Changes, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s 23rd album, is called that because it “changes” once per bar between the scales of D major and F# major. This trick produces playful harmonies and melodies and raises difficult theoretical questions.
Today we’ll look at “Change,” the 13-minute opener. It’s sort of a rock-and-roll posse cut; this was the first time four members of the band shared lead vocals on one song. In the spirit of rock-and-roll, there are also long instrumental sections at the beginning and end.
The overture gently introduces you to the central gimmick. The first melody starts over a simple bass line between A and B. D and F# only share three notes: F#, B, and C#. This riff focuses heavily on those notes. The only note unique to F# is that D# at the end.
The riff plays twice, then there’s a variant. We start seeing some chromatic action: notice this enclosure around D#, and the way that all four notes from F# to A appear in rapid succession. The first riff plays again to give us a full 16-bar section.
On the second run of this section, we get some chords and a Purdie-style shuffle. I won’t be using Roman numerals in this video because we aren’t hearing traditional functional harmony. Instead, I’ll tell you how I might think of these chords if I was writing this song: we’ve got A and B in the left hand, and ascending triads in the right hand. They go: A major, B major, back to A major, then B major, C# diminished, D# minor, E minor, F# major. That last chord sounds like a question mark. But King Gizzard has another trick up its sleeve: we go A major, B major, straight to C# diminished, D# minor, E minor, F# major, G major, A# minor. That last chord sounds like an interrobang. I hate calling it A# instead of Bb, but there’s no denying it’s a great chord.
Here’s where we go full Music Theory YouTube: if you separate the bars in D from the bars in F#, you can see the A and B triads go through the constituent parts of an A dominant 11 and a Bmaj7#11. You don’t really see giant stacks of thirds like this in practice: they’re tough to play and they’re often a sign of bad voice leading. But this made me start to wonder what’s really going on. The marketing on this record claims the two scales are D and F# major, but so far this song relies heavily on an A chord resolving to a B chord. This is an interesting rabbit hole, but it’s beyond the scope of this video. I’d love to see someone else dig deeper into this.
For now, let’s look at the second melody. We’re now fully immersed in the album’s gimmick. If you’re listening to this song casually, you might not notice that the switch from D to F# is now happening an eighth note early, on the & of 4.[1] Under the previous melody, the chords changed on the 1; the harmonic rhythm was in straight whole notes. Under this new melody, that rhythm is syncopated.
The chords are buried in the mix on the first round of this melody, but I hear A and B major. On the second round, you get the full run of ascending triads. After that final A# minor over B, there’s a short transition which sounds like a set change. The bass does this “ba-dum” from F# to B while a Wurlitzer alternates between B minor and B major. A guitar plays a whisper of the second melody.
Stu Mackenzie, the frontman of the band, sings first. He gets a verse (“who should we please”), a chorus (“change”), and a bridge (“change for its own sake”). It’ll be easier to explain what’s going on if I talk about the chorus first.
The Wurlitzer plays a single chord throughout the chorus. Remember that there are three notes common to D and F#. If you want a chord to stay still across the bar line, you have to use these notes. So King Gizzard stacks them in fourths starting from C#. This is an excellent example of quartal harmony; chords stacked in fourths instead of the usual thirds. Given the way key signatures add sharps and flats, you’re usually guaranteed to have a set of matching notes between two keys that you can stack in fourths or fifths. It’s easier to play chords in fourths than in fifths on both guitar and piano, and in this context, stacking in fifths sounds too open and resonant. This chord [C# F# B] is so profound to me and it shows up throughout this song, so I’m going to call it the Change chord for the rest of the video.
The verse starts on the Change chord over A and resolves to B major. I had a hard time transcribing it. Here’s the best I could do. I love the chord in measure 6. I don’t love that it’s an E# half diminished; everything in my soul wants to call it F minor 7 flat 5.
Speaking of annoying nomenclature, here’s the bridge. Instead of the chord names we all know and love, I can only describe this as a series of stacked fourths diatonic to whatever scale we’re in. The roots of each chord go C#, D#, C#, G#, C#, A#, G, F#. A few of these fourths are augmented, like this G to C# and this B to… F natural. Before Stu sings, the guitar plays a little lick which will be on the test.
