hey welcome to 12tone!
I've been on a bit of a high school nostalgia kick recently, and one album that really defined
that time period for me was Green Day's American Idiot.
it was a fairly controversial album, at least in my social circles: some of my friends loved
it while others resented its departure from the more raw, DIY, pop-punk sound of Green
Day's earlier successes like Dookie and Insomniac in favor of a more heavily produced style.
but, looking back, it's hard to deny the vision of the album: with American Idiot, Green Day
managed to craft a punk rock opera, telling a dark, complex story that really resonated
with the youth of the early 'oughts and, to me at least, still holds up today, so I thought
I'd take a look at what I think turned out to be its most enduring track, Boulevard Of
Broken Dreams.
let's take it apart.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
the song starts like this.
(bang) it's a pretty common progression in modern rock that I like to call the plagal
cascade.
plagal is just a fancy word for moving from the IV chord to the I, which we get on the
loop here.
plagal motion is interesting because it feels like resolved, but compared to the traditional
V-I resolution, it's fairly weak.
it takes you home, but it doesn't really feel like you've arrived.
but that's plagal motion: what's a plagal cascade?
well, that's just when we do it a bunch of times in a row.
like, we're in the key of F, which means the IV chord is Bb, but what if we were in the
key of Bb?
well, then the IV chord would be Eb, and oh look, that's the chord that shows up right
before it. and what's the IV chord in Eb?
some sort of Ab, which we have as well.
in theory we could keep going, setting up the Ab with a Db, which we'd set up with a
Gb, and so on, eventually circling all the way back to our starting F chord, but traditionally,
these plagal cascades are four-chord loops, so this is where we stop.
it also has the advantage of making it clear where our root is: starting each loop with
a jump back up lets you know that we've reached the bottom of the slide.
and the plagal cascade, is, I think, the perfect device for a song like Boulevard.
it's a song about feeling lost, directionless, and alone, and what better way to capture
that than a series of weak resolutions that wind you back home without really delivering
you anywhere?
there's this thing in jazz called a dominant chain, where you set up your V chord with
another V chord, and you keep doing that to get this big, final, satisfying resolution
(bang) but with plagal cadences, I feel like the opposite happens: the more you stack on
top of each other, the less resolved your ultimate arrival feels.
it spreads out the sense of resolution across the cascade, numbing the effect so you're
just kinda waiting to get back to I and start over.
you passed Go, but there's no 200 dollars, just another trip around the board.
from there the vocals come in, and with them an acoustic guitar.
up to now we've just been playing power chords, but the acoustic fills in the chord qualities,
and they're roughly what we'd expect based on the key, with one exception.
in F minor, we'd expect the Bb chord to be minor, but he plays it major instead.
this is pretty common in plagal cascades, and my best guess is that it's because the
IV minor chord actually does a pretty good job resolving to I, since it contains the
b6 of the key, which is a half-step above the 5. it's still not quite as strong as going
from V to I, but it's comparable.
using IV major instead moves that note further away, helping keep the resolution from feeling
too resolved.
the orchestration here is interesting too: we start with a distorted electric guitar,
then the verse mellows that out with the acoustic, but after one time through the loop, the whole
band comes crashing in, bringing that heavy rock sound to the forefront. in the context
of the song, it feels like a brief respite, a moment of hope at the start of the journey,
before the harsh realities of the boulevard kick in in full.
after a couple times through that, we get what for lack of a better name I'm gonna call
the "ah-ah" riff, where the guitar plays this: (bang) it's a really interesting melody, emphasizing
a different note over each chord transition.
the first accented note is Ab, which is shared between F minor and Ab major, so it works
great over both chords.
the second time, though, we get what's called an anticipation, where you play a note from
the upcoming chord before we actually shift to it.
in this case, Bb isn't a part of Ab major, but it is in Eb major, and since we're about
to go there, it sets up that chord well.
