Songs that never go to the Tonic chord

📌SMALL CORRECTION: at 12:02 I mispoke. I meant to say "D mixolydian or G major" not "G mixolydian or D major". Sorry for any confusion caused.

The tonic chord is the "1" chord, the root, the chord C in the key of C. Almost every song will use the tonic chord in its chord progressions, it is arguably the most important chord of the key. However, some songs will actually manage to go there entire duration without ever resolving to the tonic chord.

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0:00 What is the tonic chord?
0:39 Jane Says by Jane’s Addiction
2:11 IV - V vamp
3:11 Dreams by Fleetwood Mac
4:03 One More Time by Daft Punk
4:46 Vulfpeck
5:47 Drake
7:00 Sponsor
8:01 R&B chord loop songs
9:28 Simply Red & Modal ambiguity
13:12 Patreon

[DavidBennettPiano]

📌SMALL CORRECTION: at 12:02 I mispoke. I meant to say "D mixolydian or G major" not "G mixolydian or D major". Sorry for any confusion caused.

[willie_the_monkey_king]

One thing I like about your videos is that it inspires me to try making some music with what I learned.

[tljmusic]

Thanks David! My new goal is to write the most complex song I can without ever hitting that tonic.

[tomerfeller]

I would highlight prelude in E minor by Chopin as the piece avoids the tonic chord until the very end, and it's a really simple and useful way for every listener who doesn't know a lot about music to understand the concept of resolution

[knotwilg]

I would interpret the majority of these songs as modal, rather than not having the tonic. Like you say, with short chord loops, it's very hard to decide on what's the root and therefore the tonic chord.

[tomloncaric]

“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is a notable song that never resolves to the tonic chord. For example, the Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrill version draws from chords in D major but never actually comes to that chord. The closest it gets is the beginning of the verses that start with a I chord, but with the 6th added and the 5th (A) in the bass. It’s ambiguous enough to feel like it’s simultaneously in the relative minor (B minor).

After the verses, the bridge ends with chords that sound like they are headed to the tonic, but then that V chord goes up a half step for a key change, and leads to a deceptive cadence with the new I chord (Eb major) but with the added 6th and the 5th in the bass.

Actually, there are some live versions by Ashford and Simpson (who wrote the song) that resolve at the very end to the I chord!

[adamshield]

These songs are largely in Lydian, not Major, that’s why. It’s not IV to V, it’s I to II in Lydian. Your ear definitely starts to hear the first chord as I.

[Whitestripe]

I think that 'Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires' by Cocteau Twins is an example of this. Although the song starts on D minor, I think the song is really in F major, certainly the chorus is in F major, but at no point in the song does it ever resolve to a F major chord. I suppose you could say that it's a song that switches between the relative major/minor, so doesn't count - because we do get D minor chords in the verses - but to me it's a song in F major that never resolves to the tonic. Cocteau Twins are great, I recommend anyone to check them out if you're not familiar with them.

[TGCat]

i always thought there was something really striking about "Dreams", specifically the part where that instrumental break begins. Now it makes sense!

[capthook]

Other chords share so many tones of the tonic that it satisfies the ear without being tonic, as well.

[JoeJohnston-taskboy]

It seems like Jane's Said might be more descriptively labelled G Lydian. Sure, the notes are the same as D major, but this song emits strong Lydian vibes to me rather than D major. I hear you about the melody resolution. This is similar to the argument Adam Neely makes about Sweet Home Alabama. Then again, there are no mathematically provable answers in music theory.

[johnwallace]

Wichita Lineman is thought of as being in F, but it never lands on F, it's such an odd song, but so beautiful.

[robbyr]

Rick Beato's amazing new interview w/Jimmy Webb cites 'Wichita Lineman' as being in F without an F chord. There is an Fsus4/A, so I'd have to check it again to see if that acts as a tonic. But their discussion indicates it doesn't ever really resolve to an F major.

[James_Anderson_]

Wow I remember you replying to my request for this video like a year ago, I guess patience is a virtue 😆

[claudegenereux]

Listening to a recent Rick Beato interview of Jimmy Webb he asks a question about Wichita Lineman, Jimmy leaves the issue for a while and goes on with an anecdote. He refers to a phone call he received from James Taylor who'd like to cover this song (which he now has done) and loves but... can't get his head around the fact that this song is in F. He asks "where's is it?", and Webb answers "it's not there!".