After a third chorus, we go back to the “ba-dum” to segue into Cook Craig’s section. Stu also sings “Change” at C# instead of the usual B.
The bass plays the same riff this whole section; only one note changes between measures. The chords switch between C# half diminished and C# dominant 7. Every other dominant 7 gets an added 9 for flavor until Cook starts singing. There’s some interplay between Cook’s vocals and a synthesizer, then a drum fill moves us to the next section.
A lone Wurlitzer plays a new chord progression. We have ascending triads again, but with A and G# in the bass instead of the usual A and B. The right hand triads are E minor, then D# minor, twice. Then they move up a third to G major and F# major, then again to B minor and A# minor, then one last time to D major and C# major.
This progression doesn’t appear anywhere else on the album. King Gizzard started working on Changes in 2017. Ambrose Kenny-Smith raps over the second run of this chord progression, (“we’re changing pace, high stakes…”) and he wasn’t heard rapping in public until 2022. I’d guess his section was one of the last things written for the album, and Ambrose might have done something else in an earlier version of this song.
On the third run of this chord progression, Ambrose sings a variant of the second melody from the overture twice. (“I’m like a sniper hidin’ in the tower…”) He does the run from A# to D# the first time around (“jump the-e-e gun”), but the second time (“make a change”) he jumps straight down. Alan Pollack, the man who wrote a musical analysis of every Beatles song, would often talk about how they avoid “foolish consistency.” I think this song would have been slightly worse if Ambrose did the same thing both times.
Joey Walker sings two verses over B minor and B major. He sticks to the note B the whole time. I think this section is sick, it reminds me of early Krautrock, but there’s not much harmony to analyze. There’s an elaborate synth solo that quotes the first melody and a little counterpoint line in the second verse: D, D#, E, E#, F#, G#, A, B.
This is the final exam, covering many tricks from earlier in the song. We start with Stu’s bridge, which begins as normal. Then he starts singing the little guitar lick which preceded his first bridge as “ba-da-ba-da…” This goes on for a while as the chords shift underneath: first to the Change chord, then to the B minor/B major progression.
A Wurlitzer plays the first melody by itself, then the song explodes into a big instrumental outro. There isn’t much room for harmonic complexity when things get this distorted. Distortion emphasizes the overtones of a note, and when you play a bunch of different notes, their overtones clash and it sounds muddy and awful. Take this chord; it sounds nice until you run it through a bunch of pedals. That’s why music with heavily distorted guitars often sticks to power chords or single notes.
In this outro, I’m mostly hearing alternation between A major and B major. There’s a mandatory guitar solo; it quotes lines from earlier. There’s a point where the bass gets tense under the first motif; it does something like A, B, C#, D#, E, F#, G#, B. When the guitar solo plays some of the “ba-da-ba”s it switches to B minor and major while the bass sticks to B. The solo ends on an A#, giving us a nice Bmaj7. Then the Wurlitzer plays that first melody again, resolving to a regular B major.
The rest of the songs on Changes feature chord progressions from the title track. I’ll point out the callbacks and leave the rest as an exercise for the viewer.
Hate Dancin’ is entirely based on the overture. It’s mostly A and B major, but some sections play that ascending triad progression. (“She’s comin’ straight for me”, “Slow-mo at the disco”)
Astroturf’s verse is based on the C# half diminished to dominant structure from Cook’s verse. The piano sometimes plays this satisfying arpeggio with the added ninth: C# E# G# B C# D#. The chorus plays A major and B major along with something else for the title drop.
The B section of No Body is also based on Cook’s verse, though it focuses on the E minor and E# diminished triads separated from their C# root. The A section reminds me of Hotel California.
The chorus of Gondii (“can’t get a message to my brain”) sounds very similar to Joey’s verse. The parts of the song that don’t hang on B tend to hang on F#.
Exploding Suns feels loosely based on a Gmaj9 to G#m11 progression, which reminds me of the chords outlined by that ascending triad figure from the overture, just extended down by a third.
Short Change is a reprise of Cook’s verse and Stu’s verse and chorus.
So here we are: we’ve figured out some chords. When I write music, I follow my ear above everything else; theory takes a back seat. But with the right kind of restriction, some novel and interesting patterns reveal themselves—that’s how you get those ascending triads and chords in fourths. You don’t have to study a textbook to discover these.
