Elliott Smith "Coming Up Roses" Harmonic Analysis 

Thanks so much everyone for the love! Be sure to check out my new video on Judee Sill.. If you love Elliott Smith and you don't know her yet, I think you'll be in for a treat!

Love myself a weird bus

What a beautiful chord progression, thanks so much for explaining all the theory behind it! Hope you'll make the same kind of video on "Bottle Up and Explode!" someday

please more of these Elliott smith harmonic analysis vids! I just got here for Beefheart and stayed for Elliott Smith. Bravo.

holy shit do more of these

Wow, how cool to just sit down and find this. I am a big fan of ES music, songs, and songwriting. It’s really cool to find someone has broken down his song, illustrating some of its theoretical value, and why it’s good music, and why it catches your ear in certain distinct ways. Pretty cool man, pretty cool.

One of the best Elliott smith analysis videos I’ve ever seen

Your channel is a real gem

i want to learn piano just to play Elliott now

im so glad you brought up the I II IV thing because i hear it so much in his music that if he plays a II and it DOESNT go to IV i feel dissatisfied lol

the section transitions written on paper are really nice

Your channel content is so great and I hope you get big enough to do this as much as you want.

Thank you for this. Back in 1997 this song was my introduction to Elliott Smith.

that was amazing. thank you very much

This is great.

Finally a video truly for me

Incredible job

This is great stuff.

Ah dude, thanks so much for this.

so cool!!

wonderful video!

Thank you! This is beautiful.

Great video! Will have to go back and study this more!

your playing is gorgeous! great analysis, thanks for making this :)

Beautiful

thank you so much!

Amazing video, would love to see more harmonic analysis from you!

This is SUPER.

Amazing analysis + I really like the handcrafted aesthetic. Thank you!

Thanks for this awesome video. So helpful and it’s cool

really cool analysis, one of my favorite songs of all time tbh

please keep doing what you're doing. I've watched alot of analysis videos of Elliotts work and you've covered it better than anyone. Great work!

excellent video

This is AMAZING!! I have been down in the dumps all week because it is the week of the 21st and I've been just soaking in every piece of Elliott media I could find. This analysis is absolutely incredible. Thank you.

Fantastic video, would love to see more of his catalogue analysed

Great video

This was great. I'd love to hear more analysis on Elliott's music!

I loved that. Thank you and great job. For what it's worth, I agree with your analysis.

Keep 'em coming

Man this was an awesome video!!! Subscribed and liked

I don't understand a lot, most of the terms you've mentioned I've never heard before, but man, is this video incredible. I loved it!

Nice!

god these songs sound gorgeous on piano, thank you for this video!

New to your channel. This is lovely and awesome as hell. Greatest songwriter of all time in my opinion and the more and more I’ve dug into his songwriting the more deeply I feel connected to music in general. I hope you’ll do more of his music. Clementine, memory lane, can’t answer you anymore, Christian brothers, distorted reality, man any and everything. Thank you!

Thank you so much for this…please do more of Elliott’s work! I wonder how much he was into theory and how much came intuitively for him….

Like no views for such an awesome video! Appreciated the music theory knowledge + the visuals a lot as a musician who listens to a lot of (and plays a lot) of smith. Would watch a million of these if they existed

"smithian harmony" love it

One of my absolute favorite Elliott Smith songs.

I'd love to see a video about the songs of his that are outliers! Off the top of my head, maybe some things off of Roman Candle, or Waltz #1.

Dude! Your explanations are insanely good. I loved this song so much when I first heard it was part of what got me into song writing in more than four chords in the same key. Keep it up man and your youtube channel is gonna blow up big. My one bit of advice as a sound engineer would be to try to get a MIDI keyboard of some kind set up to record these, as you've got so much room resonance, it's sometimes hard to tell just listening to the video whether you're playing a 1st or 5th because...well that's how room resonance works. A clearer midi recording would help my brain out a bit. But otherwise, just absolutely awesome. The piano sounds amazing - but it's just a bit too beautiful to focus on for a theory video.

Yeah! ok! Edit: this was fantastic.

I would love to sit down with you, so I could be like "Hold up! Wait...what did you mean by that?"

2 more songs of his that you should do a breakdown on: really great piano work on both of these tracks that deserves their own in-depth look. Waltz #1 Everything Means Nothing To Me

Some analyses of David Ackles, Judee Sill, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake and Duncan Browne would be most welcome!

wow

Pretty Mary K would be an interesting one to analyze

Can you post a piano cover of this?

do you have sheet music for his other songs i would die for that. great video btw

The only suggestion on improvement I can make is that you should display what chords you are playing during your little examples. Oh and that you should give small examples of your own stuff where you use his methods.

In the chorus, is the Bb major chord from the F major tonality, as opposed to the Ab major tonality (just wondering why it's orange at 3:45 given Bb major is not a chord in the Ab major tonality)? Apologies if I misunderstood, thanks!

Hi i wonder if you still have/if youd share the arrangement you used for the video? Thanks!

is there any reason to why the arrows are there at 2:35? to me it's like youre saaying elliott goes from F to F- to Ab with those arrows (or other way round). are you just drawing the chords with arrows for no reason?

i think you'd find stickman interesting