more revitalized cheese: 'yesterday' and 'america'

last week, i discussed a technique for revitalizing cheesy chord progressions, using the theme from 'chip n dale: rescue rangers' as an example.  i still believe it's one of the best demonstrations of this method, but i realize that a lot of people aren't likely to take my advice seriously without a more respectable example..  so here it is!  'yesterday', by the beatles:

as it is in many songs, the only modulations occur between the predominant key of the song (F, here) and its relative minor (d ).  but it's the transitions between those keys that set this song apart.  let's go through them one at a time.

by the second chord, we're already modulating.  the slightly uncommon transition from I to viio is used to facilitate the change to d minor using the extremely common iio V7 i progression.  this first modulation sets the mood for the entire song, and it's my belief that it is a large part of what makes this song so distinctively beautiful. almost immediately, though, we find ourselves modulating back to F, using the same parallel cheese progressions we saw in the chorus of the rescue rangers theme:  VI VII in the minor key becomes IV V in the relative major.  (in fact, the i could be included as one of the pivot chords, making the sequence vi IV V I.  this is the 'lollipop'/'heart and soul' progression, one of the cheesiest there ever was.)  once we get to the chorus, roles have been reversed;  we start in the minor key, and use the ii V7 I to modulate to the relative major, where in the verse, it was the other way around.

i've also provided the chords to simon and garfunkel's 'america'.  it's a much more elaborate example, but makes for a good demonstration of what's possible.  i'm only showing the chords though--  parts of the song are harmonically subjective and don't take well to classical analysis.  the thing to note here is that no one chord sequence is particularly original, by itself--  the string of weak changes with a stepwise-descending bassline is pretty cliched, and almost everything else is just IVs, Vs, and Is-- but through creative modulations, this collection of cheesy chord changes becomes one of the most memorable and inimitable pages in the american songbook.  so here it is, transcribed from the 'concert in central park' recording: