Rick Beat is trying to deceive you. If you really believe that this Sergio Mendes song is complicated, you need to listen to some older pop songs. For example, Stevie Wonder is a good composer to start.
Yes and no —- it’s definitely pretty far out there for a mainstream 80s pop song, and a bit more fiddly at first glance than your average Stevie Wonder song.
I think the trick is that it’s bossa nova, which tends to have a lot of those semitone shifts that Rick highlights. The Girl from Ipanema is the classic example.
I love that they seem so complex when you look at the individual chord movements, and yet the melody flows very naturally (to my ears, anyway!)
The effect in Never Gonna Let You Go feels a bit like the dramatic key change you often get right at the end of those 80s ballads, but smoothly integrated throughout the whole song. I can well imagine some hate that, but I love it!
Not that anyone cares, but noticing that this song is a cover rather than a Sergio Mendes original, I was curious whether the earlier recordings had the same tricky structure or if Mendes (being a Bossa Nova guy, among other things) added them in.
And they do! The Dionne Warwick and Stevie Woods versions have the same chords (and nearly the same arrangement); so it comes from the original songwriters (Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann), although it’s a perfect fit for Mendes’ style.
That reassures me that the chord structure is really integral to the song (as I’d like to believe) and not just tacked on afterwards to make it sound cooler.
