Why you Probably Understand Music Better than you Think
The magic of a G#m7b5 chord – which unintentionally appeared in my song – and what it taught me about my musical ear.
“Let me know which songs you’d like to learn on guitar, and I can work them out for you. Just please don't ask me to try to tackle Joni Mitchell.”
This was the gist of a conversation I had with my second guitar teacher, Sheldon, who I'd come to for lessons as a graduate fresh out of university. I'd mentioned that I loved Joni, never imagining that I’d be met with this kind of resistance.
“What’s the issue with Joni?,” I thought.
Sheldon was a highly skilled guitarist. I think ‘virtuoso’ would have accurately described the level at which he played. Surely he could teach me how to play a Joni Mitchell song?
Apparently not. Or at least, he was anticipating that unpicking a Joni Mitchell song could be a long and laborious process he'd rather not have to go through.
(This was back in the day when it was still quite hard to find accurate chords on the Internet for the songs you wanted to play.)
The ‘problem’ with Joni's weird chords
The issue with Joni was this: she wrote music ‘from the inside out’. The problem was that she explored music without the map of a formal music education, seeking out the sounds that resonated with the emotions she was experiencing in her body as she composed. She was a musical adventurer who often used off-piste guitar tunings and chords built not from a foundation of theory, but by her musical ear. This meant that there were fewer shortcuts to working out her arrangements.
In her own words, “Music is when you pull the chords from your inner core, whether they sound weird to people or not.”
Joni’s ‘weird’ homemade chords annoyed some (not all) of her jazz-musician peers, who felt that her music was ‘wrong’. That she was breaking the rules somehow.
(Of course, we all know that no great artist has ever successfully broken any rules – just ask Picasso.)
So my question is, did Joni's more musically educated peers have the authority to define what was right and wrong in her music? Did they understand music better than she did?
The different routes to understanding music
Let’s pause and reflect here, because I think in our culture we tend to assume that music is best known and understood by a musical ‘elite’ – a group of highly educated, trained, and technically skilled musicians who know all the theory. And from my perspective, that idea doesn’t accurately represent the truth – which is actually far more nuanced.
I want to be absolutely clear here that I'm not anti-theory, or musical education, or skilled musicians – far from it! I deeply respect and appreciate when people have spent countless hours studying music and honing their craft, and all the beauty that they bring into the world. I have very dear friends who have done music degrees, been to conservatoire, even toured all over Europe as classical musicians. Their depth of understanding of music goes without question. I myself love the way that theoretical concepts can shed light on my response to a particular moment in a piece of music, for example.
However, I also know that some of us feel and understand music on a deep level that hasn’t (or has only partly) been facilitated by theory and analysis.
Some of us feel and understand music on a deep level that hasn't (or has only partly) been facilitated by theory and analysis.
From what I've heard about Joni Mitchell, she was one such person. Her relationship with music was immediate and embodied. She composed directly with, and in response to, the sounds she heard and how they felt to her. For me, this means she was making music in a very authentic way and on her own terms. Her songs, which have resonated with generations of people across the globe, reflect her understanding of how to create compelling compositions with real emotional impact.
It begs the question, ‘was Joni Mitchell any less of a musician and artist than people who’ve received an extensive formal musical education?’
I don’t think so.
I think that ‘painting with the colours of the sounds you hear’, absolutely makes you an artist.
I think that ‘painting with the colours of the sounds you hear’, absolutely makes you an artist.
Want to be original? Try following your ear
I've written music this way too – most notably my song 'Treasured Hands', which started with me selecting a single note (G#), then building a chord around it by picking out three other notes from the keyboard that created a beautiful and intriguing sound. I then built two other chords in the same way – without any analysis of what I was doing, simply because the sounds resonated with me – and these three chords became the central loop of the song.
What I love about this particular song is that it sounds so distinct from my others. The fact that it sprang from my open exploration of sound via the piano keyboard helped to give it an originality that I find special.
However, there's something else to appreciate about the musical ear, aside from its value in helping us create original music. It’s something you might find helpful to know if you've ever found yourself feeling ‘less-than’ as a singer or songwriter because you lack knowledge of music theory.
To explain what it is, I'm going to share with you the story of a recent experience I had while writing a song, where a ‘magical’ and unintended chord suddenly appeared in my arrangement. The way it happened completely bowled me over, and taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.
It all began one Monday morning, during my weekly piano lesson with Claire Housego.
Minor seventh flat five: the big question
There's something you should know about my piano teacher Claire: she isn't in the business of teaching piano in the ways you might expect. Her mission is to teach singers to accompany themselves at the piano. Claire helps singers like me to express their unique artistic voice by supporting them to create their own piano arrangements for songs they’ve written, and/or covers.
