Weekly Billboard Theory — Closer
The first time I heard The Chainsmoker’s smash hit, “Closer,” was Labor Day weekend of 2016. I was incredibly fortunate to have had a busy summer, but that meant that I had completely missed out on one of the biggest songs of the summer. I thought nothing of “Closer” as it played as background music to a fantasy football draft, but hearing the song in a bar later would prove to be a different experience. On one hand, there is nothing particularly interesting about the Chainsmoker’s anthem. On the other hand, they do a lot of stuff right. Irregardless, let’s diiiiiiiiiiive innnnnn.
The Chainsmokers ft Halsey
Tempo: 95 BPM
Key: Ab Major
Last week, I talked a bit about how “Shape of You” only utilizes the 5 pitches of the pentatonic scale. “Closer” is no different. A boring person would cry, “Wahhh, that’s boring! I’m boring!” An interesting person would realize, “Woah, The Chainsmokers and Halsey created a completely different melody using the same limited amount of pitches as Eddie Sheeran! That’s dope!” Don’t be a boring person.
“Closer” uses three chords. Like every classical piece ever uses three chords. However, The Chainsmoker utilize very different chords than Bach. This subject matter will dip a bit into the function of tonality in music so it might help to refer to my writeup on Migos’ “Bad and Bougie” to follow along if you don’t have any background in this.
Alright, so I’m gonna skim like crazy when going over some of this stuff to help explain how these ideas fit into “Closer” and pop music as a whole. A chord is when at least three notes are played simultaneously. To make the music more interesting, The Chainsmokers layer additional notes into those chords but we are gonna skip over this because there’s already gonna be a ton of info. Similar to the tonic of a scale, a chord will be built around one note: the root. The notes that we will use to finish this chord will be from the scale that we are using, in this case Ab major (this part is to help ya follow along with the example above). If we are thinking of the root as the first note of our chord, then we count up two notes to the third note of the scale to find our next note: the third. We’ll follow the same formula of skipping a note to come to the last note we need: the fifth. Look above and it should clear it up a little bit circles surrounding the notes. Brown for the root (like wood on a tree!), green for the third (like leaves!) and orange for the fifth (like different colored leaves!).
I apologize for how wordy this has gotten so far but if ya bear with me a little bit longer you’ll be able to notice these patterns in a ton of music! Tight, so I’ve mentioned earlier that “Closer” only utilizes three different chords. This isn’t that surprising for pop music and is incredibly common for classical music as well. Above, I circled the three chords found in closer. The fourth chord of the scale is circled in blue (because it has four letters), the fifth chord in green (five letters), and the sixth in yellow (I’m hilarious). In the classical music realm, we use Roman numerals to signify these chords. Here’s how that looks: fourth chord is written as IV, fifth chord would be V, and the sixth chord is written as vi (it’s lower case because it’s a minor chord, we won’t dive into that now but I don’t wanna give ya wrong info).
Above you’ll see the most common chords in classical music. For real. That link that I keep posting about how most classical music uses only chords? It’s about a certain type of analysis that reduces ‘yuuuuuge pieces of music down to those three chords. These three chords are the I, the ii (lower case because it’s minor), and the V. Out of these three chords, guess which is the most important? The one that’s based around the tonic: the I chord. What defines tonality in classical music is the relationship to the V chord and the tonic. If you can play any piano, you might recognize this. If you can’t, learn how to play “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” and you’ll notice this. The end of the main phrases go from V to I. I’ve already thrown a ton of vocab at ya so I’ll leave this on the table for now, but if you’re interested in looking into this on your own these phrase endings are called cadences.
Classical music. Snore. Trust me, I know. How does this relate to those hunks in The Chainsmokers? Well, I’ve noticed that the majority of pop music don’t got time for the relationship between the V and the I. “Closer” doesn’t even USE the tonic chord. What does this mean? I mean, not much . Things just sound different than they did a couple hundred years ago which I guess is worthy of more acclaim than “not much.”
“Closer” does some other things that I had already discussed on in other songs. It has exceptional use of texture, especially when combining Halsey’s voice with whichever dude in the Chainsmokers sings. There’s a bunch of stuff there but since it’s a song from quite a while ago I figure I’d take this week to set up a lot of future information. Again, I know there was a lot of tech-y info this week that might be a little hard to digest so hmu (hit me up) if ya got any questions about anything!
“Bad and Boujee” is back at number one for this week, followed by “Shape of You” and then “Closer.” I audibly sighed when I saw what was the next hit that I haven’t written about: “Bad Things” by Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello. This song SUCKS. I’ll tell ya why next week! Mahalo!
