There are only 12 notes.
That fact has always seemed completely insane to me.
Every rock song, jazz standard, punk song, country song, pop chorus, guitar riff, piano ballad, and melody that has ever gotten stuck in your head is built by rearranging the same tiny collection of notes. Put a few together and you get a chord. Put those chords in an order and you get a chord progression. Start changing the rhythm, melody, dynamics, instrumentation, and performance, and suddenly those same ingredients become millions of completely different songs.
That is the idea behind Why Is This Song So Good?
I hear a song I love, pull it apart, figure out what is actually happening underneath it, and then usually discover that the magic is not nearly as complicated as it sounded.
The Black Keys’ “Little Black Submarines” is a perfect example.
It has a simple chord progression, basic guitar chords, and an arrangement that spends its first half barely raising its voice. Then the whole thing blows open.
That contrast is what got me.
In This Episode
The Black Keys’ “Little Black Submarines”
How chord progressions shape songs
Why the same 12 notes can create endless music
The basic guitar chords in “Little Black Submarines”
Dan Auerbach’s guitar playing
Patrick Carney’s drums
The acoustic opening
The transition into distorted electric guitar
Dynamics and song structure
Why simple music can still feel enormous
Playing the song on guitar and drums
Why feel matters more than technical perfection
Five Chords Can Be Enough
I tend to hear music from the bottom up.
Even when I am not consciously trying to analyze something, part of my brain is listening for the structure underneath the vocals and production. Where did the progression go? Why did that chord feel satisfying? What changed when the chorus arrived? Why does a section suddenly feel bigger even though almost nothing happened melodically?
The chord progression is usually where I start.
Lyrics matter. Melody matters. Rhythm matters. Production can completely transform a song. But the chord progression is the floor everything else gets built on.
“Little Black Submarines” is especially interesting because that floor is not complicated.
The song moves through basic guitar chords that most people encounter fairly early when learning the instrument: A minor, G, D, A major, with C appearing as the song develops. Nothing about those ingredients looks particularly intimidating written on a piece of paper.
That is part of what makes the song so good.
The Black Keys did not need some bizarre collection of jazz chords or an impossible guitar part. They took familiar shapes and arranged them in a way that creates tension, release, melancholy, and eventually a gigantic rock song.
Simple does not mean easy.
Sometimes simple means there is nowhere to hide.
The Quiet Part Is Doing More Work Than It Seems
The opening of “Little Black Submarines” feels almost fragile.
Dan Auerbach starts with acoustic guitar and voice, and the arrangement leaves enough empty space around him that you hear the movement of the chords instead of being distracted by a wall of production.
That restraint matters because the song is quietly teaching you what it is before it changes.
You get used to the pulse. You learn the progression. The vocal establishes the mood. Your ear settles into the acoustic version of the song.
Then the drums and distorted guitar arrive.
If the song started there, it would still have a good riff.
Because it waits, the riff feels huge.
That is one of those arrangement decisions that seems obvious after you hear it, but it changes the entire emotional shape of the track. The loud section works because the quiet section created somewhere for it to go.
Dynamics are not just volume.
They are storytelling.
Why The Black Keys Work
One of the things I have always liked about Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney is that their music rarely feels like somebody trying to impress you with how difficult it is to play.
That does not mean they are unsophisticated musicians.
It means the technique serves the song.
There are guitar players who make me think about guitar playing. I hear the precision, speed, theory, or physical difficulty and immediately start wondering how they did it.
The Black Keys often make me think about the song instead.
Auerbach can play something loose, dirty, and deceptively simple while Carney sits behind it pushing the whole thing forward. There is enough imperfection in the performances to make the music feel alive.
That looseness is especially important in “Little Black Submarines.”
When I recorded my own parts for this episode, I was not interested in reproducing every note exactly. I wanted to understand the structure well enough to get inside it.
The song does not feel like something that should be measured with a ruler.
It feels like something that should be played.
The Moment Everything Changes
Around the middle of “Little Black Submarines,” the arrangement shifts from acoustic restraint into the version that makes you want to turn the stereo up.
The chords have not suddenly become dramatically more complicated.
What changes is the weight.
Distortion fills the space that had been empty. Carney's drums give the progression a completely different physical feeling. Auerbach attacks the guitar harder. Notes that sounded reflective in the acoustic section suddenly feel aggressive.
The song gets bigger without abandoning the thing that made the first half work.
That is great arranging.
It is also one of the reasons learning songs by other people is so useful. You stop thinking only about which notes somebody played and start noticing when they chose to play them, when they stopped, and how much space they left before changing the entire character of the song.
Sometimes the best part is not a new chord.
It is the same chord played differently.
The Difference Between Knowing the Chords and Knowing the Song
You can look up the chords to “Little Black Submarines” in about thirty seconds.
That does not mean you know how to play it.
A chord chart gives you the skeleton. The record gives you everything that makes the skeleton move.
There is the timing of Auerbach's strumming, the way individual notes come out of the chord shapes, the vocal phrasing sitting over the progression, Carney's entrance, the dynamics, distortion, little rhythmic changes, and the looseness that keeps the track from sounding like somebody playing along with a metronome exercise.
This is why I like breaking songs down by actually playing them.
Once your hands have to reproduce the idea, you notice details your ears were allowing you to ignore.
A guitar part that sounded easy suddenly has a tiny rhythmic move that makes the whole phrase work. A drum beat that seemed straightforward lands differently against the guitar than you expected. One chord hangs around slightly longer than your memory told you it did.
That is where the song starts becoming interesting.
Playing Along With “Little Black Submarines”
The second half of this episode is the demonstration.
I recorded myself playing through “Little Black Submarines,” adding guitar and some additional drums so I could show the parts instead of spending another ten minutes describing them.
It is not supposed to be a note-for-note recreation.
That would miss what I like about the song.
The point is to hear how a handful of basic guitar chords can become something much more powerful once performance and arrangement enter the equation.
The first half explains the machine.
The second half turns it on.
Why Is This Song So Good?
I don't think there is one answer.
That is probably why I started making these episodes.
With “Little Black Submarines,” the chord progression matters. The dynamics matter. The acoustic opening matters. The electric section matters. Auerbach's guitar playing matters. Carney's drums matter.
But none of those things alone explains why the song works.
It is the relationship between them.
The quiet part gives the loud part somewhere to go. The basic chords leave room for performance. The loose playing keeps the structure from feeling mechanical. The arrangement takes something that could have remained a good acoustic song and turns it into a rock song that feels enormous when it finally arrives.
Five chords on a page do not look like much.
That is sort of the point.
Song Credits
“Little Black Submarines”
The Black Keys
From El Camino
Written by Dan Auerbach, Patrick Carney, and Brian Burton
Dan Auerbach: guitar and vocals
Patrick Carney: drums
Useful Links
The Black Keys
https://theblackkeys.com/
“Little Black Submarines” Official Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k8es2BNloE
Watch My “Little Black Submarines” Breakdown on YouTube
https://youtu.be/nSahSKdS5vo
More Song Breakdowns
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