(No, wait, there’s a scientific proof of this, too!)
Seriously, Christmas music is the fucking worst. But no, of course, because it’s a Christmas song, there’s a key change. (No, really, it’s true - check out the statistical analysis about three quarters of the way down this page.) Mariah Carey’s Christmas album is infested with the damn things, usually in combination with her infuriating habit of singing as many notes as humanly possible for every single syllable.Īlso on the Christmas song front: Ariana Grande’s dire Christmas song, which fairly bursts with homilies about how love is all you need and how you just need to believe and pretty much every other trite holiday season cliché. Given the abiding cheesiness of one-step-up key changes, it’s not at all surprising that their use tends to peak during December. Mariah Carey - “Miss You Most (At Christmas Time)” Yes, it’s about Bradley Nowell’s heroin addiction, and yes, it’s very sad, but dear god, what a terrible piece of music.ĥ. Imagine how much better ‘Hey Jude’ would have been with three key changes towards the end.” Kids, this is why you should not do too much cocaine.Ī mess of a song that’s less than a minute long and still manages to incorporate a key change, this time of the “just sing the entire song again in a different key” variety. Of this song, he proclaimed proudly, “There are three key changes towards the end. It’s not just your typical up-one-step thing, either - as with everything else about this song, Dion doubles down on the drama by going up two whole tones, because of course she does.Īround the time Be Here Now was released, Noel Gallagher gave Q Magazine a track-by-track rundown of his opus. The song that puts the “power” into “power ballad.” Curiously, for a song that has such a formidable reputation, it spends its first three minutes as a rather pretty, understated piece of music… and then there’s a key change, at which point it becomes the musical equivalent of a Michael Bay movie.
The fact that these changes usually occur in songs that approach emotion in a hamfistedly bombastic manner is no coincidence. Make of this what you will.Ī prime manifestation of the, “Now sing the chorus a tone higher for extra emotional effect” key change. Big(s)” is rarely used Australian slang for actual human shit. True fact: this song was #1 for about a thousand weeks in a row during the 1990s. We may get around to looking at the former in due course, but for now, it’s more fun to look at the latter - so here are ten of the poorest key changes in music, ranked from the worst to the absolute worst. The key change is like pretty much any other musical trope: if it’s used well, it can be an effective and inventive way to signal a shift in the mood or tone of a song if it’s used badly, it can be a godawful cliché that makes your ears hurt and your heart fill with existential despair.
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