 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to do a deep dive, a deep song breakdown and analysis into Miley Cyrus' latest hit song, Used to be Young. So there are a lot of incredible things which are there in this song. The vocal lines, rhythmic structure, the bridge, the chord progression and a lot of this is kind of forgotten in music song writing. So I figured we look at this song to kind of be a good benchmark of pop music. I think among the pop songs of the recent I guess five, six years, this really stood out and it was quite exciting for us to put this video together the moment it released. In fact, we are probably making this video about just about a day after it got released. So we are very excited to share this video with you and along with the video with all of what I say, there will be chords for each part of the song, each section, there will also be notation for every single bit, the verse, the bridge, the chorus, the outro and so on and so forth. And we are also going to put up a piano arrangement of the song, a basic piano arrangement and we will probably be doing a video of that in the very near future. It is not a piano tutorial as we usually do, it is a song breakdown of pretty much all the elements of this song and there is so much to tell you. So we thought we will limit this to five and see how that goes. So hopefully these are the best five elements of the song which exist and if you think there are more, do leave them in the comments of course. Before we get started, it will be awesome if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and hitting that bell icon for regular notifications and all the notation, my hand written chord charts are all waiting for you on our Patreon page for a small subscription of course for about five dollars a month. Let's get started. So the first insanely cool element of this song comes from the piano intro which he also plays during the verse sections. The chords are basically E major, G sharp minor 7th or G sharp minor or E over G sharp. You see where I'm going with this, I don't know what that chord is because he's not playing it as chords. So I'll deal with that soon. So it's kind of E major, then then G sharp minor or E major over G sharp and then C sharp minor and then A major okay and this goes on for the verse and more or less the chorus as well but the way the pianist approaches the section is let me play you the intro and you'll get what I'm saying. So if you observe the chord structure of the piano except for the first chord which is an E major, even this E major is not played in the traditional way, it's not played like that. Even the second chord G sharp minor is not played in the traditional triadic way and this is a trend I guess with modern day pop and I guess country music as well. Country music, pop music and folk music has always done this where they voice the chords really well. It could probably be an open voicing as what we are seeing here. So it starts like this. So it's an E major in an open position. Instead of doing E, G sharp, P, we do E, P, G sharp, almost cello like in nature, a cello player playing chords will generally play like that and on the piano it allows you to go a lot deeper. We've done an entire playlist on spread chords so do check that out, we'll have it in the description. So you go na, na, na, na, na and each of this is very melodic, there's a da, da, da, da, G sharp, F sharp, F sharp, E and then a B always droning with that. So now already this changes the flavor of the E chord, it's no longer E major, it's more of an E add nine, so E major, E add nine, E add nine and then normal simple E five. And then when it goes to the next part, it's automatically a voicing for a G sharp minus seventh, a very sophisticated chord but without the D sharp, without the fifth. So it's a very clean voicing and a very dynamic movement of the harmony as well. He's not just going, so he's going, it provides a nice counter melody to what Miley Sire is going to eventually sing, while the piano continues to play that melody, he continues to play that tune so it's incredible. So all of the notes with the B, so your chords in the left hand would be E just in the bass, G sharp bass, then C sharp in the bass with the same figure which you played for E offers a completely different perspective when you now played with a C sharp bass, third chord and the fourth chord is beautiful. That's already an A sus too, so that ends up forming a very Lydian sound or a sharp four sound and the trick is really simple, all chords you're going to play need to have a B in them no matter what, you just decide generally when you're playing pop music with these open kind of voicings, you could have your root to be rooted or repetitive, in this case they are keeping that fifth of the E major scale, this song is on E major scale by the way, I forgot to mention that four sharps, F sharp, G sharp, C sharp, D sharp, so we go everything, every harmonic movement has this B in it, very clean and very deep as well, you can play it quite down below and that Lydian sound, very beautiful there and that's an A chord going back to the E which is very interesting, that's called the plagal cadence in music, we miss that a lot these days, it's usually the authentic cadence which is the five going to one, so very vocally nice as well, if you sing it it's a vocal melody too and that's not all the piano player is doing, there's also a good focus on rhythm because for the most part of the song is just piano and vocal, so the piano is creating a kind of a broken effect between the chords, instead of going that way he's adding the additional B playing as an eighth note, there we go, there's always that B and also the B is providing rhythm to the party and to make it even more interesting he's flamming it almost like a guitar, most guitar players will play this line like this so it's very guitar like and the piano is also chosen to have a very guitar or a harp like sound, it's a felt piano, see very subtle, yes you should play it also softly but that's your felt sound, beautiful tone, so that's about the piano intro, there's so much more the pianist is doing, so let's now move forward to the next amazing thing in used to be Young by Miley Cyrus, so it might be very weird to say this but secondary dominance are back now in music and hopefully going to be trending the soon as well as Miley Cyrus has done in the chorus of the song, so in the verse we did E major, G sharp minor 7, all diatonic and now the chorus, so that's the chord there which is always there in your old 90s and especially 80s power ballads, so a chord which is not part of the native scale of E major is G sharp or A flat dominant 7th, as you can see you have a C there which is not part of the scale, so it provides a nice tension and the secondary dominant chords are a detour from your normal road but where you have a road map to go back to the scale and the road map is you just tell yourself all the secondary dominant chords will resolve you go up a 4th or down a 5th, you go down to C sharp, so G sharp dominant 7th or A flat dominant 7th, that's the vocal figure over the G sharp chord and the first chord is just your tonic E major, so it just provides that tension and works with the chord and then G sharp as all G sharp