key: C minor
mode: C D Eb F G Ab Bb
melody: D R M F S l t d r m f s
form: verse-prechorus-chorus-breakdown
meter: duple
English function names: tonic subdominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: t s
Scale degrees: i iv
Chords: Cm7 Fm7 Fm7 Cm7
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / :| loopThe recording is somewhere between C and B. The more I listen to it, the more I hear it being closer to B. But I'm leaving it in C, just 'cause.1
We have a subdominant-tonic shuttle for the whole song. We saw this in Here's Where the Story Ends, but only for the chorus. Usually, a shuttle with these functions is tonic first. So it begs the question, how do we know the tonic is C and not F? And the answer is always, it's in the melody.
Every phrase of the melody comes to rest on either C or G. And this makes sense since the phrase always ends in a Cm7 chord (of which G is also a member). But is that enough to establish it as the tonic? If we go back to something like Feel Like Jumping, where the shuttle starts with the tonic, we can hear that even though the phrase always ends on the away chord (the subdominant), the melodic phrases (both sung and in the horn interludes) are still centered around C and not F. In that song, the lack of finality caused by putting the away chord at the end of the phrase is ultimately dealt with by a fade out — the song could go on forever.2
Here, the combination of the melody clearly ending with C-minor chord tones and flipping the usual shuttle to subdominant-tonic gives the song a heaviness that supports the "goodbye" sentiment in the lyrics. There's a finality here, an impermanence — it's not going to last! — that Feel Like Jumping is the intrinsic opposite of. Yeah, I feel like dying, but it's part of the circle of life, baby, it just goes on and on, keep jumping, keep it light. It's two sides of the same coin, two chord functions, two modalities (major and minor), almost the same subject (impermanence), but very different takes.
Just 'cause = a) that's how I originally heard it, and b) I try to do three songs in the same key with the same chord functions as often as possible, so folks practicing at home have three different contexts for the same chords. This was filed under C minor, so here it is!
Compare that to Here's Where the Story Ends, where song ends similarly with the initial shuttle of tonic-subdominant, closing on the downbeat of the tonic, keeping it from going on forever.