Acceptable I-V-vi-IV Songs

You have to know what stinks to appreciate what's great

In an epic new video, my favorite YouTuber Pat Finnerty introduced me to a horrible concept in modern music interpolation. In a cover song, an artist performs an existing piece of music, adding their artistic flourishes, crediting the songwriting to the original artist. In sampling, an artist lifts audio from a previous recording and weaves it into their song with different degrees of sonic manipulation. Interpolation is somewhere in the middle. You take a song, change some of the lyrics and arrangement, and then call it your own.

Now, all music is interpolation. There are only so many permutations of notes that resonate with people. One of the best ways to write catchy tunes is to start with something familiar and modulate it a bit to make it unique and surprising. Artistry is elevating the familiar.

Pat’s YouTube channel posts a couple of videos a year about what makes songs stink. The song that tortured Pat this week was a blurry interpolation too far: Machine Gun Kelley and Jelly Roll’s “Lonely Road.” Pat’s right; this song is an audacious dumpster fire. They took John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and changed its name to “Lonely Road” and put some of his insipid lyrics and lousy singing on top. The chorus is literally the melody of Country Roads. The song people sing at football games!

Yes, I’m a snob, but this song really stinks. It’s just so cheap. As Pat points out, he’s interpolating a song that EVERYONE knows. You can’t take songs sung at every karaoke bar and then change their lyrics. Using the melody of “Country Roads” as your hook is worse than writing a song to the tune of Happy Birthday. It’s just cheap pandering, and unless you bring something to the table, it’s just crap. And this song is atrocious.

Pat has a lot more to say about this. As in all of his videos, there are a lot of deeper positive messages about what music is and what it means to us. There’s also a great synth version of Billy Joel’s Piano Man. You should watch it.

But the part I got stuck on was a brief screenshot of Pat’s Notes App. Pat’s videos have many recurring bits, one of which is his hatred of this I-V-vi-IV chord progression, abused by the band Train in countless insipid power ballads. The numbers here refer to the root note of the chord. If you are in the key of C, then I is C, V is G, vi is A minor (that’s why it’s lowercase), and IV is F. Strum these on the ukelele, and you get “Hey Soul Sister.” Or the intro to Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s “Over the Rainbow.” Or Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours.” Hmm. Once you start listening for the I-V-vi-IV, you’ll hear it everywhere.

Train’s blatant stealing of Kamakawiwoʻole’s ukelele is awful, but no chord progression intrinsically stinks. Pat says “I don't hate every I-V-vi-IV, just most of them and definitely the ones that make it sound like if Brett Michaels joined Mumford and Sons.” To show he means it, Pat posts a screenshot of acceptable I-V-vi-IV songs at 14:40.

My friend and fellow Pat Finnerty fan Brian Whitman threw these into a Spotify playlist:

They’re all really good! The first song, “So Lonely” by The Police is nothing but I-V-vi-IV. There are no other chords. But they hook you in by changing the feel as they go: the verses are a laid back Sting reggae groove, the chorus fast, straight-ahead rock, and they gear change up a whole step at the guitar solo. But it’s all the same chord progression. U2’s “With or Without You” is even more unwavering. Other than some short single-chord vamps after the chorus, the bass line never changes. The song is propelled by variations in the intensity of Bono’s singing, the drums, and the guitar textures.

Some of the songs hide the progression as little turns to grab the listener. You have to pay attention in “Romeo and Juliet” to hear where Mark Knopfler stitches in the I-IV-vi-V. And I’m not sure if we should count Better Than Ezra’s “Good,” as it replaces the IV major chord with a dominant 7th. But that small change is part of what makes that song so damned catchy.

What makes Pat Finnerty great is not just his humor and storytelling but how his complaining about bad music reminds us why we like music in the first place. “Lonely Road” stinks because it's audaciously lazy and transparently calculated. And it might not even be the worst interpolation out there.

As Pat says at 33:25, Pat shares a far worse offender, too terrible to even make a whole video about: Dustin Lynch and Jelly Roll’s Interpolation of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away” into “Chevrolet.” Dear God. They wrote a jingle for a car commercial and paid money to get it on the radio (though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they got paid a kickback by Chevy). The dying remnants of the music industry remain pretty gross.

The core problem with popular music is the fine line between transcendent cultural relevance and advertising slop. Yes, people produce slop and get paid for it. With reference to this terrible “Chevrolet” song, Pat says

“I know everybody's worried about the future of music with AI. How bad it's going to be and soulless and stuff like that. But I'm still worried about “I.” Don't sleep on “I.” “I” has me way more worried than AI at this point because “I” did this.”

He’s right. Part of the problem with how we wrestle with whatever these mystical AI tools do and what they are for is that we don’t like to reckon with how culture is built upon stochastic parroting. People create terrible interpolations and blurry jpegs all the time, and unlike AI, they make a profit when they do it. But Pat’s videos highlight what distinguishes us from the machines: that we can choose to be better.