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6.13.7 “Free Man in Paris” Chords: How the Chord Progression Works
In “Free Man In Paris,” Joni Mitchell, empress of open-chord tuning, uses five major chords (major triads) to shuttle between the keys of A major and C major.
You can get away with a lot if you use a handful of triads like that. Triads have internal stability. In “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin,” Gershwin uses a progression of simple triads to modulate back to the song’s original key.
The chord map below (Figure 110) shows the variant chords A major and D major in place of the default chords A minor and D minor in the key of A minor—which effectively becomes the parallel key of A major.
All five of the chords for this song can be accommodated in one circular harmonic scale, which maps the verse and the chorus (Figure 110):
FIGURE 110: Chord Map of “Free Man In Paris” (Words and Music by Joni Mitchell, 1973)
The chord map above shows that the last four chords of the verse, C – G – F – A, get reversed in the chorus, A – F – G – C. It’s a mirror image, a novel way to create verse-chorus contrast. Did Mitchell plan this, or did it just “happen”? She’ll never tell, we’ll never know. Alas.