Stevie Wonder Send One Your Love Piano Cover/Tutorial love song 🌹😍🌱

[krisplayspiano]

Stevie Wonder, Send One Your Love


A beautiful whirlwind love song that’s in constant modulation through various keys…The verse starts in A, but uses tritone substitution passing chord, Ab7 (make note of the bass motion, Ab7/Eb - the inverted bass notes help carve out a melodic bassline) to move to a mode mixture chord, the bVIIIM7, GM7..

Similar motion follows, the GM7 slides a half step down to F#7 but this time the dominant chord is used almost as a more typical V7/ii, but the ii is swapped out for one of its chromatic mediants, Dm. The Dm works in the key of A as it’s the iv, another mode mixture chord (both of the mode mixture chords can be thought of as coming from the modes of A dorian and A aeolian respectively). Stevie moves back to the GM7, before resolving to the tonic, A, which restarts the loop (the AM7b5 is a fun splash of tension between the verse phrases but the verse starts and ends on an A chord). 


After the second phrase, another tritone substitution passing chord, Eb9, is used as a secondary dominant to the IV, D6, which starts the chorus. From there Stevie moves to C#7 (note the bass note, G#, echoing the same interval movement that started the verse, A to Eb)...but instead of resolving this dominant chord, he slides it to a parallel flavor, C#m7b5…this chord acts as a ii7b5 in a ii-V, where the V7 is F#+7 (the flavor variations don’t change the chord functions). F#7, like the verse, moves to Dm instead of Bm, a chromatic mediant substitution. This Dm7 acts as the ii in another ii-V, moving to G9 which resolves back to A, acting as a backdoor dominant (bVII7) - note how similar this movement is to the verse loop, but the subtle flavor shift (bVII7 instead of the verse’s bVIIM7) keeps it fresh!  After the second loop of the chorus Stevie instead resolves the G9 to its usual tonic, C, but this is a quick chromatic passing chord that slides down to a B (each with the same extensions and voicings). It’s a slick move that starts the song over.

Wild chord movements like this can be difficult to pull off in such a short piece of music but study how the melody and bassline create echos of previous movements to help thematically tie everything together.