I heard there was a secret chord cord

As a non-musical lover of music I’m a sucker for those who can show me, at the technical level of their construction, how the songs that move me actually work. And I’ve as big an appetite as the next guy for a detective yarn well told.

When the two combine, I’m all ears.

So it was when classical composer Howard Goodall, featured in The Fab Four: a very personal view, dissected two McCartney compositions – Eleanor Rigby  and Penny Lane – to show how major lifts of the kind used in a zillion pop songs are twinned to such haunting effect with minor falls. He doesn’t say Paul sat down with menace aforethought to insinuate into either the Plagal Cadence; the E-Minor Dorian. Rather …

… he was an intuitive composer and it felt right for their poetic imagery. Eleanor Rigby is without doubt one of the most brilliant and poignant songs ever written and its tense brooding soundscape isn’t merely good luck. Even at 24 years old Paul McCartney knew exactly what sound he was after.

Not for nothing did Bob Dylan, whose personal relationship with the man – unlike the warmth of that with George Harrison, or the edginess of that with John Lennon – was never close, hold McCartney up as one of the three greats of 20th century popular music.

Talk of His Bobness brings me from musical detective work on the Beatles to that on the late great Leonard Cohen. Finding themselves with same date concerts in Vienna, the two met one afternoon in a discreet cafe to sip coffee and talk shop. Dylan asked how long Cohen had taken to write his monumental Hallelujah. Knowing how fast Dylan – a great but very different and more slaphappy wordsmith than Cohen – can bang out an anthem or ballad to ring down the decades and enthral generations yet to be born, his embarrassed fellow songster fessed up to it having taken two years.

Later he would admit that he’d lied. It took him five. And thereby hangs a tale.

In 1984 the career of Leonard Cohen, to whom I’ve also dedicated posts, was at rock bottom. A run of three albums containing many a good song and three or four great ones – but marred by wrist-slitting self-indulgence (Songs of Love and Hate), atypically thin material (New Skin for the Old Ceremony) and a deeply ill-advised pairing with Phil Spector (Death of a Ladies Man) – had done it few favours.

With some difficulty he got his Columbia record label, on the verge of dropping him, to release his seventh studio album, Various Positions. It houses Hallelujah, along with quiet gems like the ethereal yearning of Night Comes On, and the spiritual surrender of If it Be Your Will, and was passably well received. But it took years – and the boost of an album of covers by his gifted former backing vocalist, Jennifer Warnes – for his career to take a markedly upward turn. And it took decades – and the boost of covers by Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley, Bono, Bob Dylan and a few score others – for that magnificent song to gain the status it has today, as one of the greatest lyrical compositions of all time.

Sitting comfortably? Then we will begin our seventeen minute tale of musical, religious, lyrical and erotic sleuthing.

Once upon a time there was a singer-songwriter of rare depth and not what you’d call a golden voice (though he, with a trademark self-deprecating humour lost on his detractors, did just that in one of his songs). Profoundly versed in Judaist mysticism while practising Zen Buddhism, he sat down to write. Five years later he was done, and his deftly alliterative opening line, “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord,  harbours a mystery in an enigma in a conundrum …

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