One of my most favorite albums of all time is Beck’s One Foot in the Grave from 1994. I like Beck’s later albums well enough and am happy that he has received a lot of commercial success, but to me, none of them compares in terms of soul, truth, musicianship, and creativity to this early album of his. Sadly, it seems One Foot in the Grave has gone out of print, and new copies of the CD now sell for upwards of $100 on Amazon.

A big reason I like this album stems from Calvin Johnson’s down-home production style, which gives a very intimate feel to every song. Also, though, Beck has a very unique harmonic sensibility that I’m not sure Beck really recaptures in songs on later albums. In particular, many of the songs on One Foot in the Grave have unique and very original chord progressions that lend themselves to colorful chromatic lines. For instance, let’s take a look at:

Beck’s guitar on this album is tuned down three half-steps by the way, which also lends the tunes their earthy feel. The chord progression for “Girl Dreams” (after tuning down the guitar) is as follows and repeats throughout the song:

A - C - G - F# - C - D - G - G

Each chord is simply a major triad; no strange extensions or anything fancy here. The phrase structure is pretty simple, too, and is just eight chords long. As you can probably tell from listening, the G chords are tonic (and sound like E major with the guitar tuned down). But if G major is the key, then what are the A major and F# major chords doing in this song?

The A major on the downbeat is fairly easy to explain; it’s just a V/V that should be leading to D major but is subverted through the move to C. That’s a common enough trick in popular music. The F# major chord, though, is another story. Does anyone know of other songs that have this progression? I have thought a lot about what harmonic function to attribute to this F# major chord, and I can’t say I have an ideal solution.

One thing I like about the F# major is that it moves by tritone to the C major subdominant. It’s only a careful songwriter, I think, that can insert tritone motion between root chords and make it sound natural without having it turn into some sort of obvious device.

The other thing I like about the F# major is that it continues a little chromatic descending line that I hear in the harmonies up until that point. With the first chord, A major, we might hear a C# as the third of the chord. This C# would descend to the C natural on the C major chord. Following would be a B (the third of the G major chord) and then an A# (as the third of the F# major chord). So we potentially have this little descending chromatic line, C# - C - B - A#, over the first four chords, A - C - G - F#.

This little chromatic motion seems to be one little piece of glue that holds this strange sequence of chords together. But what harmonic function does it serve? Should we just slap a #VII label on it a call it a day? What if we conceived of the F# as the V/V in E major? E major would be the parallel major to the relative major of our tonic, G major. With this interpretation, the V/V of F# nicely mirrors the function of the opening A major as a secondary dominant as well. If you are a little skeptical, try playing the chord progression as follows, and notice how it could easily modulate away from the tonic:

A - C - G - F# - B - E - etc…

The chord progression, therefore, could easily modulate to a new key, but doesn’t. The F# major chord is thus perhaps some form of mixture, maybe, if not an extension of the chromatic line. I think you could also just look at the F# chord as an incomplete lower neighbor to the G major chord that, instead of immediately resolving back to G major, only resolves back to G major through the entire cadence of C - D - G in the second half of the phrase.

So as you can see, I don’t have any quick answer. Sometimes that’s the way music theory goes. I can say that it’s a brilliant little chord progression, even just for the fact that it starts off-tonic, which gives it a constant push forward and avoids making the multiple repeats seem dull and stagnant.

Now I do not mean to imply that Beck is some sort of harmonic genius, although he obviously has a great ear. On some level, you might just say he’s simply moving major-chord forms around on the guitar and finding stuff that works. I don’t disagree. A strong characteristic of the “Seattle Sound” is merely that simple: strings of uniformly major-sonority chords. But the end result is a sort of pressure on the boundary of one’s conception of tonality.

Anyway, how do you hear the F# major chord’s function in this song? Is it merely a link in the chain of pre-dominant, functioning only to prepare the more traditional pre-dominant of the C major chord? If so, could some other chord be substituted? Play around with it and let me know what you think if you’d like. I think you’ll find, though, that this single chord will open up a world of harmonic possibilities in the way you potentially think about chord progressions, modulations, and tonality; at least it did so for me many years ago.