It began with a noticing. I’d been drawing maps of the classics — all those glorious 80s songs in the key of E — and something odd kept not happening. Nobody, in any of them, ever touched the seventh chord. D♯ diminished: the strange one, the path so overgrown that every songwriter walks past as though it isn’t there. Why? What had it done to deserve this? What does a chord have to sound like to be left out of every song?
That was the curiosity, and on its own it would have made an interesting exercise and a dull song — an intellectual challenge is a spark with no tinder under it. But it found its emotional ground in a scene I couldn’t shake: Elton John in Rocketman, at the bottom of the staircase, hopeless and full of regret — the older self speaking back to the younger musician who dreamt of perfection and possibility and got carried away by it all. That feeling of standing in your own shadow. Dancing with it.
Two things, put together. The challenge and the staircase. So I set myself the task: use every chord in the scale — all seven, including the weird one — and be quite deliberate about the surprises along the way.
Of the two tales told by this campfire, this is the one that went the whole distance — caught, tended, written, recorded, mixed, mastered and released into the world. Have a listen while you read:
The map
If this map looks strange, The Songs will teach you to read it — but you don’t need it to hear the story.
What the map shows, if you look closely
Every chord in the key gets used — that was the deal. But notice where the diminished appears: exactly twice, once near the beginning and once at the end, carrying the tension out and then resolving it home — and never in the repeating section, because a surprise repeated is just furniture. The repeats do the structural work; the strange chord does the feeling.
And there are quieter choices hiding in the weave. Instead of a plain A major, the song reaches for an Amaj7 — a G♯ folded into the chord for a deeper, wider tonality. The B slides up through a broken G♯m shape before settling onto that Amaj7, so the G♯ keeps singing through the change. And the passing notes that walk down to the A borrow a step from outside the key — a D natural where you’d expect D♯ — G♯, F♯, E, D. Small things. But songs are made of small things, deliberately placed, the way a path through the woods is made of single stones.
Every song in these two tales began the same way: something in the head and something in the chest, struck together until they caught. Yours are already flying about somewhere, waiting for your tower to be tall enough. So — one last question before you go wandering: what’s your weird chord? The one you’ve been told not to use?