Without wishing to appear too reactionary, for some reason I don’t see that much bravery in songwriting all that often anymore. So, how how did David Bowie come up with this chord progression? We don’t really know, but my guess is that he played around with all sorts of chords on the guitar until he found something that gave the melody that something different. I’ve shown those notes on the score in orange. It helps to create tension and continues the ascent in the melody which starts on D and goes to F# (on the Bm), G# (on the Amaj7) and then A# (on the C#dim7), leading to the climax of the high B on the G chord. OK, the D to Bm is nothing unusual but the shift to Amaj7 and then C#dim7 certainly is. It’s the verse that packs the most surprises: A great melody but not so out of the ordinary. The end of each motif is characterised by a forceful triplet. Let’s start with a look at the chorus, which is perhaps the most recognisable part of the song:Īs you can see, it consists of a repeated motif, which centres on a D note with changing D major G major and B minor chords underneath, all of which contain the D note. It’s in the key of D, is in common time and has a BPM of 120. But like so many David Bowie songs, this is not as simple as it seems and it’s a difficult piece to analyse systematically. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.Obviously, this is a big ballad, with a huge backing, including Rick Wakeman on piano, and a big Don Weller sax solo. It had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. “ has a very wide spectrum of music styles: “Paint It, Black” was this kind of Turkish song and there were also very bluesy things like “Goin’ Home” and I remember some sort of ballads on there,” added Jagger. Verse 1 I see a red door and I want it painted black No colours anymore, I want them to turn black I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes I have to turn my head until my. charts in 1966 and has remained a staple on the Stones set to this day.

Though the song was written by Richards and Jagger with most of the musical arrangements set by Jones, a slanted publishing deal in 1965 led to the band signing over the rights to the track, and all the songs they wrote through 1969 to the band’s former manager Allen Klein. “It’s the first time we wrote the whole record and finally laid to rest the ghost of having to do these very nice and interesting, no doubt, but still cover versions of old R&B songs, which we didn’t really feel we were doing justice, to be perfectly honest, particularly because we didn’t have the maturity. “That was a big landmark record for me,” said Mick Jagger of Aftermath.

We tried a guitar but you can’t bend it enough.” To get the right sound on ‘Paint It Black’ we found the sitar fitted perfectly.

“We had the sitars, we thought we’d try them out in the studio. “They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff,” said Richards. The sitar was most likely a discovery during the band’s break in the South Pacific around a tour in Australia. Adding to their musical experiments, guitarist Brian Jones first introduces the sitar into the mix-and marked the first time the Stones featured the instrument in their music-and would often play the wooden instrument, sat cross-legged, during television appearances. Inspired by more Indian and Mid-Eastern sounds, the song was written while the band was in Fiji for three days.

Rolling stones paint it black bpm