Send My Love (To Your New Lover) — Adele (2016)

Why this song

Two chords. That is the whole song, and it went to number one on Billboard's Pop Songs chart.

Before the first note you hear Adele talking: "Just the guitar. OK, cool." It is a studio remark, the kind of thing people say before a take, and it stayed on the record.

Then comes almost a minute of guitar and percussion. So here is the question: how does a song hold together for nearly four minutes on two chords?

Historical context

Adele is known for ballads. Her album 25, released on 20 November 2015, opens with "Hello", a piano ballad. Critics picked this song out as one of the few up-tempo tracks on the record, along with "Water Under the Bridge".

It got here by an odd route. She was working with the producer Ryan Tedder and the sessions were not going well. One day they went to lunch and the restaurant played Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble". Adele liked it straight away and asked who had produced it.

It was Max Martin, a Swedish producer. Adele had never heard of him. Tedder sent her clips of his work, and soon after they met for a session.

Foto: Näringsdepartementet, CC BY 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Martin came to London. Adele was reworking the skeleton of a song she had written as a teenager, and she showed him a guitar riff she had. The two of them finished it with the guitar in hand. Max Martin and Shellback, another Swedish producer, produced it, and it was recorded in two studios: MXM in Stockholm and Eastcote in London.

For a while it was rumoured to be the album's first single. In the end that was "Hello". This one came out as the third single: to radio on 13 May 2016 and as a download on the 16th. That is why we date it 2016 although it had been on the album since 2015: 2016 is the year it was everywhere.

Musical characteristics

Almost the whole song is two chords: D major and B minor. One bar each, over and over.

Those two chords share two of their three notes, D and F sharp. So the change does not jolt you. The music does not go anywhere: it sways from side to side. B minor is the minor chord that lives in the same house as D major, with the same sharps. It is called the relative minor. In Roman numerals, I–vi.

If the harmony hardly moves, what drives the song? The guitar. Everything came out of a riff: a short figure that repeats and that you recognise in two seconds. Chord sheets write it with muted strokes between the notes, marked with an x. Those gaps are what make your body move. Rolling Stone described it as an "almost African-sounding guitar lick", and Adele herself talked about a calypso vibe.

Then there is what you do not hear. For almost a minute there is only acoustic guitar and hand-played percussion. The layered backing vocals and the full arrangement come later. Deciding what comes in, when, and how much room it leaves is part of production. Here the decision was to take away, not to add, so everything that comes in stands out.

The voice plays percussion too. A Pitchfork review noticed how the syllables are clipped: "Send-my-love / To-your-new / Luh-uh-ver". The words land like hits, not like one long line.

And the form. Between verse and chorus there is one more section: the pre-chorus. With only two chords, what tells you the chorus is coming is not the harmony. It is the drums: in the chart, verse and pre-chorus have one pattern and the chorus has another.

Hard facts: D major, 4/4, 82 beats per minute, 3:43. The form, according to the chart: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus. The pre-chorus appears three times, always right before a chorus.

A warning about the tempo. The official sheet music, Hooktheory and the chart say 82. Spotify says 164. They do not contradict each other: 164 is exactly double. Clap along to the relaxed step of the voice and you get one number; clap along to the fast rhythm of the guitar and you get the other. Counting the beat at twice the speed is called counting in double time.

And one about the chords, in case you look them up yourself. Some chord sheets add a G in the pre-chorus or the chorus. The chart attached here and the most-voted chord sheet stay on D and B minor. The chart is also in the same key as the record, so you can play along with the recording without changing anything.

Trivia and curiosities

• The song had a different title: "We Ain't Kids No More". Adele changed it at the last minute. Her reason, according to Rolling Stone: with that title, the album might as well have been called "Old". A title also tells you what mood the song is in.

• The music video looks heavily edited and has almost no editing. The director, Patrick Daughters, filmed Adele dancing twelve times against a black backdrop and laid the twelve takes over each other in a single shot. It is what the production does with the backing vocals: layers of the same voice, one on top of another.

• The song went in and out of the chart. In December 2015 it entered the Hot 100 at number 79 and dropped out the following week. After the video premiered it came back at 26, and in September 2016 it reached number 8. Same recording: what changed was the video and the single release.

• In Britain it reached number five, and in Iceland number one. In the US it topped three Billboard radio charts: Pop Songs, Adult Top 40 and Adult Contemporary. A song with two chords and almost no instruments, on the radio all day.

Guided listening

Play the music video and listen for these things, in this order:

• Adele's voice talking before the music starts. That is the studio, not the song.
• The guitar on its own with the riff. Clap along: are you on the slow step or the fast one?
• The hand-played percussion. Count how many instruments play in the first verse.
• The move from pre-chorus to chorus. Listen to the drums, not the chords: the chords have not changed.
• The layered backing vocals in the chorus. Now there are several voices at once.
• The clipped syllables of "Send my love to your new lover".
• The bridge, and then the last pre-chorus. How do you know the chorus is coming again?

Classroom activities

• Play: D and B minor, one bar each, for the whole song. On ukulele, D comes quickly; B minor needs more fingers, so practise just the change before adding the strumming. The bass needs two notes: D and B. On keyboard, play D as D–F sharp–A and B minor as D–F sharp–B: the two share D and F sharp, so your hand only moves one finger. The drums have two patterns, one for verse and pre-chorus and another for the chorus, and both are in the attached chart.

• Analyse: half the class claps the slow step and the other half the fast one, over the recording. Both groups are right. Then count how many claps fit on each chord in each group. Explain why one group counts twice as many as the other.

• Sing: the chorus fits inside one octave, D to D. Sing it clipping the syllables like Adele, "send-my-love / to-your-new / lo-o-ver", and compare it with singing it smoothly. Which version makes you want to move more?

• Create: over the D and B minor loop, improvise a solo with five notes: D, E, F sharp, A and B. That is the D pentatonic scale, the same one the chart shows in the solo box. None of those five notes clashes with either chord.

Key vocabulary

• Relative minor — relativo menor: el acorde menor que comparte casa con uno mayor
• Riff — riff: figura corta que se repite
• Production — producción: decidir qué suena, cuándo entra y cuánto hueco deja
• Pre-chorus — pre-estribillo
• Double time — doble tiempo: contar el pulso al doble de velocidad

Resources

In the Year 3 theory and history book — this song works for ¿Cómo sabes por dónde vas en una música que oyes por primera vez?, ¿Cómo se guarda algo que solo existe mientras suena? and ¿Qué pasa cuando dejamos de cantar todos lo mismo?.

Official music video — directed by Patrick Daughters, 2016. Twelve takes laid over each other.

Ukulele tutorial — Elise Ecklund. Two strumming patterns, D and B minor.

Guitar tutorial — GuitarZero2Hero. Two ways to play it, plus the riff.

Bass, to play along — Music Will, the people who made the attached chart. Not a lesson: a play-along.

Drum tutorial — LearnSomeDrums. The song has few sections, so it is quick to learn.

Keyboard tutorial — Atlantic Notes. An easy piano version.

The whole band at once — Kaila Lifferth. Two chords for guitar, bass, keyboard and voice. It plays over the Kidz Bop version, not Adele's.

• Tab — the Songsterr button opens it with the tracks separated out: acoustic guitar, bass and drums.