Wednesday, April 13, 2016

"Butcher's Tale" and "Friends of Mine"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I was thinking about this a few days ago, but I forgot until earlier to-day.

Part of the chord progressions for "Butcher's Tale" and "Friends of Mine" are sort of the same, which makes some sense since they're both Chris White songs.

There's a progression in "Butcher’s Tale" that's F major, Bb major, F major, A major, and there's a progression in "Friends of Mine" that's C major, F major, C major, E major.  There's a significant difference though in that "Butcher's Tale" is in D minor and "Friends of Mine" is in C major, so if you write those sections of the chord progressions in Roman numerals, it's III VI III V for "Butcher's Tale" and I IV I III for "Friends of Mine."  The relationship between each group of four chords is the same even though they start on different scale degrees and are in different keys.

I should add a disclaimer to this that while I think I'm right, I don't have any training in music theory so I could have gotten this wrong.