The 10 weirdest chords used in popular songs
Writing a pop song doesn’t have to be the most complicated thing in the world. Since the lion’s share of most songs on the charts can be hammered out with just four chords moved up and down different keys, it’s not like all writers are trying to rewrite Bach whenever they make music. There are times when artists need to start exploring, and artists from Nirvana to Steely Dan have put chord anomalies right in the middle of their hits.
Then again, what makes these chords so different? Not every chord is meant to sound nice, but each of them serves a purpose in telling the story of a song, either to take someone to a different place tonally or push them to the next chord in the sequence that feels much better on the ears.
Although none of these chords are meant to keep the listener satisfied throughout the length of a song, the right collection of notes can bring an air of refinement into the mix. One minute, you were writing a simple ode to your hometown with a handful of chords, and suddenly, there are these mysterious chords that make the song sound much more nuanced.
Given how many pop songs follow a certain formula to the letter, seeing some of these out in the wild is refreshing to hear, almost as if the professionals of the world are finding ways to hide their clever chords amongst the normal pop fare. It’s not always the easiest way of writing songs, but sometimes the best way to hide a chord is in plain sight.
10 weirdest chords to be used in pop songs:
10. ‘Quicksand’ – David Bowie
If there was anything expected when picking up a David Bowie record, it was hearing something that no one else would make. Bowie always prided himself on his trademark weirdness, and normally that meant taking whatever song that he could and turning it on its head ever so slightly. ‘Quicksand’ may have just been a typical ballad throughout most of its runtime, but the chorus throws a lot of wrenches into the mix to throw people off.
As Bowie sings his lyrics about self-belief, he adds a lot of diminished chords between the main chord sequence to push the track along. By nature, most diminished chords are meant to sound unresolved, as if they need somewhere to go, and they act as a way of pushing the chords into the next line in the measure, either falling down to another major chord or lifting up to a minor chord.
It’s also rather appropriate that Bowie would choose this song to do this with, considering he’s talking about being confused about one’s place in the world while the chord progression itself is unsure of where it wants to go. Bowie may have gotten emotion out of every player he worked with, but it’s saying something when even the harmonic structure of the song is painting the picture better than words ever could.
9. ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’ – Jeff Buckley
We probably didn’t realise what we had on our hands with Jeff Buckley. It may have been easy to write him off as yet another dreamy heartthrob amongst the thousands of guitar heroes of the 1990s, but Buckley was far from just another man with a golden voice. He was an experienced musical connoisseur, and one of his most aching ballads included a chord that most needed to go to great lengths to figure out.
As we get to the pre-chorus of ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’, what could have just been another dominant chord shifts into a weird extension of a jazz chord that sounds more at home on a fusion album than anything rock-related. Though most guitarists can pick out the F# in the bass, it’s a finger twister trying to get the rest of the chord right, especially when it’s being used for a split second to go back to the B minor chord.
In the context of the song, the fact that Buckley can play something this complicated and sing at the same time is both a testament to his skills and a feat of superhuman physical and mental strength. Buckley may have been inspired by greats like Led Zeppelin, but these were chord choices that even Jimmy Page wouldn’t touch.
8. ‘Josie’ – Steely Dan
By the time Steely Dan started becoming famous, they weren’t afraid of sounding grown-up. They had already turned in time in their early career playing the standard brand of rock and roll, and it turned out that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen wanted nothing to do with that kind of harmony. It was time to graduate to something more sophisticated, and ‘Josie’ decided to flex its complex chords within the first few bars of the music.
Almost structured like a jazz standard, the opening fanfare at the beginning of the song has every instrument moving slowly down the scale before finally landing on the home key. While everyone’s just waiting for Fagen’s voice at this point, the few chords that precede include what the band called ‘mu’ chords, which are based on different inversions of major and minor chords where the third interval is on the top of the chord.
Just like any Steely Dan song, the whole goes by almost without you noticing it, including a handful of chords that go by that seem like they’re intentionally trying to make the song sound even more fucked up. Far more musical geniuses have come before Steely Dan, and there will be plenty more after, but how often can someone say they actually have a chord they named themselves?
7. ‘Breathe’ – Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd never made music intended for a specific audience. They were most likely making music for themselves half the time, and whatever they spit out would be in response to where they were in their lives. Roger Waters already had the concept for Dark Side of the Moon centring around a descent into madness, but Richard Wright should be the one credited for the moody texture of ‘Breathe’.
As the album opens with screaming, the listener is thrown into the first theme in E minor, moving around between just two chords. By the time the song plays out, you’re going to need to find a way to get back to home base at some point. Most people would have chosen to just play the fifth to bring everything home, but Wright’s love of jazz led him to go outside the box for a second.
Flipping between the Hendrix chord and a jazz chord that he borrowed from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the strange feeling evoked by that movement makes the world of this tune feel that much more ominous. The entire album may have to deal with what drives someone to madness, and with a chord like this trapped in the middle of everything, it seems to represent that one side of the mind that’s always veering towards the abnormal.
6. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – The Beatles
The Beatles can always be relied on to do things outside the norm. Even though they wrote the rulebook for what pop songs would sound like for years to come, they weren’t afraid to take a risk every time they went into the studio with a song. That meant bringing some wild chords to the mix, but ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is in a class by itself because it’s nearly impossible to play on just one guitar.
Compared to other bands that try to make chords that blend well, this is, in essence, two chords stacked on top of one another to introduce the song right from the start. Although George Harrison played a Fadd9 chord, John Lennon layered that with Dsus4 while Paul McCartney played a high D bass note underneath everything. You’re not out of the woods yet if you’re trying to play it either, especially because Ringo Starr hits a kickdrum somewhere in between the storm of different sounds.