from there, though, we get Ab again, except this time it doesn't belong in either chord:
we're trying to go from Eb major, where it's the 4th, to Bb major, where it's the b7, which
means in both cases it rubs pretty hard against the chord's 3rd. the fact that we heard this
same line earlier in the riff is just enough to make it still feel palettable, but it's
a clear escalation in the tension of the riff, which then gets released by the final part,
where it falls back down to F on the downbeat of the next bar. this feels almost like a
sigh of relief to me, letting go and relaxing back into the root, but they don't actually
always play it.
they usually just let the tension hang, again playing on the lack of resolution that's driving
the song.
and before we move on from the verse, I need to talk a bit about the lyrics.
not the meaning of the words, I'll leave that to my colleagues, but the way they sound.
that's right, it's time to talk poetry.
the first line of each phrase in the verse is in what's called iambic trimeter, which
isn't nearly as scary as it sounds.
"iambic" just means that it's based on an alternating pattern of one weak syllable and
one strong one, and "trimeter" just means there's three of those in the phrase.
"I walk a lonely road".
"I'm on the borderline".
sometimes they skip the first weak one, like in "Check my vital signs", but more or less,
every one of these lines has the same basic pulse, with accents falling on the 2nd, 4th,
and 6th syllables. and the rhythm of the melody supports that, placing the strong syllables
on the beats and the weak ones off them.
so everything's good, right?
well… (bang) did you catch it? did you hear the big jump up followed by a drop back down?
it's a clear, unmistakable melodic accent, and it falls on the 5th note.
that's not supposed to happen.
the 5th syllable is weak, so why are we accenting it?
well, normally, when I see this sort of misalignment, my first assumption is that it's lazy songwriting.
they had a line they really liked and just jammed it in there without considering whether
it fit with the music.
but I don't think that's the case here.
for starters, it just keeps happening.
every single time he sings this line, he places a weak syllable on the accented note, hitting
you with things like "borDERline", "ciTY sleeps", and "loneLY road".
missing that sort of thing in every verse for the entire song would be a colossal oversight.
but the bigger reason I don't think it's a mistake is that it works.
it sounds good, so who cares if it breaks some wannabe "rules" in the process? we're
making art, not painting by numbers, so if it works, it works, but hey, quick question:
why does it work?
I mean, it's not like lyrical meter isn't important, and most songs that ignore it wind
up sounding bad, so why is Boulevard an exception?
well, again, I think this goes back to what this song is.
it's about feeling disconnected, and what better way to show that than a vocal line
that's aggressively out of sync with itself?
having the melody contradict the lyrics is just another way for the narrator to tell
you how alone they really are.
anyway, from there we go to the chorus, which switches to a different four-chord loop, this
time built entirely out of power chords. we've got Db, Ab, Eb, and F, and on paper, it looks
like a key change to Ab major.
this is what's called the relative major, which means it shares all the same notes as
F minor, it just uses them differently, but if we look at these chords in that key, they
start to look pretty familiar.
not seeing it? here, let me just shift this Db chord to the end: (bang) this is what's
called the four-chord progression, and it's been a staple of rock music for decades.
it takes the four most fundamental chords in the key and arranges them in a way that
maximizes forward momentum, filled with mini-resolutions that keep things feeling directional without
ever creating any obvious stopping points.
in Boulevard, they rotate it around a bit, moving the IV chord to the start so you kick
off with a bit of plagal motion, but it's still the same basic progression. and on top
of that, the key change is even emphasized by the melody, where each line ends on Ab
to really drive home the new root.
except there's a problem: it doesn't actually sound like a key change.
it looks like it, but to my ears at least, when I listen to the song, it still sounds
like F is the root. and there's a couple reasons for this.
first of all, while the melody does end on Ab, it starts on F, and the Ab is sung over
an F chord so it doesn't really feel completely at home.
plus, shifting the Db to the beginning moves the Ab chord to the weakest part of the progression,
so rhythmically speaking it's hard to hear it as the root, whereas the F chord gets bumped
to the end, which is relatively strong.
