Can you take me high enough?: 24 songs with a pivotal key change

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As guitarist Nigel Tufnel despairs to director Marty DiBergi in Spinal Tap, once your amps are turned up all the way to 11, “Where do you go from there? Where?” Many songwriters stuck in a creative corner kick up the jams with a tried and true chestnut: the key change. This showy yet effective tool can underline a song’s true meaning, turn a simple ditty into an epic saga, or highlight just how strongly Sisqó feels about thongs. The below list features two dozen songs that took it just a little bit higher.

Watch the video above for some highlights, or read on to get the full story.

previous arrow2-3. The Beatles, “Penny Lane” (1967), “Hey Jude” (1973) next arrow

As with many things in pop music, The Beatles took the idea of the key change and perfected it. The warm-up is “Penny Lane,” Paul McCartney’s paean to his hometown street. In this change, the shift in the song’s register reflects the transition of the narrator’s own story, as the change is teased by the lyric “very strange.” Which, at that time in music, it certainly was: Producer George Martin considered it a bold and innovative shift in pop-song structure, and called it the band’s greatest single. A year later, “Hey Jude” perfected the formula. The perfectly timed key change in that seven-minute-plus long epic turns the coda of the song into a spectacular anthem for the ages. It essentially flips the main chord progression, and thereby flips the switch into classic song status. “Take a sad song and make it better,” indeed. [Alex McCown]

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