Recently, I’ve found myself humming James Taylor’s 1975 song Mexico a lot. It’s filled with so many hooks that both satisfy and surprise, especially when you dig in and start to figure out the guitar parts. I decided to listen more closely to figure out what’s going on, and found a few things that caught my ear.
The Magnificent Flat-Seventh
The song is in the key of E major, but the guitar part is played with a capo on the 2nd fret. This means you can play the song using open chord shapes as if it were in D major, and the capo transposes everything up a whole step to E major.
To make it easier for my fellow guitarists here, I will describe the song as if it were in D major so you can follow along with a capo on the 2nd fret. A full guitar tab and sheet music for the intro is available at the end of the article.
Here are six chords used in the intro:
If we build a chord on top of each of the notes in the D major scale, we get the following chords: D, Em, F#m, G, A, Bm, C#dim (C# diminished, or viiº). And the song Mexico almost goes through all of these just in the intro!
But wait a minute - what’s C major doing in the song’s chord changes? In the key of D major, shouldn’t the 7th chord in the scale be C#dim?
What we see here is the use of the “flat-seventh” (bVII), chord, also known as the subtonic chord. In D major, the C note is an “accidental” - i.e. it is not a member of the scale. We therefore describe this C major chord as being “borrowed” from the 7th chord of the parallel D minor scale, where the chords are Dm, Edim, F, Gm, Am, Bb, C. The flat-seventh chord is typically used immediately before the I chord (e.g. D - C- D, or G - C - D), or before the IV chord when resolving back to the I (e.g. C - G - D).
I’ve always thought of this chord as sounding like rock and roll, and this may be because the chord was largely introduced during the music of the 1950’s and 1960’s such as The Beatles. For me, one band that comes to mind is AC/DC, who seem to use the flat-seventh in almost every song.
Mixed Meter
Going from pitch to rhythm, one thing you’ll notice in the intro of Mexico is that it’s not in 4/4 time! It definitely starts in 4/4 and has a four-beat rhythmic feel, but somewhere along the way extra beats are added.
To find out what the time signature might be, tap along to the intro and count out the number of beats there are before you arrive at the end of a phrase. If you got the same as I did, you would have counted two 10-beat phrases which get repeated once: a 10-beat phrase starting from D major and ending on A major, and another 10-beat phrase starting from Em and ending on G major.
: : : : : : : : : :D A D Bm A: : : : : : : : : :Em Bm C G
Each phrase is 10 beats long, but the rhythm definitely feels like 4/4 especially at the beginning and end of each phrase. Something in the phrase must therefore be extending the meter. By subdividing the 10-beat phrase into 4/4 - 2/4 - 4/4, with a 2-beat chord in the middle of each phrase, we can piece the chords neatly together.
| : : : | : | : : :D A D Bm A| : : : | : | : : :Em Bm C G
When a piece of music has bars with different numbers of beats, it uses a mixed meter. In this case, the mixed meter sounds quite natural, but creates the feeling of a little skip - something that not only grabs your attention, but also allows for the progression to be be more stretched out than usual (and hence be able to fit in so many chords!)
Syncopated Fingerstyle
Now that we’ve looked at pitch and meter, it’s time to see how they come together in the rhythm and texture. The guitar part is played by fingerpicking the chord changes, and you can follow along using the chord charts I added previously:
| : : : | : | : : :D A D Bm A| : : : | : | : : :Em Bm C G
But here’s something very interesting that makes the song groove. If you tap along to the beat, you’ll notice that the notes of each chord are played slightly before the downbeat, on the “4-and” beat of each bar. This type of off-beat rhythm is known as syncopation, and in this song it really drives the groove forward.
In the sheet music / guitar tab transcription I’ve created below, these syncopated notes can be seen in the curved “tie” lines stretching across the bars for many notes starting on the 4-and beat.
So there you have it! The flat-seventh chord, mixed meter and and syncopation - some of the musical elements in Mexico that make this song, at least for me, so distinctive and catchy. If you liked this article, hit subscribe to stay tuned for more! Would you like me to transcribe and analyze the rest of song? What’s a favorite song of yours that you would like to deconstruct? Leave a comment to let me know what you think!
