Chord Of The Week 19/12/15 - The Mariah Carey 'All I Want For Christmas' Eaddb9 chord

bigjon · December 2015

As a Christmas special in this series of cool chords in songs by unfashionable artists (although I hear this video tops the Youtube Christmas song charts this year!), here is the paused chord on the word 'true' in the line "Make my wish come true", just before the song gets into full speed with the hook line "All I Want For Christmas Is You".

The chords underneath the following line, "All I want for Christmas is you" are Am, D and G, which form a ii V I in G. The paused chord on the word 'true' just before it is a variety of E chord, which is a VI chord at the beginning of a VI ii V I progression, but is really a 'Secondary Dominant' temporary V chord in the momentary key of Am, so it has an E in the bass and the third is a G#, the natural 7th from the new key of Am: it doesn't belong to the home key of G major at all.

The next most prominent note in this E chord is the 7th, a D, but I can't hear it in the accompanying music at all, instead it's the first note of the slur Mariah sings. The second note she sings on the word 'true' is a C, which is straightforward as part of the home scale of G major and the temporary scale of A minor, but in relation to the immediate E chord it's a complicated extension, a sharp 5th. What's really weird is that the guitar is playing the natural 5th (B) a semitone away from the melody note: it can be heard really clearly in the first (live) video underneath, and the guitar is also playing the b9 extension, an F, which is part of the underlying A harmonic minor scale but not part of the home G major scale. So to make up the overall harmonic palette of this E chord we have every note from the A harmonic scale except the A itself - E (5th), G# (nat 7th), D (4th), F (b6th), C (b3rd), and B (2nd) which is an E7b9#5add5 (NOT an Ealt, jazz pedants, because there is no nat5 in the altered scale, only a b5 and a #5). The guitar doesn't play all these notes however (not enough strings ;-) !!), instead the guitar plays

Eaddb9 x76464

To my eyes this is an A-shape C#7 chord with the root C# note at fret 4 on the 5th string changed to an E at fret 7, so a substitution of a 7th chord a minor 3rd away. You can get lots of good V chords by substituting with a 7th chord of some kind some multiple of a minor 3rd away, and if you substitute 2 minor 3rds away, that's Tritone substitution.

You can hear the chord more clearly on the guitar at 0:59 in this video, although it's down a semitone.

And the original is at 0:34 here