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Taylor Swift has an interesting practice of going back to the usual chord developments time and time once again. So I chose to go through her whole discography and work out which chord progressions she is using the most.
Here's the full list of tunes for each chord development I discuss in this video:.
I V vi IV.
– Ought to've Said No.
– Teardrops On My Guitar.
– Bye bye infant.
– Romance.
– Champagne issues.
– Mean.
– Crazier.
– Change.
– All too well.
– Eyes open.
– I understood you were trouble.
– Out of the woods.
– Clean.
– This love.
– The archer.
– Midnight Rain.
– Cornelia street.
– We mored than happy.
– Cold as you.
– Epiphany.
– Christmas Needs To Be Something More.
I V ii IV.
– Wildest dreams.
– I know places.
– Beautiful eyes.
– Just the young.
– Crazier.
– Invisible.
– Brave.
– The outside.
– Looped with a smile.
– You belong with me.
– Superman.
– The method I loved you.
– Afterglow.
– Unfortunate stunning terrible.
– Speak now.
– Daylight.
– Trip cars and truck.
– King of my heart.
– Bigger Than The Whole Sky.
– Treacherous.
I vi IV V.
– Blank area.
– I want you would.
– Teardrops on my guitar.
– White horse.
– Sweeter Than Fiction.
– The best day.
– Ronan.
– It's time to go.
– London boy.
– Illicit Affairs.
– Tim McGraw.
– Beautiful.
– Me.
– Last kiss.
– This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.
– Everything has actually changed.
– New Year's Day.
vi IV I V.
– Teardrops on my guitar.
– You're not sorry.
– Stimulates fly.
– Christmas Must Be Something More.
– Better than revenge.
– Snow on the beach.
– A Place in this World.
– Haunted.
– Marjorie.
IV I V vi.
– All you had to do is remain.
– We are never ever getting back together.
– Bad blood.
– Wonderland.
– Breath.
– Tell me why.
– I Don't Wan na Live Permanently.
– Anti hero.
– Midnight rain.
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0:00 Intro.
1:15 her fifth preferred progression.
2:43 her fourth preferred development.
4:22 her 3rd preferred progression.
8:22 her 2nd favourite progression.
11:35 Taylor's favourite progression!
14:41 is this an issue?
16:49 Patreon.
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this is inspiring. it always feels a bit like cheating anytime i use a chord progression more than once
@Badgasaurus how
@Badgasaurus it’s statistically impossible. There are only so many progressions and songwriters write hundreds of songs (usually all in genre)
@Badgasaurus why?
Lots of cope in this section. If you canāt come up with multiple ways to express your ideas musically then it does feel like cheating, or at the least laziness.
@The Sahel Yeah but, you as a writer can at least not utilise the same progression ad nauseam. Is that too much to ask for?
I am a fan of Taylorās, and I really enjoyed her recent album Folklore. If she broke out of these familiar chord progressions a bit, I think it would make her music better.
your mashups here are really beautiful!
as a huge swiftie, I was amazed at how many times some of these have been used
great video!
the mashups are so beautiful!! Honestly this video was so well done and edited perfectly
Right after I read your comment, I paid extra attention to the audio editing. It was right around 4:00… talk about bad timing! (I mean the deep rumble stuff… probably I wouldn’t have even noticed it if not for the just reading the comment about great editing. This isn’t a complaint about the rumble (it didn’t bother me), just noting a weird coincidence of timing while reading g the comments. Plus, I had to pause the vid to prepare myself for the 3 truly overused chord progressions… perfect time to write my own comment…EDIT: ah, the rumble is during all the Nord recordings, I think. Maybe check for this in the future.
Right? It actually pulled even more emotion out of otherwise relatively light sounding songs like Love Story
Honestly though,David has done an absolutely wonderful job with this
@Adam dude no one cares
@David Bennett Piano was that just a way to get around copyright strikes?
As a Taylor fan, I love to sing the lyrics of one TS song over the chord progression of another when I hear they match, and I try to see how many other of her songs I can fit in. She is such a talented storyteller and songwriter that the chords are just the vessel for her words – and she is a pop writer after all soā¦ those satisfying chords are gonna come up a lot to make hit songs.
Honestly, itās quite understandable that these are her favorite chords if you remember her background is playing a guitar and all that country music.
Those chords (C, G, D, Am, F) are basically the most popular chords and kinda the first chords any person learning a guitar would in fact learn. Lots of rock music (played with a guitar obviously) is played basically with only those chords, with a few additions here and there.
It all makes sense. She isnāt some Jimmy Hendricks type of a person, sheās a lyricist first, so it makes sense that her music might be seen as quite basic in terms of chords.
@Al the Alligator check out Elton John’s masterful, intuitive, instinctive off-road forays
@johnson johns I love Elton John, but I don’t see what that has to do with my reply lol. Explain
@Al the Alligator can’t
@johnson johns aight
@Rashotcake would you get bored of having a billion dollars?
Iām not even a big Swift fan but I love this, it shows how even if her genre has changed over the years she still writes similarly to her old country music
Musically, she’s boring AF. And yall call it, keeping her unique style. Good one. I’ll remember it the next time I want to insult-without-insulting some artist for being very, very, very limited & repetitive. “Oh, she’s so loyal to her own style & vision” wink wink.
Without saying I like it or dislike it, I’ll say that I’d be hella bored if I were the artist. I feel the same way about 12-bar-blues artists, or reggae 2-bar bands. Dontcha wanna try something else? Especially Swift, who can do just about anything she pleases and retain fans. Try some wacky new chords, collaborations, instrumentation, beats,… I know she’s a Beatles fan. Let’s look at all the experimentation they did. John would have hit himself in the head with a rock if he had had to keep playing Love Me Do music, and Paul is always trying something new.