Claire had started to take me through a process of relating musical intervals (interval meaning the gap between two notes, whether that's a tiny step or a bigger leap), to chords (a combination of two or more notes played together). Over a series of lessons, we were using a portion of our time to discuss which types of chords contained each interval. The idea was for me to revise, or freshly learn in some cases, a range of chords and understand how I could create them.
In this particular lesson we were looking at the minor seventh interval, and minor seventh flat five chords (m7b5). I remembered that I'd come across this chord before in a cover song I'd played and sung on the piano – Donny Hathaway's ‘A Song for You’. I loved the chord sequence of this song, which contained a range of expressive colours. Increasingly, I'd been wanting to bring more of a jazz and soul feel into my own songwriting, and to get more comfortable with incorporating chords like the minor seventh flat five. My question was, how?
“If I were writing a song Claire, how would I know that I wanted to bring a minor seventh flat five chord into it? How would I know that that was the sound I wanted? I guess a good first step would be to learn to recognise how the chord sounds?”
“If I were writing a song, how would I know that I wanted to bring a minor seventh flat five chord into it?”
“Yes, and also I think it might help you to look at the chord in the context of ‘A Song for You’ and other songs you know, to give you examples of how it's used in practice.”
Lessons from descending basslines
So that's what we did. The following lesson, we revisited Nina Simone's ‘Feeling Good’, which is a cover song I've learned to play on piano. Claire shared with me that she’d noticed a pattern of the minor seventh flat five chord being used in songs with a bassline that descends step-by-step (chromatically). The songs that follow this pattern are all in a minor key. ‘Feeling Good’ is one example, and ‘A Song for You’ is another.
“I've got another example of this chord being used in a different way in another song we've looked at together,” Claire told me. It's in ‘Sway’ (the song that was written in 1953 in Spanish by Luis Demetrio and Pablo Beltrán Ruiz, and later made popular by singers like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, who sang an English version).
“We'll look at how it's used in 'Sway' in a future lesson too.”
That was the plan – except that we never got there.
Here's what happened instead...
The magic of G#m7b5
At that time, I had recently finished writing a piano arrangement for a song I'd written called ‘Phoenix’. It's a song about the heartbreak of feeling a strong, seemingly mutual connection with someone without that connection ever developing into a loving relationship. It's also about how you can transform your heartbreak by deepening your sense of connection with other people and the beauty of the world, and living into the best version of who you are.
The song had begun with lyrics, for which I'd vocally improvised a melody. From there I'd worked out a series of chords on the piano to accompany the song, which I used as a map to create a more detailed arrangement. Claire was supporting me to work out the best fingerings, and also to memorise the arrangement from the score I'd written.
One or two lessons on from our analysis of how a m7b5 chord is used in ‘Feeling Good’, we were looking together at a section of ‘Phoenix’. As we came to the third bar in verse 2, the flow of the lesson was interrupted as Claire started to notice something.
After a pause, she said, “OK, there's something interesting going on here.”
“You've labelled the bar with ‘D Major’, but actually not all these notes are from D major. Can you see that in the second half of the bar you've created a different chord that wasn't in your original chord sequence?”
“I have? Oh yes.” The bar we were looking at was part of a broken chord sequence, and I hadn't even been thinking in terms of chords at that point. I’d just felt that the bar was lacking something, and had found a solution by playing around with my right hand until I found the notes I wanted.
“Can you see which chord it is?” There was something about Claire's amused expression which suggested that something unexpected and synchronistic had happened.
“It's not... the minor seventh flat five chord is it?”
“Yes!”
“No way!”
“Yes and not only that but...” There was another pause as Claire double-checked the score.
“What you've done here follows the exact pattern that I was going to use ‘Sway’ to explain to you. I was going to highlight this pattern to you as a teaching point, and you've already intuitively written it into your song.”
All that jazz!
Claire went on to explain that what we were going to look at in ‘Sway’ was the use of a m7b5 chord as a chord of 2 in a 2-5-1 chord progression.
If you’re not familiar with musical keys and their numbered chords, then it’s enough to know that each musical key has a series of chords that follow the letter-names of notes in order. So to give an example, my song Phoenix is in the key of F# minor, and one option for chords in that key are:
Chord of 1 = F#m
Chord of 2 = G#m7b5
Chord of 3 = A
Chord of 4 = Bm
Chord of 5 = C#
Chord of 6 = Dmaj7
Chord of 7 = E
A chord progression of 2-5-1 is very common in jazz. I had heard of it before, but I couldn't have told you any examples of songs where it had been used. Led by my musical ear, I had put this progression into my song Phoenix, with G#m7b5 as the chord of 2, without consciously realising what I was doing.