While the chord has been boggling the minds of Fab fans to this day, it might be better that it remains somewhat of a mystery. The Beatles were already on their way to becoming musical magicians when they entered the studio, and the number one rule of every magician is to never give away the trick too early.
5. ‘Never Gonna Let You Go’ – Sergio Mendes
Of all the songs to fit under strange and unusual, the realm of easy listening doesn’t come up very often. This is the kind of music reserved for the safe corners of the music business, and if there were any rock in it, to begin with, it would be a light electric guitar and maybe a few distorted lead lines if the writer was feeling fancy that day. Although Sergio Mendes may not have been the one who wrote ‘Never Gonna Let You Go’ in full, the amount of chords in this song almost feels like they were picked at random.
On first listen, the song just seems like the same kitschy schlock you would hear coming out of those old easy-listening compilation albums from the 1990s. Once both singers start harmonising with each other, the entire thing seems to jump up a notch. It already wasn’t the most stable chord progression, but fasten your seatbelts…we got some key changes.
As if the tune’s structure wasn’t already challenging enough, the entire track features so many chord changes that it’s hard to keep up, especially when the band starts playing inversions of different chords that would work in a jazz club rather than at the top of the pop charts. Compared to the other songs that use unusual chord structures, this feels like it was written on a dare to see how many chord anomalies the writer could cram into one tune.
4. ‘Serve the Servants’ – Nirvana
For most musical aficionados, there’s a good chance many of you are rolling your eyes to see a band like Nirvana on this list. Kurt Cobain never claimed to be the best guitarist in the world, but the chords that he used gave the band a unique vocabulary that no one else had, especially with the sus4 chord he would use out of necessity whenever he played his first power chords. The one reason that ‘Serve the Servants’ stands out amongst the rest is that it’s impossible to describe what this chord actually is.
Cobain had been known to fiddle around with different chords before the tape rolled, and this was no exception. Instead of just trying to make something that built up like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, this chord throws you into the world of In Utero, with everything at the very front of the mix before going back to normal (by Cobain’s standards) chords for most of the verse and chorus.
If ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a way for The Beatles to usher you into their album, this is like that in reverse, as Cobain deliberately tries to make something off-putting from the start. Nirvana were already going through their fair share of shakeups after Nevermind, and from the first time you heard in In Utero, they were making music that didn’t sound like it wanted to be listened to.
3. ‘Purple Haze’ – Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix tended to have his own musical vocabulary whenever he sat down to write a song. He may have had his roots in the sounds of blues, rock, and R&B, but people could not accurately describe Hendrix unless they saw footage of him doing it himself. If the opening tritone of ‘Purple Haze’ didn’t already put someone on edge, just wait until they got to the verse to see what Hendrix was rocking for the main chord.
Dubbed ‘The Hendrix’ chord shortly after it was used, the main chord of ‘Purple Haze’ is a sharp nine chord, which involves both the major and minor intervals in one chord. Although that sounds like it should be dreadful to hear, the fact that they are spaced out so much on the fretboard makes for an interesting crunch whenever Hendrix plays it, especially with a healthy amount of distortion and wah.
If you know anything about what Hendrix’s music was all about, the fact that he made a chord out of both major and minor notes says more about him than anything else. This wasn’t a man concerned with making run-of-the-mill blues rock. He was opening up doors for what music could be, and it didn’t have to necessarily be major or minor to sound good.
2. ‘Sir Duke’ – Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder feels like the music incarnate whenever he starts playing. Some performers might be able to hang it up once they leave the stage, but whenever Wonder steps up to the keyboard, plays the harmonica, or opens his mouth to sing, it’s almost as if the music is pouring out of every pore in his body. That doesn’t come from listening to just one genre, and if Wonder was paying homage to Duke Ellington, he was going to do it the right way.
While ‘Sir Duke’ starts off nicely with a slinky groove behind it, we already know that we’re in for something strange when the pre-chorus starts by going down and up different seventh chords chromatically. By the time we reach the chorus, everything should be smooth sailing…until Wonder throws in a big ol’ F minor chord in the middle of things.
For anyone who knows music theory, this is probably the most unflattering chord that Wonder could have played in the home key of B, but his way of weaving together a melody makes the whole thing seem like the most natural chord extension in the world. Most artists have tried their hand at putting different pieces together to suit whatever the song needs, but leave it to Wonder to take something that many would consider the most dissonant sound imaginable and make it sound easy.
1. ‘God Only Knows’ – The Beach Boys
By the time The Beach Boys got around to making Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson was already starting to hone his craft in the studio. The days of writing surf music were done, and it was time for him to go into his studio playground and see what he could develop. While most of the tracks followed the different conventions of music theory, Wilson somehow managed to take the strangest chords he could find and put together the best love song ever made.
Although most people come to a Beach Boys record for the singing and the harmonies, the different chord extensions being played by The Wrecking Crew sound like you’re about to listen to something unsettling. As Wilson works his way through the verses, his melody goes in a million different directions before finally settling down in the key of A, only to go back into the kind of chord progression that would leave some classical musicians shaking their heads as to how he came up with it.
Wilson was more interested in quoting his own heart in this song, though, and maybe the fact that everything sounds so dissonant is because of how confusing love can sometimes be. Love is complicated for anyone to figure out, but by putting it into the space of a cute pop song, Wilson made a sequence of chords that could stand alongside the Beethovens of the world.