Can’t Stop The Feeling by Justin Timberlake (Part 2/2) — real world music theory
This is part 2 of my analysis of the song „Can’t Stop The Feeling“ by Justin Timberlake in terms of music theory and its harmonic content. The idea of these articles is to bring the dry topic of music theory to the real world and help you understand why songs like „Can’t Stop the Feeling“ work and sound like they do. If you want to start at the beginning, then jump right to part 1 of this article. For all others: let’s continue with the pre-chorus here in part 2…
Pre-Chorus (continued)
The last two chords of the pre-chorus are a cadence leading back to the tonic of the chorus. You might ask, how this cadence (Fm Bb13sus4) can lead back to a C major tonic chord!? After all, these two chords are a ii-V7 cadence in the key of Eb (!). To solve this mistery, let’s first give this cadence it’s name: this is the backdoor progression. It’s called backdoor progression, because it kind of sneaks in to the tonic through the backdoor ;). But why does it work?
The backdoor progression (or iv-bVII7) works for several reasons:
- It has a well known and convincing „inner“ structure: it’s essentially a ii-V7 progression. The ear tolerates this yank to another key, because it recognizes familiarity in this inner structure. In fact you…
