Townes Van Zandt and the Loneliest C# Minor Chord in Texas
How a single shadowy chord reframes the meaning of a classic country ballad.
In Theory is a new semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.
Back in January, I published a piece I’d had on my mind for awhile about the Diana Ross disco anthem “Upside Down,” which involved a bit of analysis of the song’s unusual chords. “Upside Down” has always seemed to me a little stranger, spookier even, than its dancefloor-filling jubilance initially lets on, and I wanted to talk about why.
Andy Cush
I didn’t intend to make this sort of writing a regular thing, but the response to the Diana Ross piece was so enthusiastic that I decided to keep at it. For days after I published it, people were responding on Twitter to say they’ve always wanted to read this sort of criticism, in which concepts from music theory are presented in terms that non-musicians can understand, and used to raise questions and possible answers about how and why songs make us feel the way they do. Or else they were writing to quibble with aspects of my analysis, usually with well-reasoned arguments, but with a few insults to my musical intelligence thrown in. All of these responses seemed encouraging.
Next up in this newly inaugurated column, which I'm calling In Theory, is Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” prompted by the late Texas songwriting legend’s birthday last weekend. As with “Upside Down,” I’m interested in the way “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” uses its harmony to create emotional subtext that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from the words on the page. I don’t know exactly what else I’ll get into as the column progresses, but I suspect this will be an ongoing theme: looking at how words and music interact to create effects more powerful and richly complex than either could convey on its own. And though, as with "Upside Down," I’m using harmonic analysis to suggest a somewhat counterintuitive reading of the song, I truly believe a listener without a musical background might come to the same conclusions, just based on how the music feels. This is important: For me, this sort of analysis is only meaningful if it is descriptive rather than prescriptive—that is, if it helps to elucidate some aspect of the music that is already apparent from simply hearing it, rather than lording the theory over you as a way of telling you what to think.
“I’ll Be Here in the Morning” first appeared on For the Sake of the Song, Van Zandt’s 1968 debut, but its best-known version came out a year later on his self-titled third album, which featured several re-recordings of songs that he felt had been overproduced in their earlier renditions. The 1969 recording is sparser, slower, rougher around the edges, stripping away the swooning strings and jaunty backing vocals that adorn the original. I’ll be focusing on that version, both because it’s the more familiar one and because its lonesome arrangement further brings out the painfully ambiguous quality of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” that I want to discuss, which for me is what elevates the song to masterpiece status.
On its face, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is a straightforward inversion of one of country music’s trustiest archetypes. The genre’s history is full of ramblin’ men too drawn to the call of the open road to be tied down by the women who love them: Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, and many, many others have recorded songs in this vein. At first, Townes’s take seems like just another contribution to the ramblin’ man’s enduring myth, albeit one with an especially poetic rendering of the road’s appeal. “There’s no stronger wind than the one that blows down a lonesome railroad line/No prettier sight than lookin’ back on a town you left behind,” he sings wistfully in the song’s first lines. But then, in the third line of each verse, his tone changes: Sure, he’d like to be out there roaming, but there’s a woman he loves at home who keeps him there. The choruses take the form of reassurances to her: “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning/Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while.”
If that were the whole of it, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” would still be a sweet love song, one that finds unexpected tenderness beneath the tough masculine exterior of a time-worn country trope. (For a song that does more or less that, without pressing on the wound like this one does, see Jerry Reed’s delightful “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me.”) But Van Zandt, a deeply troubled guy and a brilliant observer of subtleties of feeling, was not much for uncomplicated sweetness. Though he never lets on as much, I think his narrator is telling his companion to hush and not worry while he plans his escape in the night. Or maybe he will stay, but he’ll never be all the way there, with some part of his heart always yearning to ramble.
