Stevie's Piano Playing

[jkmaletic]

A couple things I noticed about her piano playing that may or may not have been mentioned before...

I noticed Stevie tends to mostly, if only, use the white keys when playing. I also noticed a lot of her songs start in C? (I'm not a music or piano person, so this is just an interesting observation ).

In this video, Stevie is SUPPOSED to be playing "Blue Water", but she's actually playing "Moonlight" on the piano. I mean, it works, but I wonder if she realized that? Anyone else notice these things?

https://youtu.be/enGeXEmkQUQ

[DauphineMarie]

Originally Posted by jkmaletic

A couple things I noticed about her piano playing that may or may not have been mentioned before...

I noticed Stevie tends to mostly, if only, use the white keys when playing. I also noticed a lot of her songs start in C? (I'm not a music or piano person, so this is just an interesting observation ).

In this video, Stevie is SUPPOSED to be playing "Blue Water", but she's actually playing "Moonlight" on the piano. I mean, it works, but I wonder if she realized that? Anyone else notice these things?

https://youtu.be/enGeXEmkQUQ

What I find amazing about Stevie's piano playing is how she uses almost exactly the same chords to create entirely different and interesting songs. What's cool about Blue Water, is how she also uses the same sort of riff in a different key, and we get "Moonlight" like you mentioned, but also "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You" and "24 Karat Gold" and "Christian/Spinning Wheels" and somewhat in "Doing the Best that I Can."

Interestingly enough, she rarely uses black keys, but some of my favourite songs of hers are, like Bella Donna, The Nightmare, and Blue Lamp (I think)...

[SisterNightroad]

Originally Posted by DauphineMarie

What I find amazing about Stevie's piano playing is how she uses almost exactly the same chords to create entirely different and interesting songs.

I remember one of the guys working on the white album had said the same thing: she knew only three or four chords but she could write thirty songs with them.

[jkmaletic]

Originally Posted by SisterNightroad

I remember one of the guys working on the white album had said the same thing: she knew only three or four chords but she could write thirty songs with them.

She told me that herself at a Q and A I went to back in 2011.
I just thought it was so funny how she IS playing Moonlight while singing Blue Water. The piano keys for Blue Water go in the opposite direction of Moonlight (I actually figured that out playing around on a keyboard app). If you listen to Blue Water beginning and then the Moonlight beginning you'll see.
Also, Blue Water and If You Were My Love are the same in the beginning, but one just sounds like its played higher than the other.
All of this is making me think I may want to try piano myself.

[UndoingTheLaces]

She gave a talk at the Grammy Museum in LA a few years ago, I think the video is on YouTube somewhere, and she joked something along the lines of "I'm going to play a few songs for you so you can see exactly how untalented I really am". And then she talked about how she only knows a few chords and it used to piss Lindsey off that he would spend all this time working on one chord progression and she would just sit at a piano and write a whole song in minutes.

Then she talked about how Waddy once said something about creating all this amazing music out of these songs that were written with the same three chords and his comment was "It's like she just keeps writing one really long song".

[bombaysaffires]

Originally Posted by SisterNightroad

I remember one of the guys working on the white album had said the same thing: she knew only three or four chords but she could write thirty songs with them.

Ken Caillat has said this many times.

[David]

My opinion is that it isn't chord progressions (moving from one chord to the next through time) at the root of Lindsey's or Stevie's craft. The chord progressions in all the Fleetwood Mac songs are all very basic and very commonplace, and they've all been employed in billions of other popular songs since the dawn of time. Musicians even name common chord progressions by their numerical scale placement—for example, a I-IV-V (one-four-five) song is one whose chord progression is tonic (say, C) to subdominant (F) to dominant (G). This progression and several dozen like it are the bedrock of popular song structure. Many Fleetwood songs, from "Second Hand News" to "After the Glitter Fades" to "Over My Head" to "Monday Morning" to "I Don't Want to Know" to "Think About Me" to "That's Enough for Me," follow a bedrock chord progression or a slight variation of one.

No, chord progressions mean practically nothing in any discussion of the craft of popular songwriting. What counts is, in Lindsey's case, a focus on the arrangement of voices (instrumental and human) in a track—what they call orchestration—and in Stevie's case, a nifty way of setting confessional verse to melody. Christine puts her energy into writing great hooks—melodic and lyric—in simple, straightforward structures that become earworms and thus hypnotize people into buying the single.