tones, elements of chromatic voice-leading that drive the harmony forward.

In this chapter we will first discuss augmented triads: triads with a major third and augmented fifth above the root. We will go on to look at how an augmented fifth can also be introduced in a dominant seventh chord. The chapter will conclude with an examination of dominant seventh chords with lowered fifths.

Augmented triads are not functional chords in their own right, but rather chromatic representatives of diatonic harmonies: the raised fifth is usually introduced as a chromatic passing tone. The following example illustrates:

At the end of the brief piano introduction (and then again at the end of the first phrase with the voice), we hear an authentic cadence with a root position V resolving to I. This cadential dominant, though, has a chromatic alteration: the fifth has been raised to F#, creating an augmented triad out of what would have otherwise been major. This chromatic alteration does not affect the function of the chord though; in a way, the dominant function is strengthened. The F# is clearly a chromatic lower neighbor tone to G and resolves up by step to the third of the tonic after a brief suspension.

The three augmented triads in Example 34-7 are enharmonically equivalent: G+, Eb+, and B+. By respelling the chord members, it is possible to make any of the three notes the root without changing the sound of the chord. This property can be a useful way to avoid problematic accidentals.

The augmented triad is presented all at once here: the augmented fifth has been absorbed into the chord and is not introduced here as a chromatic passing tone. This dissonant chord lends an aurally striking quality to this prolongation of I in a way that a diatonic auxiliary sonority could not.

Whereas in previous examples the chromatic pitch of an augmented triad was introduced as an ascending chromatic passing tone from the fifth of a major reference sonority, here it appears as a chromatic lower neighbor to the root of a minor triad. It is worth pointing out that normal figured bass conventions are incapable of showing this alteration since the chromatic pitch appears in the bass. The parenthetical (#5) under the Roman numeral indicates the raised fifth. The result, in this case, is a neighboring auxiliary sonority that resembles a III chord with a raised fifth in second inversion.

With the increasingly adventurous chromaticism of the nineteenth century, the treatment of augmented triads slowly relaxed. Rather than simply serving as chromatic representatives of diatonic harmonies, augmented triads began taking on more structural roles. Consider the key structure of the following excerpt (composed around 1840):

Dominant seventh chords occasionally appear in an altered form, with a raised or lowered fifth. Since dominant sevenths have a major third above the root, raising the fifth will result in an augmented triad with a minor seventh. Like the augmented triads discussed above, the augmented fifth is typically introduced as an ascending chromatic passing tone:

Dominant seventh chords with lowered fifths (b [latex]\hat2[/latex] instead of [latex]\hat2[/latex]) recall the characteristic sound of the Phrygian mode, which features a semitone between its first and second degrees. Consider the following example:

Augmented triads typically function as chromatic representatives of diatonic chords. They are usually derived by replacing the fifth of a major triad with the pitch a semitone above it, though minor triads can become augmented as well by lowering the root. In some cases, the chromatic pitch is introduced as an embellishing tone while elsewhere it is simply absorbed into the chord. Augmented triads typically resolve to a chord whose root is a fifth below.

Before the Romantic Era, augmented triads were used sparingly and seldom as functional harmonies on their own. With the increasing chromaticism of the nineteenth century, however, they eventually gained greater structural significance, both in the chord-to-chord action and in the large-scale relationships among keys in a piece.

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