#coacoa

Oh Louis, our king, our brilliant boy. This is perhaps the best thing he’s ever written. I’m enamored, I’m awed, I’m gonna mourn if he never releases a studio version and I have to keep replaying my voice memos recording for the rest of time...

Spellings and dualities; there are two ways to spell the key of COACOA, either B Major modulating to C sharp Major, or C flat Major modulating to D flat Major. I prefer the latter.

Key: C flat Major

Verses: vi, iii, IV, I, V6

Bridge: vi, iii, IV

Chorus (now in D flat Major): I, V6, vi, V, ii, iii, IV (repeats)

Repetition of coacoa: I, IV, V, III, IV

Final end: I (D flat Major)

There’s a musical interlude that goes down in a chromatic progression, B flat M to F M to A flat M to E flat M to G M, then links back up to the chorus.

Louis loves to subvert the expectations of our ear, and by starting with vi and iii, he delays the arrival to tonic, making us think the song is in a minor key. Likewise, Louis fucks around with a Frankenstein III chord throughout the song. So, in a normal Major key, the iii chord is minor. If you want to make it Major, you usually just raise the 3rd of the chord. In this case Louis would raise the A flat to A natural, but instead he DROPS the 1 and 6 of the chord, lowering them to F and C flat, and making a III than is the same as the IV chord in C flat Major. And you guessed it, the IV chord in C major is the one that modulates to the new key for the chorus.

Usually, modulations go from a key to its relative major/minor, or to its fifth. Louis modulates by WHOLE STEP UP. But when you also consider what he does with the melody, another angle becomes clear. The full extent of Louis’ range is on display in COACOA; the verses begin in the octave below middle C, and he stays there in that mellow, rich tonal landscape before LEAPING up a full 9th to hit the A flat above middle C. Before that stairway to heaven glissando (yes that’s what I’m calling the suspicious SOTT’s moment) Louis holds out a G flat long enough that our ear has a chance to dissociate it with what’s come before, to just hear that G flat major chord go to a D flat major chord and think, oh, IV to I! The “amen cadence.”

Religious imagery abounds in the lyrics too; the oldest curse, of course, is that of death, a consequence of eating forbidden fruit. Louis gives us a gnawing picture of birds breaking their beaks on impenetrable glass, able to see the other side through their cage yet not free. With “a kiss won’t bring it back,” he leans on the fairy tale trope of the awakening kiss, the defeat of death and beginning of happy endings. This loss is something magic—belief, religion, take your pick— can’t undo.

“The first blow hits you cold” is perhaps the most indicative of the hope, and struggle, that is to come in the chorus, for it implies a prize fighter, someone actively thwarting the hits that he suffers. The “young man” Louis speaks to could be a subject, or could be himself, an ambiguity he used before in Fearless. But the genius of the song comes in “nothing is original, there’s nothing left to say.” And in irony, the oldest popular text to say such a thing is the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Our sun knows this, knows that the only comfort comes not from poetic lamentations, but from the knowledge that we are not alone in heartbreak. We’re not the only one.

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