The sequence I’d written was: G#m7b5 (chord of 2), C# (chord of 5), and F#m (chord of 1).
I couldn't believe what had happened! In that moment when I'd asked the question, “how would I bring a minor seventh flat five chord into a song?” I'd actually already done it. Not only that, but I'd done it within a 2-5-1 chord progression, which is a classic progression in jazz – even though I haven't studied jazz and I would have said I knew very little about it. And to top off the unlikely unfolding of events, this specific progression was the one that Claire had been intending to teach me – to show me how I might use a m7b5 chord in my songwriting.
In that moment when I'd asked the question, “how would I bring a minor seventh flat five chord into a song?” I'd actually already done it.
A lesson for me and you
Life is a classroom, and here's the lesson I gained from this experience: I actually know and understand music better than I'd thought.
And it's not just me. I believe this is true for many of us.
There's an intelligence to the musical ear of many people who love music and have immersed themselves in it, yet don't have an extensive formal music education. The immersion might have come through deeply listening to recorded and live music, and/or taking part in singing and music-making.
It's similar to the intelligence of a child who learns to speak their mother tongue by simply listening and imitating the language that's being spoken all around them.
Learning the language of music
As children we don't need anyone to sit down with us and explain what an adjective is, how you make a plural, or how you should order your subject, verb, and object correctly in a sentence. We can learn how to speak our mother tongue perfectly, following the rules of grammar, without being able to explicitly explain what those grammatical rules are.
A similar phenomenon happens with music. Our brains can internalise the patterns we hear in music, and replicate them, without us having to analyse what it is that we're doing.
Our brains can internalise the patterns we hear in music, and replicate them, without us having to analyse what it is that we're doing.
So as well as creating music in direct response to the sounds we hear and how they land in our bodies – the ‘painting with the colour of sound’ that I spoke about before – we also have access to a bank of musical references which our intuition is able to draw from, without the need for conscious reasoning.
How wonderful is that?
I’ve found learning music theory to be useful and interesting because it raises my conscious awareness of all the options I have as a songwriter. However, in practice, a lot of my songwriting process happens by my following the ideas that I hear first in my imagination, or that I’ve found through experimentation at the piano, without too much analysis going on at the time. These methods have often taken me to structures and patterns in music that I haven't actually studied.
A takeaway to help you break through your blocks
Before I started writing songs in my mid-thirties, I carried around the limiting belief that I didn't know enough about music to write ‘good songs’. I now know this idea to be completely untrue!
So if you've ever felt shame around your lack of musical education, or the gaps in your knowledge of theory, then please keep the story I've shared here in the front of your mind.
Sing, write your songs, don't hold back. Be a musical adventurer like Joni – go to your instrument, play with the spectrum of possible sounds, and notice how different combinations make you feel. Improvise with your voice by following the sounds of your imagination.
And remember: you probably understand music better than you think.
Further reading / resources
Video: Joni Mitchell – Chords of Inquiry
This video by Paul Wilkinson includes footage of Joni Mitchell explaining her composition process and other people’s reactions to her ‘weird chords’. There’s also a demonstration of how to create some of Joni’s chords on the piano.
Website: Claire Housego – Piano Lessons for Singers
If you’re a singer who’d like to learn to accompany yourself at the piano, check out Claire’s lessons – available online or in person in Bristol, UK. Her piano lessons are one of the highlights of my week, and I can’t recommend her highly enough!
YouTube channel: Sheldon King – Ambient, meditative, acoustic guitar
It’s been many years since I’ve been in touch with Sheldon, but writing this post prompted me to search for him online. He has a YouTube channel where he posts incredibly beautiful, soul-soothing acoustic guitar improvisations. I should add that although Sheldon never taught me a Joni Mitchell song, he more than made up for it by teaching me many other cool things – including transposable chord shapes, picking patterns, and folk, blues, and indie guitar songs. Thank you Sheldon!
Joni is definitely free as a bird in her music. And as brilliant as she is, I think she understands that music is much more about the heart than it is the mind.
This sentence you wrote..."In that moment when I'd asked the question, “how would I bring a minor seventh flat five chord into a song?” I'd actually already done it."
I recently had a big shift in my body's perception of pain during a session with my acupuncturist. I shared this with her after the session and she said to me, "When you asked the question about your hip, the body heard you and started the healing process before the session actually started."
After reading your story and then virtually celebrating that "aha moment" with you, it made me wonder how often we begin the process of learning something new the moment we define what we seek. I like that inquiry. And I loved your story!