The Big Feelings Chords Progression
An explanation and a supercut
The first clue I had that Big Feelings needed to be about a specific affective orientation within indie music—rather than a book about indie writ-large—was the fact that so many of the bands I was listening to had songs featuring the same chord progression: I∆7–IV∆7.
At first, my noticing was gradual. And it only happened because these chords already meant something to me. I’d be driving somewhere with Hannah, who’d say “Oh I love this song.” Eventually, I started teasing her a bit: “Of course you do; it’s got your favorite chords.” Song after song, time after time, she’d disproportionately swoon over songs with the same two chords in them, I to IV and back in a cycle. The joke here is that these were also my favorites.
∆7
I vividly remember the day in first-year theory when my professor demonstrated major 7 chords on the piano—trained as a drummer,1 I hadn’t known what to call this magical sound that I nevertheless recognized from my favorite band. Now my teacher was telling me its name, a secret that had been available all along.2 Ignorant as I was about how music gets put together, I was still aware of the fact that this sound was special: In the context of the rock music I had grown up loving, not many bands used it, making it glisten sharply when it did appear. Given its relative rarity, that sound seemed to reach out and grab my jaw whenever I heard it, turning my head in its direction.
So when Hannah started pointing out all these I-IV songs, I knew exactly what she was talking about, why she found them so alluring. She was also pointing them out more often because around that same time, there seemed to be more and more bands making serious use of this progression—primarily (but not exclusively) all the bands I was getting interested in writing about: The young, queer rock groups who were reviving 90s alt aesthetics in order to express the feelings and worldviews of a group initially excluded from the conversation around that music, those sounds.3
These bands—the ones I call Big Feelings bands—love the major 7 (∆7) sound, for a variety of reasons about which I speculate in the book. To put it too simply, it’s a worldbuilding chord perfectly suited for expressing overwhelming feelings, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. I want to talk about that more later, but for this post more specifically, I'll focus on the I-IV progression that often serves to foreground and intensify this major 7 sound, building something out of it rather than using it as a passing chord on the way somewhere else.
I-IV
The I (one) chord and the IV (four) chord are the two places in a major key where major 7 chords occur “naturally.” If you haven’t taken music theory before, sit at or imagine a piano keyboard. Triads are chords built on three notes—in the key of C, the root position I chord would be a C chord built from C (the root), E (the third note of the C scale) and G (the fifth). If you add a fourth note, B (the 7th), you get a C major 7 chord. This is demonstrated quickly here, if you want to get the sound and visual together in your mind.
Now, take that root position 7th chord (C, E, G, B) and, keeping all four fingers equally spaced, walk that chord up the C scale. You’ll next hit a D minor 7 chord (D, F, A, C), followed by an E minor 7 chord. The next (and only other) place in the C scale where you hit a major 7 chord is in that next, fourth position, starting on F.
Of course, there are all kinds of ways to get a major 7 sound by venturing outside of the key you started in, and rock music in particularly doesn’t like to pay a lot of attention to the rules of classical harmony anyway. If a band wants to hit a major 7 beyond the I and the IV, there are infinite ways to do so. All I’m pointing out here is that if you’re working with a basic major key center, the I and the IV pair together easily and gorgeously, without any convoluted, music-theoretical tricks. They are natural chords to reach for in search of that bittersweet, longing ache. They also don’t need other chords to mediate between them: Because they both produce a whole, commensurate feeling of stasis—each on their own—oscillating between the two can become a way of intensifying the feeling they produce without any sort of a break or transition or point of tension and release. It starts big and swells further from there.
This is but one reason why many Big Feelings bands have songs heavily—if not exclusively—featuring the I-IV progression. For my money, it is the sound of Big Feelings, the song structure that most represents what this moment in indie rock is all about: the affective, the complex, and the emotional, dialed all the way up and overwhelming the artist who’s not so much expressing those feelings as they are surrounded by them.
Emotional complexity has long been the purview of women and queers, for a variety of historical reasons that continue to shape western culture and the role of gender within it. Here, emotional complexity meets (relative) musical complexity, which David Temperley suggests is conjured by “events or patterns that go outside the norms of the style” (2018, 143). Breaking with or expanding on rock music’s building-block chords—the masculine-coded and simple “power chord”—Big Feelings’ embrace of more nuanced harmonic vocabulary indexes the central importance of emotional intelligence and affective experience in the music.
Supercut
Below, I’ve compiled a supercut of Big Feelings songs that use the I-IV progression, excerpting small snippets of this back-and-forth movement. Like all music theory concepts, if you hear it enough times, you become capable of recognizing and naming it (that’s the cool part).
The songs are listed below the audio in the order of their appearance (which is arbitrary).4 The list is certainly not exhaustive5—just the ones I’ve been able to remember to write down.
Cry hard.
Jesus and the Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey”
Phoebe Bridgers, “Kyoto”
Broken Social Scene, “Cause=Time”
Land of Talk: “This Time”
Alice Phoebe Lou: “Lover / / Over the Moon”
Hana Vu: “Hammer”
Fazerdaze, “Last to Sleep”
i hate mirrors: “it hurts, now that you’re gone”
Anna Burch: “Can’t Sleep”
Fazerdaze, “Little Uneasy”
Blueboy: “Clearer”
Diet Cig, “Broken Body”
Mannequin Pussy: “I Don’t Know You”
Snail Mail, “Heat Wave”
Pity Sex, “Wappen Beggars”
Yuck, “Milkshake”
Diet Cig, “Stare Into The Sun”
Soccer Mommy, “Royal Screw Up”
Yuck, “Stutter”
Soccer Mommy, “Henry”
Fazerdaze, “Bedroom Talks”
Vagabon, “The Embers”
Indigo De Souza, “Real Pain”
(not included): Soccer Mommy, “Cool”
(not included): Black Belt Eagle Scout, “Scorpio Moon”
The more I learn about the embodied nature of musical experience, the more I believe that drummers (who only play drums) grow into hearing music differently than their instrumental peers. Unable to produce harmony ourselves, we have no means of accessing it on that most important level—the level of the body—relying only on the mirror neurons that fire when we hear others play the chords we’re trying to apprehend.
I took AP Music Theory in high school, but instead of realizing how special an opportunity that was, I goofed off and learned nothing.
While women, queer, and minority artists were a significant presence in the kinds of indie music that gave birth to 90s alternative, once the latter became a big business, there was no oxygen left in the room for their concerns or their music.
Except for the first two, which I put back to back because I feel like they speak to each other. The first, as my friend Raechel points out, “was a character” of its own in the closing scene of Lost in Translation. The second, released 17 years after LIT, starts off with the lines, “Day off in Kyoto/Got bored at the temple,” dropping us into a scene that almost directly invokes LIT—even more so later, when Bridgers sings from a perspective that might as well be Charlotte’s (“Dreaming through Tokyo skies/I wanted to see the world/Then I flew over the ocean/And I changed my mind”). In other words, I don’t think it’s accidental that the song that soundtracked the most dramatic moment of the film and a song that mirrors the mindframe of the film’s main character are built from the exact same chord progression, albeit in different keys.
HEEEYYYYY!!!! Do you know of other examples I’ve forgotten? I might still have time to add to the appendix, so please do let me know.