Flat Seven

 by Zac Bentz

There’s one particular piece of musical language that’s been a constant source of joy, confusion, clarify, and general life-affirmation since long before I had any sort of critical understanding of the form, a technique that tickles my brain so deeply I’ve liked virtually every song I’ve heard that uses it, completely regardless of genre. My musical “cellar door,” if you will. It’s the I-♭VII-IV chord progression.

I don’t know much music theory, but here’s the basic breakdown of what that means. There’s 8 notes in a major scale. Let’s use the key of C major as an example – we start at C, then go to D, E, F, G, A, B, then return to C, but an octave higher. Numbers are a quick and easy way to determine which chords we can play without deviating from the key of C. For example, if we want to play the common 1-4-5-4 progression, we first determine the first, fourth, and fifth notes on the C major scale. Go back and look at that list. C is first, F is fourth, and G is fifth. So just play a bar of C, a bar of F, a bar of G, and another bar of F. So the I-♭VII-IV progression would be C, B♭, and F.

I can’t overstate how many songs I’ve tried to write using this progression. Every time I sit down to write a song, whatever key I’m in, my gut instinct is always to incorporate the 1, flat 7, and 4. It’s like an addiction – and it means a lot of what I write just sounds like the same song over and over again. But I can’t help it. Every time I hear it, it’s like every single layer of reality and perception aligns for a moment, and I’m swept up in the immense beauty of this musical phrase that somehow awakens both deep melancholy and profound groove, a pensive hillbilly swagger that feels supernaturally aligned with whatever wavelength my brain operates on. It’s a constant across everything from bluegrass to psychedelic rock, and in my opinion is a vital element of the connective tissue that binds those genres and everything in between them.

Some of my favorite examples of this off the top of my head are The Outfit’s “Tragic Head,” the opener to my favorite record of theirs, Cobra Poems; Primal Scream's "Loaded;" “St. Stephen” by the Grateful Dead; the relatively recent “Words” by Bayonne; Pavement’s “Father to a Sister of Thought,” their most explicitly country-inspired cut; and a whole host of others I’ve been listening to my entire life, from all corners of musical history. I love it deeply. I always will. It’s indistinguishable to me from my love of music as a whole. I’ll never stop writing songs with it. And if you want to write a song I’m guaranteed to love, just toss it in there. Please. As a favor.