@ghost mall Using super common (and overrused) chord progressions isn’t a “style” lol
@Mitchell Brown I didnāt say it was, dodo. The chord progressions along with her instrumental, melodic and production decisions is a style. Iām not claiming sheās Miles Davis over here or anything, just that she does have a recognizable sound within the pop sphere. I donāt think thatās a controversial take
@jcarty123 Musically everything pop is boring. She is an artist targeting teens/young girls as her audience and in that category I have mad respect. She has limited grasp of musical concepts, plays her own instrument and seems open in regards to the fact that she’s not a musicians musician, this is all I can ask of a pop artist. Most of them surround themselves with incredible musicians and give little to no credit. Also, in her Demographic (Young/Teen girls), she is in a powerful position of providing consistent music to people who DONT understand theory. All of us on this channel have a higher than average understanding of what goes into making music, people who just listen to Taylor Swift have no idea she’s reusing chord progressions.
Even as a budding music theory snob (and marginal TS fan), I’ve never detected all these chord progressions she uses so much–I think it’s a bit of a testament to how she’s able to make them sound so different with her lyrics, vocal melodies and rhythms, etc. It’s cool; thanks for the video!
Exactly. She may re-use common chord progressions but thereās quite a bit of timbral variation throughout her catalog, from soft and acoustic to distorted and electronic
A 4-chord loop is a SMALL chord progression. “Let It Be” does use the I-V-vi-IV progression for the FIRST 4 chords of its verse. But it doesn’t LOOP that way for the entire song. I-V-vi-IV is just the beginning of an 8 chord verse. And then its chorus uses different chords and then its instrumental bridge uses yet another set of chords. Try singing the full “Let It Be” lyrics (which are excellent) over a loop of I-V-vi-IV. You can do it, but it’s not nearly as good.
Elvis Costello is another writer for whom lyrics are extremely important. But he doesn’t limit his chord progressions (and thus limit his MELODIES) like Taylor Swift does. There’s nothing wrong with a familiar loop now and then. And a one-chord song like “Chain of Fools” can be magnificent. But when every song is a 4-chord loop, it’s BORING. At least 12 bar blues loops are 12 bars instead of only 4.
Let it Be seems to do some interesting variations, including where it walks down the bass, from memory adding a D so F becomes Dm7. Much better than a lot of 4 chord songs.
Anyway, I’d like to see some statistics that represents how often that chord progression was used, before and after the release and success of Let it be. That’d be interesting.
The first time you played the 4 chords of her most used progression (I V vi IV), my mind automatically filled in “… speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”
Amen!
I really like your conclusion to this, that chords are colours and painting and liking the same colours isn’t always a bad thing. I think Taylor Swift does it well because while I knew some of her songs had similar progressions, I had no idea about the amount that shared the exact same ones (and I’ve been a big Taylor Swift fan since my teenage years when I first heard Love Story). They sound similar but different enough, and I enjoy that, honestly. It made me curious about an album that’s just one singular progression but each song is done differently, trying to make it sound unique despite sharing that progression. I don’t know if anyone has done this – and I’m definitely not the right person to do this!!! – but I would be really interesting in it if they have.
I like this idea alot, I’m probably going to steal it for a project. But I’ll let you know when it’s done haha
Hey David, love your chord progression analyses. Could you do a session on one of the most deeply moving progressions I know. It’s by Rachmaninoff. It occurs towards the end of the slow movement of his 4th piano concerto. But it’s much more powerfully done in his Etude Tableau No. 3 in C minor. It’s such a haunting, deeply moving melody with harmonies that move me to tears. Maybe you can figure out why or how it conveys such powerful emotion.
Those piano and vocal collages you did were sublime! Iād legit listen to those outside of this video
Fantastic video! The amount of work involved in splicing and tempo-shifting those mashups must have been immense, but so worth it.
Chord recycling aside, I think Taylorās genius (and yes, i think she is one) is in finding unique and memorable hooks that fit over these classic progressions. Her lyrics are relatable and often striking too, but her melodic sense is unmatched, while never being pretentious (unlike this comment š¬)
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I second the lyrics being the key selling point of her music. I think the variety of styles and layers of textures she and the musicians she works with are able to bring in with instrumentation also helps keep her music fresh. Also, great job on the mashups.
This is great. Everything on the list uses I-IV-V-vi chords except for one ii chord in there. Amazing that she can vary up the melodies enough to make the songs sound relatively unique. I guess thatās why there isnāt an end to pop music in sight, even though 90% of it uses the same chords.
I just finished a songwriting lesson with my music teacher and played this video. I’m a songwriter who has been following Taylor’s carrer since 2008. The mashup of her discography made me emotional. Great work!
A student of mine told me that she has a friend who only knows 4 chords and played the same 4 chords for an hour and figured out 20 Taylor songs.
Also, you should really do a video on Bob Dylan’s chord progressions. A lot of people say that his lyrics are better than his music and while that is largely true, he’s quite clever with his chord choices and very often they act as the song’s main hook, more than the melody. You can recognize several Dylan songs just by the chords.
Iāve been arranging covers of 13 songs from each of her albums (did 13 Days of Red last year for the re-recording release) so thanks for saving me a lot of time going forward š Also the mashups are a great example of how she could go about performing more than 10% of her output for the Eras tour. š
I think of her music like a Trojan horse the simple chord progressions are easy to listen to and very familiar to everyone listening and then the lyrics are like bam clever wordplay and brilliant storytelling and I think it’s that mix that’s her secret to success