[snookerwither]

I've always wondered if you'd make a video about this, since I didn't know whether it was actually possible to have no tonic chord. It was interesting to see so many examples

[ronaninkster]

“This Must Be the Place” by the Talking Heads is also a song that avoids the tonic, it vamps from D to Em to C to Em (V-vi-IV-V) for the whole song, but the melody confirms that it’s in G major

Edit: forgot to mention the artist lol

[sweetmusic]

I am surprised and impressed that you found so many examples. Well done, David! This must have taken a tremendous amount of research.

[fromchomleystreet]

I find it bizarre that David sees only two possibilities for the key of “holding back the years” - A aeolian or D Dorian - when to my ears it is unambiguously in C ionic, despite never resolving to a C major chord. To my ears, the D minor and the G are a classic “ii / V / I” except it keeps denying us the “I”.

If you sing the line “holding back the years”, the “years” note sounds (at least to me) like the second degree of the scale, and it sounds like what it really wants to do is resolve down a tone to the tonic (C), accompanied by a C major chord, and if you actually sing/play precisely that on an instrument, you’ll see that it sounds completely at rest when you hit that C. You could play an Am too, and it sort of works, but it doesn’t sound (at least to my ears) nearly as satisfyingly resolved, rather it sounds like we’ve reached the “semi” resolution of a vi chord, and still have a little further to go before we get home.

That said, I’m not so arrogant as to tell David he’s “wrong” to say it’s in A minor (or, for that matter, the people who say it’s in D Dorian, although I do question whether they really do HEAR that D minor chord as being a place of rest or they are simply resistant to the notion that the tonic chord might not be a chord we ever hear).

That’s the thing people get wrong about modes - they are inherently subjective and unstable. The tonic is something that your ears tell you, not something you work out via some foolproof formula. Sometimes your ears tell you it’s something completely unambiguous, but sometimes they’re vague and indecisive. Sometimes you can “flip” your perception to hear the same piece of music in two different keys (see “Sweet home Alabama”, where I’m naturally in the D Mixolydian camp but can sort of “choose” to hear it in the G ionic which is the key in which many, including the band that wrote it, appear to conceptualise it).

Theory can really get in the way of your ears and I do wonder if that’s what’s going on here. Theory and analysis can’t definitively tell you what note the tonic is, because it’s just not a black and white thing. Analysis can tell you that, for example, “Holding back the years” uses the seven “white key” notes. But as with any heptatonic scale, a piece of music that uses those seven notes could be in any of seven modes (of which the two with which we are most familiar, ionic and aeolian - colloquially known as “major” and “natural minor” are only two).

And here’s the kicker - any piece of music that uses those seven notes is really in ALL SEVEN MODES AT ONCE - because, essentially, they’re all the same key, and a note that your brain, at any given moment during a piece, tonicises, IS the tonic, and that IS the key it’s in, for you, at that particular moment. That tonicization is personal and involuntary, and based not only on harmonic context (the WHOLE harmonic context, not just the melody - it is entirely possible to write a song that will be widely perceived as being in a certain key without the melody ever using the tonic note) but also the context in which you heard it on that particular occasion, and a whole lot of cultural baggage we can’t even begin to unpick.

That baggage includes the fact that western ears are conditioned to enormously privilege the ionic mode as the default, for example, which is why modal writing is mostly an exercise in fighting against the overwhelming gravity of the ionic mode - it is the schoolyard bully of modes who, given any opportunity, will barge in and take over. Try writing a song in Lydian (ie all white keys with F as the tonic), for example, and you pretty soon realise that you kind of have to avoid playing the chord built on the fifth degree (C major if in F Lydian), or at least be very careful how you introduce it, because the moment it arrives it will decide it’s the boss and insist that you were really in C ionic all along.

It is impossible for me to know to what extent this last point, for example, might be at least part of the reason I find it impossible to hear “Holding back the years” as being in D dorian, or even A aeolian. I am culturally conditioned, by a lifetime of listening to western music made by people for whom middle C was ground zero of a musical education, to subconsciously think of the ionic mode of the major scale as the default, which means that even if the ionic one chord is entirely absent (as it is here), a piece of music that uses those seven notes has to work harder to NOT be in ionic than “Holding back the years” does, if I am to perceive it as being in any other mode.

[singsongdan]

I think the reason you get this a lot on hip-hop and daft punk is the use of sampling - producers will chop up a section of the song and loop it without the full chord progression