My sense of the unspoken sadness in “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” comes largely from its chords. For much of its runtime, it cycles through four or five of them, depending on how precise you want to get. These are E Major, A Major, B Major, B7, and F#7. For the purpose of simplicity, let’s focus for now on E, A, and B7, a trio of chords that firmly situates us in the key of E Major. (F#7, the one chord from outside the key, is what’s known as a “secondary dominant” chord—a concept that’s probably too complicated to explain here, and not especially pertinent to the point I hope to make.) In the context of the key of E Major, E is what’s known as the I chord; A is the IV chord; and B7 is the V7 chord. That’s one, four, and five-seven, if you’re saying them out loud.
These chords are important building blocks of almost all Western music, and they each have their own color and feeling, sonic qualities you might recognize even if you can’t name them. The I chord feels like home: when a song seems to be coming to a satisfying rest, whether literally at the end or just the end of a phrase, that’s often because it’s landing on the I. The IV feels like a departure, or a lift: You hear it and you feel like you’re setting off from home, going somewhere else. The V7 is even further away, but it also has a tension in it that pulls your ear back toward the I, letting you know you’re about to return home. You can make a compelling musical journey by just repeating these three chords, and maybe varying their order from time to time. Home→departure→the feeling of wanting to return→home again. Repeat as necessary. This pattern, with some built-in variations, is the basic underlying structure of the blues, and from there it migrated to all sorts of other American music, including country. With its cycles coming and going, this sort of chord progression has obvious resonance with the subject matter of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning.”
Van Zandt’s composition is evocative of a classic blues form, but without replicating it exactly. One element he does pick up from the blues is a little flourish that comes toward the end of the cycle, before it repeats: You’re sitting on the V7 chord, waiting to be pulled to the comfort of the I, but you travel back through the IV before you get there, as if retracing your steps around a big circle to get home instead of just finishing the loop. This is where “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” gets a little tricky: It pulls this bluesy V7-IV move, setting you up for a leisurely return home to the I—E Major, remember—but it lands instead on C# minor, the first minor chord in the song.
Even if you never got past grade school music education, you might remember that minor chords tend to sound sadder than major ones. C# minor, in this context, is the vi chord (minor chords get lower-case roman numerals), otherwise known as the relative minor. It’s sort of like the shadow self of the I chord: It has all the same notes in common except for one, but that one change makes it dark and heavy instead of light and airy. Home, but a sad version of home.
Van Zandt lets this unexpected shadow drift over right at the end of the chorus. “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning”—everything’s still fine, we’re making our leisurely way from V back to IV—“Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while”—right on while is where the vi chord hits. Compared with the chordal gymnastics of “Upside Down,” going to the vi here is not especially daring from a purely musical perspective, but its simplicity is part of its power: There is no mistaking the ominous note that Van Zandt strikes just as his lyrics offer these words of comfort. It’s enough to make you wonder how comforting they really are. “I’ll be here in the morning.” OK, but what about the morning after that? “I’ll be here for a while.” And then what?
I’d always thought of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” as being a dark twist on the very archetype it seems to undermine: the song of a guy who runs off even as he promises to stay. But as I listened carefully and repeatedly to prepare for this piece, the answer became less and less clear. If he leaves, he’ll miss her; if he stays, he’ll miss the road. The C# minor chord starts to feel like a symbol of the regret he will inevitably feel, whichever choice he makes. Van Zandt’s songs often have an allegorical or philosophical quality: a hand of cards becomes a battleground of fate and free will; a tale of two bandits a meditation on sin and redemption. “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is not just about one man’s wanderlust, it’s about the way any major decision can feel like a sort of death: The death of the person who took the other path, the snuffing out of the love or adventure that he might have found there.
Van Zandt’s writing is characteristically beautiful. I especially love the second verse: “There's lots of things along the road I'd surely like to see/I'd like to lean into the wind and tell myself I'm free/But your softest whisper's louder than the highway's call to me.” There are little seeds of doubt that the lyrics may plant in your mind, but the song’s painful ambiguity really comes almost entirely from that single C# minor chord. If you were to change it to E Major, the more expected move, you’d get got a much happier song, and a much less powerful one.
