I love checking out what has worked for other songwriters, and seeing what I might learn from them, so I found myself looking at Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of all time.
500 is a lot of songs and a lot of chord changes to investigate. (Not to mention a lot of lyrics, rhythms, melodies, harmonies and arrangements). I’d love to look at them all, which, at one song a week would take a mere 10 years. Maybe I’ll skip around in the list a little bit. . .
Anyway, No. 500 is Smokey Robinson’s “Shop Around.”
Rolling Stone doesn’t seem to say much about why they consider it a great song, but I’m willing to take it on faith. One thing that caught me as I looked at it was the simplicity of the chord progression.
Check it out below!
The Prompt:
The Musical Idea:
Here’s a downloadable pdf of the worksheet above:
timmyr.com 