dominant 7th chords do, they have that locking or that magnetic property to go to C sharp minor, C sharp minor in this case because it's an E major song, so where we go, that's your C sharp minor and the last line of the chorus is incredible, sometimes it's A major 6th at the end, while in the first chorus and maybe in the more timid or the more quieter parts of the song, that's your minor plagued cadence which is also missing a lot in music, so you could argue that this is a borrowed chord from another parallel scale which is not E major, you could argue that it's an E mixolydian flat 6th scale where that chord exists, in the chorus you have this varying nature of the last chord when the song gets a bit happier or more positive, at least in the video I guess, you'll have a major 6th chord, well you have that minor 6th which is borrowed and what is a major 6th and a minor 6th chord very quickly, they are beautiful chords, both of them have one thing in common, they have a major 6th interval up top and the minor 6th chord is a minor chord with a major 6th chord up top, so those are the two remarkable harmonic things in the chorus where we go secondary dominant and then the minor, the relative minor and then sometimes the minor 6th versus major 6th sometimes I say I used to be young and don't forget what Miley is doing at the end, the melody of most pop songs these days is this is just pretty much root second third or just three note melodies or sometimes two note melodies or in some horrific cases one note melodies but look what Miley does in the end I say I used to be young that's a minor 6th jump by the vocalist that's very tough to sing actually it's very awesome that that's there and at the catch phrase in the song so that's a very good songwriting tip if you want your catchphrase to be very rememberable and meaningful do something different about it and clearly she's found that difference and that edge she made her first three lines very repetitive still the same it's the same tune and then and that works really well with both the major 6th chord a major 6th and the minor 6th because she doesn't hit the third so she is very clever about singing that melody because it could go with either of those chords there's something more about this song and that brings me to the bridge the bridge pretty much has the same chords they move into like an e major 7th Miley now goes into a kind of a vocal solo with just oh oh things like that and the rhythmic pattern which she uses is incredible I'm just gonna sing that and it's also notated there so you can see the sophistication there she waits for a dotted quaver and then starts singing that's over the e major 7 okay that's a 30 second note for you which she does with her voice then the secondary dominant which was there in the chorus as well that's the same two tunes but on two different chords and then C sharp okay that's another similar figure but different notes okay and then she goes a yeah there again at a very unpredictable point and then it goes much more higher towards the same chord structure but that goes very well with that e major 7th or e major in general that's a nice tension there that's like a 11th or an ad 4 now is where it gets really interesting so they choose the a 7th chord but Miley is singing intervals or has ended up singing intervals singing the sharp 9 as well as the flat 9 literally right after the other and the 9s we call them 9s because they are beyond a 7th chord so there's also there's already a 7th chord which is a flat 7th and then she sings a tension note or an extended note over that which is not that note that would be a normal 9th but then you're leaving the e major scale a normal 9th with respect to a flat will actually sound bad that'll be wrong actually so she sticks to the key so I thought that was really interesting and very beautiful to hear you're hearing sharp 9 and the flat 9 in which vocal melody have you heard a sharp 9 and a flat 9 in the same song and one note right after the other that's a trivia question for you I don't know if you'll find many the absolute end of the bridge would be she repeats that okay so that's the bridge it's first of all there's no guitar solo it's a vocal solo and she just does some vocal syllables like oh yeah yeah and it's so well rhythmically knit and then that ending which I told you the the way the inevitable intervals landed up being I thought was very beautiful having the sharp 9 in there having the flat 9 in there consecutively so there's one more really nice thing I thought worth mentioning about used to be young that's the end of the song where she breaks the song down sings the whole melody one octave low and then she goes back to her usual range but to go back to the last chorus of the song we have this breakdown chorus or like a lesser dynamic chorus I know I used to be crazy so she goes to that lower octave and that rhythmic figure I think was the best part of the song for me I don't know how they came up with that so that's at the line that's cause I used to be young and she waits for a dotted quaver so the two on and the uh of the two and the of the one to be is now a triplet it's a eighth note triplet introduced in a bar with semi-quaver so there's some serious beat division going on there dividing by four dividing by three then having a dotted feel which is a lot of work for just one bar of a song you know that's a lot of work put in so you go that's cause I used to be young I know and then so let's do that again that's cause I used to be young young young almost every beat is a different figure that's cause I used to be young and chorus and then that's pretty much the song guys so do let me know what you thought about the song what you liked about it maybe you found something which I didn't cover in this video it'll be nice to hear from you as well these were some of the concepts and I thought as a teacher it's worth mentioning the things which are more eye-catching from a musical song writing and theoretical perspective so hopefully you can use this song as a kind of a benchmark and then listen to another song and see did it have this or did it have something different or way beyond this or did it have something which was not even close to the sophistication of this so I always look at songs at least which I enjoy as songs which surprise me which is kind which is what the great sting also says surprise because me the essence of all music is surprise I also like songs which have a lot of density in them with a lot of interesting things to listen to I don't like the choruses just copy pasted you know and it's a boring bridge which with the same old thing you know so this is a really nice song you should definitely check it out and hope you found the lesson useful hope you found our breakdown useful and in the very near future we'll be putting out a piano tutorial as well of this same song where we've broken down each part we'll have a beginner version and an advanced version thanks a ton for watching the video all the notation the transcription chord charts my handwritten notes are all on patreon you could consider heading over there downloading all the files and that will support our channel as well a great deal for as low as five dollars a month thanks a ton for watching the video guys cheers