Songs Beginning with a Half-Diminshed 7th Chord on the Flatted 5th

Here is another example of it used in this Country/Pop song
Rose Garden - Lynn Anderson

Appears at the 1:10 mark......
Still, not at the beginning of the song, but just for another reference.

 

At this point, I imagine only the musicians are here.

 

Just saw this post:

I don't think we're referring to the same chord...? It sounds like you're thinking of Bø7, but I'm talking about the chord that would be expressed as F#ø7 if our tonic were C major. It has nothing to do with A minor, but is iiø7 in the key of E minor, which is how it functions relative to C major -- i.e. as a way to tonicize iii more strongly than if you just went V7/iii > iii.

 

It comes in after the drum intro.

 

Yes, but the listener interprets music based on what preceded it. The listener will not know the song ends in another key on the first listen. So the flat-5/sharp 4 interpretation is at least partially valid.

 

I need a fifth of gin and tonic.

 

There is a ZZ Top thread for you someplace.

 

Yeah....
Whatever happened to the '3 chords and the truth'.
I know some of this stuff, my music theory is pathetic however.

 

They got diminished.

 

I'm just saying that a song can move through different keys. If the piece had otherwise been very cleary in C and an E major had appeared (to set up an Am) it might just be called a secondary dominant, but when it's part of a whole II-V-I section like this it is common to think of it as temporarily moving to a foreign key, at least that how I have been taught, and I think it makes more musical sense to think of it that way than to think of a bunch of "secondary" chords. Then again I don't think it is "foreign", I think the over all key could just as well be considered to be A minor, it is ambigous (which is great and makes it more interesting to the ear).

I am talking about the chord in the beginning of the piece the OP posted, which is a Bm7-5 (which then leads to E7 and Am), I don't know how you ended up with F#m-7. If you encounter any "minor seventh minus five" chord there are only two keys you can be in, the major key one half step up or the minor key one whole step down.

I don't know how ZZ Top got involved, but they are my favourite band, and it's quite possible to combine that with discussing music theory. I don't think they ever played a half diminished chord, but I think there's a diminished chord in "Apologies To Pearly".

 

I'm having that right now.

 

That's never been my truth. I've been interested in harmonically complex music since I was a kid, and turned off by conventional "rootsy" chord progressions (or at least not turned on by them -- if the music is interesting in other ways, that works).

Generally speaking I'd rather have either 20 chords, or one chord, than three.

 

The chord progression for "I'd Have You Anytime" is

Gmaj7 Bbmaj7 Cm7 G Am Em D

No half-diminished chords in this house!

 

What a 'flat' (Bb) thing to say.

Oh dear, glad I'm not a comedian.

 

That response couldn’t have been better. Touché!

 

I beg your pardon...

 

It appears we're essentially talking about the same thing, but describing it in different terms. I think, though, that talking about "temporarily moving to a foreign key" risks losing sight of the fact that some foreign keys are more closely related than others, and in particular, that they can play a role in long circle-of-fifths progressions that actually heighten our sense of the original key, rather than undermining it.

Some theory texts make it sound like you can only tonicize a chord with a secondary dominant, and anything more than that (i.e. a ii-V-I) constitutes a modulation, but I don't agree with that stance.

Ah -- I'm not.

 

I understand too!
I started as a guitar player with the '3 chord stuff' and playing early country and rock n roll type stuff.
Over a period of 20 some years, I drifted from that a bit.
I also discovered Brian Wilson/The Beach Boys.
I had no idea how he would influence in song structure and learning new chords and using and learning
the use of a different root note to a chord!
On the top, their music seems so simple.
Then it led to Chet Atkins. Django Reinhardt, even Willie Nelson, who is a guitar master.
I went down the Jazz chain of guitar players, but I could never get close to learning or being like those guys.
Even members of 'The Wrecking Crew' and their solo works.
Mind boggling when you go down that rabbit hole.

 

^My path was sort of the opposite: as a kid I instinctively liked bands like the Doors and Pink Floyd because they had unusual chord progressions (Light My Fire, The Crystal Ship, Breathe, Great Gig in the Sky, etc.). Then later, the same thing happened with jazz, and composers like Debussy.

It's taken me a while to warm up to rootsier, three-chord stuff, and even then it tends to be a bit of an acquired taste for me, unless it's so strong in other departments that it doesn't matter or is beside the point (e.g. Robert Johnson, where complaining about the harmony would be silly).

 

It's close enough. Off by one interval.

The major 7ths are the most wonderful chords out there. An astonishing way to start a song. Far better than starting it by diminishing the 7th.​

 

This is just the first one. And you don't get to the truth til after the third. Strap in.

 

I just don't hear it that way. If I've been fooled into thinking the song is in F, a chord that emphasizes the b5 is so disorienting that I mentally hold off on letting it be part of that key until I can tell where its going. And within a second I'm rewarded - it immediately becomes clear that it's associated with A minor and has nothing to do with the key of F, and as it turns out, it has nothing to do with the key of C major, either, except that it's common to both keys.

 

I guess there are different schools on this. My way of thinking probably comes more from analysing Jazz (for improvising purposes), where whenever there's something that looks like a II-V you think a new key (or scale if you will). I think a combination of thinking "secondary dominants" and "foreign keys" for different situations might be best.

I listened some more to the piece and there's more stuff going on later that is "foregin", I think I spotted a Cm6/Eb for example, which leads up to the part where it lands nicely on F again for a while. But yes the whole thing ends up on C eventually, so I'd agree that is the over all key of the piece.

 

The Devil's in the details!