Stevie's Most Complex Chords

[David]

Since I've had a sinus headache today, I've had a lot of time to think about which song of Stevie's (has to be one she wrote the music for) has the most complex chords & chord progression.

Stevie's got a superb talent for taking simple chord progressions (for example, Am/G/F) & weaving beautiful lyrics & a powerhouse vocal together to create a complex tapestry of emotions & images. But a couple of her songs are actually somewhat complex in terms of their strictly musical structure.

"Crystal" came foremost to mind. The way the chord progression descends, pauses & ascends across the scale is far more advanced than the typical I-IV-V rock structure. And the chords themselves are more complex & variegated than pop usually provides. She uses some beautiful chords, including suspended 4ths with dominant bass tones ("holds true") followed by major 7ths with nontonic bass tones ("I turned around"). In fact, the song's progression as a whole is a masterly use of drifting bass tones, which lend prettiness, urgency & even novelty to the progression. On musical grounds alone, "Crystal" is great.

Runner-up honors go to "Escape from Berlin" ("Doing the Best That I Can"), which takes the suspended 4ths & 6ths & the drifting bass tones of "Crystal" & transforms them into a minor.

Also (believe it or not) worth noting is the song Stevie & her brother co-wrote, "The Nightmare," which repeats an interesting minor-tonic/submediant pattern in two scales a whole step apart ("That was when the dream took her prisoner . . . but the nightmare was not over").

Stevie herself frequently says that she writes simple melodies & uses simple chords, but her more complex chord patterns can stand up to some of the complexities of other Fleetwood Mac members, particularly Bob Welch in songs like "Coming Home" (from Penguin) & "Somebody" (a song from "Mystery to Me" that compares favorably to the music of Steely Dan in its chordal complexity).