couple that with the fact that tonality loves inertia and we were definitely playing in
F minor before, and the key change becomes one of those phantom analyses that makes sense
in theory but falls apart in practice.
it just doesn't reflect what the music actually sounds like, at least to me.
but it's still a useful exercise, because despite being in F minor, I think the best
way to understand this section is still as a modified version of the four-chord progression
from the relative major.
it exists in a sort of in-between space, borrowing a major device but twisting it around to fit
in minor.
we're taking something bright and hopeful and tainting it with melancholy darkness:
you have a companion, but it's your shadow.
you hear sounds, but they're your own heartbeat.
you wish someone would find you, but until then, you're just gonna keep walking.
alone.
we go through that a couple times and then the chorus ends on C, the V, before resolving
back to I at the start of the verse progression. this is the biggest resolution in the song,
giving us a moment of arrival before we wind up right back in that same plagal cascade,
but it still feels kinda like a collapse to me.
there's this huge dynamic ramp up, with everyone getting super loud and excited about finally
getting to the V chord, but then they suddenly pull the rug out from under us and we're right
back on the Boulevard.
it feels almost like a mirage, like we see a resolution but it's not actually there.
it's V to I, sure, but because of the dynamics, it still doesn't really feel satisfying.
anyway, the last section we need to cover is the outro: (bang) and honestly, this confused
me for a bit.
most of these chords exist in F minor, but I didn't have an explanation for what they
were actually doing there.
then I realized that, listening to it, it didn't really sound like F minor anymore:
this time, it did feel like a shift to Ab, the relative major.
I think that's aided in part by the fact that the loop is three bars long: in Western music
we mostly break things up into groups of 2, 4, 8, and sometimes 16, so picking a number
in between those cracks makes it easy to lose track of where the section actually begins
and ends, and I pretty quickly found myself hearing the Ab chord as the start.
and viewing it in that key once again makes labeling easier: starting from Ab, we've got
the I chord, the VI, the IV, and the V. this is what's called the Doo-Wop Changes, another
incredibly classic progression in popular music.
it uses the same chords as the four-chord progression, but arranges them differently
so that, instead of creating maximum momentum, you create maximum resolution.
the whole thing works to set up a big V-I.
but, again, there's a problem: this doesn't sound much like the traditional Doo-Wop Changes,
largely because we have a couple extra chords getting in the way.
the first of these is the E chord, which in the key of Ab is the bVI. this serves to create
tonal ambiguity: we're using power chords, so whether we're in major or minor, the I,
IV, and V chords will all sound exactly the same, but the VI chord won't.
its root is one of the notes that gets changed when we switch between those two scales, and
here we're seeing both versions, the VI chord from major and the bVI from minor, being played
back to back, which means we're not really in either scale.
if anything, we're in both.
the narrator feels trapped between two worlds, trapped, to borrow a phrase from elsewhere
on the album, between rage and love, and fittingly enough, so are the chords.
the last thing we need to explain, though, is the D chord, and I think the best way to
understand that is to look at what it's not: specifically, it's not Eb. again, the whole
point of the progression is to set up this huge, satisfying V-I, and it does that, but
at the last second, the V chord slides down a half-step, ruining the resolution.
we've finally found the signpost that points us back home, but right before we go there,
we trip, stumble a bit, and wind up back where we started, ready to try again.
there's no resolution, no end, no sense of finality, so even though on paper it looks
like the Doo-Wop Changes, its musical impact is fundamentally different.
often, these sorts of added chords don't really change the overall structure of a progression,
but since the ultimate resolution is such a big part of the Doo-Wop Changes, this one
small tweak takes an incredibly familiar skeleton and turns it into something almost unrecognizable.
heck, even when the song finally does finish, it's not on Ab or F. it's on the E chord,
which was never the root, not even really a part of either key we were trying to play
in.
it's just another missed opportunity to resolve, because when you're on the Boulevard of Broken
Dreams, all you can do is keep walking.
anyway, thanks for watching.
as always, this song was chosen by my patrons on Patreon: the poll to pick the next one
goes up over there next week.
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