A special mention to Michael Bolton’s ‘ How can we be Lovers’, which employs a similar device, arriving a beat earlier than expected, while rising up a massive major sixth. Breakdown bit where everyone in the stadium can clap along? Rinsed.īut then? The coup de gras: a fairly standard tone rise, but delivered two beats earlier than you expect, accompanied by a massive drum toms roll. The geniuses who wrote this song really knew what they were doing. Belinda Carlisle - ‘ Heaven is Place on Earth’ Tell you what, while we’re here, what an underrated banger ‘ Born to Make You Happy’ was (with a key change of its own of course).ġ3. Spears’ adlibs help the whole thing bed in in a way that’s quite unexpectedly moving. But for now, enjoy the delights of this little stop-n-semitone-shift up which lifts what is already a truly brilliant pop song into total dreamland at 2:45. It’s brilliant and it’s seriously clever.ġ999 was quite a year for epoch-defining key changes, as you’ll discover later. It then shifts back to the original key for chorus two, which also invokes an unsettling feeling. Nowhere is this more perfectly demonstrated than on ‘The Show Must Go On’, which when you least expect it - out of the very chorus and into the second verse - they put in a tone lift, which, instead of providing euphoria, instead creates this weird, uneasy feeling that the stakes have been subtly raised. Queen, not a band normally famed for subtlety, but any students of their back catalogue will know that, actually, this was just as much part of their armoury as all the bombastic stuff. And then think that not even this was enough, and make a video with elephants coming back to life and the use of wind machines so massive that, ironically, they probably had to cut down a rainforest to power them. And only a true genius could have reached 3:45 and thought, “No, this song needs to get BIGGER”, and whack in a giant key change. This could only have come from the mind of a true genius.
It is, simultaneously, one of the most utterly ludicrous and utterly brilliant pieces of music ever recorded. ’Earth Song’ is a track that, like an archaeological dig, only gives up more and more of its majesty and secrets as time progresses. ‘Take my Breath Away’? Berlin, you just did. This is just absolutely bloody great, using a wholly unexpected semitone drop to then launch into an eventual tone and a half rise. While the cynics amongst you, and those of you who actually bothered to read the intro, will point and exclaim, ‘But Dave, this key change happens at 2:42 - at precisely the point at which the song has run out of ideas and they need to spin it out a bit longer’ - well, you’d be correct, but honestly, with a chorus that good, this is where a key change is totally justified, especially when it’s accompanied by Jo singing the classic, time-honoured bridging line: “Heeeee-eeeey, yeah yeah yeah-ee, alright, ooooo-ooooooo”. It was this track that led me to pose the following question, which maddeningly, remains unanswered. Trust Beyoncé to not only recognise the brilliance of the key change but to casually throw out four of them in the same song in a really clever manner that completely suits the jazzy style of the track, bringing something new and fresh to the whole experience. The best true wireless earphones - all reviewed and rated.Look, I know my onions on this stuff, alright? Likewise the oft-cited ‘key changes’ of Randy Crawford’s ‘Street Life’ are in fact part of the general movement of the track. For example, Chaka Khan’s ‘I’m Every Woman’ while an eternal banger of epic proportions, does not have a key change during the end section - this is merely an (admittedly totally amazing) bouncing between two chords rather than a substantive harmonic change. PLEASE NOTE: To count as a key change the song has to move for a ‘substantial’ amount of time into the new key (’substantial’ to be judged by me). Prepare yourselves for an emotionally-charged journey (sorry, The X Factor ruined that word too) into pure musical joy. ‘Whack it up a tone, stand up from your barstools and wait for the audience to whoop and applaud because that’s what they’ve been taught to do when they hear it’ has become such a cliche that now the key change is viewed with suspicion by many songwriters and music fans.īut to disregard the key change is a mistake, for when used correctly, it is a device that can utterly transform a track - to take something which is already brilliant and lift it into the stratosphere.
Used incorrectly, it’s an easy, lazy way to rouse interest in a song about two minutes in, when you need to spin it out a bit longer but can’t be bothered to do anything inventive. Since Pop Idol, The X Factor and Westlife came into our lives, the key change has got itself a bad rep.