Axis of Awesome 4 chords song. How does this band play so many top songs just with 4 chords when the songs sound very different? What are the chords?

Question

In: 4

Answer 1

1. There are a LOT of popular songs. Even if music generally used chords at random there’d be a lot of songs that used the same ones.
2. Songs don’t use chords at random. In the same way that some colours look good together in an outfit, some chords sound good when used near each other and in certain orders. That includes structure too, like using 4 chords in a verse or a chorus is something that just ‘sounds good’ in pop music and so it’s very common.
3. Common influence. If song A is popular, the writers of song B and song C might incorporate elements of it. And then the writers of songs D and E incorporate elements of those. There are many elements to be influenced from. It’s useful to recognise that chord progression is one element that transfers really well across genres, over time, different instrumentation etc. So popular chord progressions tend to proliferate, especially within a subset of music like ‘popular western songs in the last 50 years’. Sometimes that re-use is a conscious choice, sometimes it’s unconscious.
4. Familiarity is an influence on popularity. This is kind of the same as the above point but from the listener’s point of view rather than the writer’s. When I hear a song that sounds like something I’ve previously liked, there’s a good chance I like the new one too.
5. The original 4 chords aren’t necessarily all exactly the same as the ones used in the video. ‘Transposing’ or ‘changing the key’ of a song means taking the starting point of it, for example in C, and instead starting it at another pitch, for example in G. What the ear hooks into often is the ‘interval’ from one chord to a next; for example if you hear a C followed by an Am, then some time later you hear a G followed by an Em, those two progressions will sound very similar – because the interval from C-Am is the same as the interval from G-Em. This means if I write a song using Am, F, C and G, and you write a song using Em, C, G and D, someone can play those two songs using my Am progression or your Em progression by transposing one of them. That’s what’s happening in the video, it’s not quite ‘all of these songs have the same four chords’, it’s ‘all of these songs have the same progression of intervals and we’ve transposed some of them to put them in a common key’.