Weekly Basslines #243: Christmas Time (Bryan Adams)

This year I'm playing a few Christmas gigs and therefor I'm learning a bunch of christmas songs. While transcribing I noticed that a lot of christmas songs have similar harmonic features and so I decided to analyse a few of them. In the remaining weeks until Christmas I'll be posting 4 Christmas songs with analysis starting this week with Bryan Adams "Christmas Time":

Like many christmas songs “Christmas Time” by Bryan Adams is in the key of C major. This is in fact one of the most common keys for christmas songs. I’m not quite sure why, but maybe because it’s the “white” key , as it only contains the white keys of the piano.

Regardless of the “whiteness” of the key, in most christmas songs you’ll find a few non-daitonic chords. Let’s take a look at the verses:

The E major chord in bar 5 is the secondary dominant of the VI chord (Am) bringing in the G# as a non-diatonic tone. The lament bass in the first two bars however is a all-diatonically descending bassline typically going down from the tonic chord (I) to the dominant chord (V). This is a musical technique which goes back as far as to Renaissance composers like Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643).

In bar 6 of the chorus we have a minor subdominant chord (Fm), which is a borrowed chord from the parallel C minor scale and thus adds an “Ab” to the list of non-diatonical notes, which is enharmonic to “G#”.

The bridge contains another secondary dominant chord in bar 6. The D major chord (V-of-V) resolves to the actual dominant G major (V) and adds the F# to the list of non-diatonic notes. At the end of the bridge we accounter a descending bassline which unlike the lament bass is only accompanied by the dominant chord G major.

After the bridge the song modulates up a whole tone to D major:

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