Brian Eno accuses James Blake of using the "asshole chord" in 'Retrograde'
Brian Eno has called out James Blake's for using what he calls the "asshole chord" in a new interview between the pair.
Posted yesterday as a follow-up interview to the recent release of James Blake’s ‘Robots Into Heaven’, the producer tells Eno: “You once accused me of using the ‘asshole chord’.”
When Blake asks Eno to explain what the chord is, he’s told: “There’s a way of resolving things in songs which always disappoints me.”
“You have a sort of setup, and you think: ‘Don’t go to that one, don’t go to that one’, and it goes to that one and you think, ‘oh, god.”
The specific chord Eno refers to appears in the middle of Blake's most popular, 2013-released track 'Retrograde'.
“So it starts with a G major which is the nice chord,” Blake explains. “We like that,” Eno adds. “Then the bottom G in the right hand I moved up to an A flat, and that made it diminished over a G bass,” he says. “That was when your head cocked like a dog listening to a high pitch, and you said: ‘That’s the asshole chord!’.”
Blake admits he even tried to remake the song without the chord in question, but gave up because “the song doesn’t work without it”.
“It impacted me in that moment,” he tells Eno, recounting the time when he first heard the criticism. "Years of pain, therapist's office!”, he joked.
Watch the full interview 'Talking Robots Into Heaven - A conversation between James Blake & Brian Eno' below:
