And on my deathbed, I will pray to the gods and the angels. Like a pagan, to anyone who will take me to heaven.
-Chris Cornell, Audioslave, 2003
The rumor is that this song was written in Jimi Hendrix's old house. The energy would certainly fit. Hendrix would have loved this song. We understand that Chris was fairly clear about the context. Desperately scraping across the holy books, death imminent, and calling. The deathbed prayer so clear, but the agnosticism is equally opaque. A prayer to any God or any angel who might be listening is surely a hail-mary, and we're not sure that's how it works. Praying to "anyone who gives me what I want", is a bold strategy. You don't know who, or what might answer. Nor what their cost might be. It's ominous, as is the song: Dark, foreboding, brooding, shadowed sure, but utterly honest & wonderfully authentic.
Intro
The four chords of the verse progression unfold twice through as an intro before the Bass enters. The progression is i- to bVIImaj to v- to bVImaj7. It would be a simple Aeolian progression, but the Bass is making the solar system spin rather unpredictably. It starts in a straight forward manner, on the first chord, the minor tonic, the bass establishes the root, and hits the 5th back down to home. We've all heard this before, nothing out of the ordinary. But it starts influencing things in unusual ways as soon as it hits that root again on the second chord. You see, over, and over, indiscriminate of the changing verse chords, the bass, like a beating heart, continually hits the primary 1, 5 to 1, 5 to 1. The second chord of the phrase, the b7 chord, the Bass literally plays exactly what it played in the previous i- chord. This makes the new chord feel unstable. Normally the bass would play the 5 to one of the chord, but here, it doesn't budge. From its point of view as a b7 chord, these bass notes are not even chord tones at all, but rather tensions, specifically 9 and 13. The pattern continues for chord three, a v- chord that now effectively feels like it's over it's 11. The last chord of the phrase, a bVI Maj7, is made to feel as though it's over its 3rd. Due to its repetitious nature the repeating bass line is perhaps experienced here more like some kind of pedal ostinato, but when a chord has a note other than its root in the bass, we call this inversion.
Inversion is a remarkably useful technique that can be used in a myriad of manners. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, John Williams masterfully used inversion to create texture and atmosphere. It was an evil scene, it was the Nazi book burning scene, it called for patriotic march music, but more so "evil" patriotic march music. To achieve this he took a normal sounding march arrangement, and inverted the chords over their 7's, which added just the right dash of psychoacoustic mojo for that moment. Brilliant. We can also use inversion to integrate what might be separate chords, into one clean progression. We might allow a four bar stepwise bass-line to invert one or more chords of a series. Now what was three separate units, are now integrated into a new larger single (3 chord) unit. Much like constructing sentences out of words. The use for this in lyric phrasing is self evident, but it goes much deeper than this. We've now created an expectation, and it can be built on, or exploited in creative ways. The goal usually being to heighten the journey for the listener. The poignancy of the story. In Like a Stone, the bass is achieving this, by approaching the technique in the opposite way as we just explored. As a single bar phrase, it breaks each chord into a lonelier unit. The repetition of the pitch is disorienting, and genius. It's unique, and integral to the full song experience.
Verse
Of course, so is the wonderful melody, the very first note of which, springboards off the tritone. The tritone being the Diabolus in Musica. The devils note. The famous interval that was at times outlawed by various religious puffy pants fancy fellows. It has a palpable psychoacoustic effect, and it's a direct method for turbo charging a dominant chord resolving to tonic. Putting that note right in the melody, right on the first note is epic on it's face, and its classic Cornell, classic Audio Slave, & classic Grunge. And by the time you've felt it, you've heard the phrase "On a cobweb afternoon." It's as killer interesting, as it is disorienting. By the time syncopation within the second melodic phrase hits, in the lyrics, 'In a room full of emptiness', you're down the rabbit hole.
Chorus
The chords of the verse progression are both unified & deranged by the Bass ostinato, obstinate in its repetition. In contrast, the first three chords of the Chorus are decorated and bound by the primary b7 in the melody, we hear it repeat from the i- chord, to the bIII to the v-7, and only at last releases on the turnaround chord, the bVImaj7. The bass, freed from it's single bar prison now seems positively leviathan cascading through a stepwise, 4 bar phrase. With respect to the phrase framing of the harmonic rhythm, the bass from below, and the melody from above have changed places. This gives room for the lyric & the melody to positively ravage your heart. The second half completes with all instrumentation unified on an antecedent/consequent phase, followed by a melodically integrated antecedent/terminal phrase. The last part hanging on the always spicy, always powerful nondiatonic secondary dominant. The diatonic chord here is the positively dull by comparison v-, with a minor third. By raising that third major, the chord becomes fully functionally dominant. Perhaps not coincidently, this power comes from the fact that the note change introduces, a new nondiatonic tritone, a new diabolus in musica: the devil of the crossroads, and he shows you the way home. The diabolus in musica is very good at that.
Guitar Solo
But we are not done. After a deathbed, pagans, angels, and biblical references; the bruised sky, and the bled wine, we hit the chorus a second time. It now feels like a prayer more than ever. As a listener, if you have the bandwidth to go introspective, you're given a moment during the guitar solo to consider the implications of an old man pleading to a God that he barely believes in. It's a classic song solo. Informed by the song, in service of the song, and composed of bits of the song's primordial ooze. It has 4 clear sections, mirroring the tessellation presented by the 4 chords of the verse section that repeats 4 times, and the 4 sections of the chorus, each composed of 4 chords. The solo's antecedent phrase's contour is a puddle jump, and the second is a reply in the shape of a liftoff. Phrase three repeats itself 4 times, setting up the phrase 4 climax of 4 groupings of 4 sixteenth notes repeating that frankensteinian, one foot in front of the other, no replacement for displacement, stepwise melody that liaisons into the bridge like walking through a hurricane wall, and into it's eye.
Bridge
The bridge is also 4 phrases: Major, minor, Major, minor. On that first Major, at last the sun is out and the sky is clear! But no sooner have we rejoiced in this warmth, then we're hit with phrase two- in some kind of parallel minor. Of course, we are creatures with memory, and the primary tonic still lingers like a ghost or an old God making this moment feel very much like a cleverly placed IV-. It's so interesting, it's so sophisticated. It makes no apologies for being heavy mental nor for being absolutely schizophrenic. The way the bridge began on major, with that ray of sunshine, it would seem to be a cruel narrative device- a gift given only to be cruelly snatched away. Major, to minor, to Major, to minor, building from just a simple strumming acoustic guitar into the full penultimate energy of the band! It crashes hard, one foot in front of the other, in a frankensteinian, 'no replacement-for-displacement', stepwise movement right back into the heart-wrenching chorus.
Outro
Once more, taken by the overflow, and swept to sea. ... As it at last subsides, we’re left wondering. Is there a ray of light on the horizon? Is there yet salvation? The final cadence resolves not to the primary minor tonic that has haunted us all song, but rather to the major. Our song leaves us, within that familiar and fragile ray of light that broke through in the Chorus. We are left pensive, wondering if this is the end of the story, or merely the beginning of a new chapter.
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