One of the simplest ways to add energy to a sparse musical texture without obviously adding ’extra instruments’ is to just change the timbre and thickness of the instruments that are already there, and there’s a great example of this idea in action here when the first chorus lands. Up to that point we’ve had a good 45 seconds of just a single acoustic-guitar rhythm part, based on the classic 3+3+2 stress pattern that underpins so many pop songs (eg. Taylor Swift’s 'The Fate Of Ophelia', Olivia Rodrigo’s 'Stupid Song', Gigi Perez’s 'Sailor Song' and, back into the mists of time, Ed Sheeran’s 'Thinking Out Loud'), and an unadorned central lead vocal, although both do have a touch of small-room reverb widening things slightly, as you can hear if you check out the stereo Sides signal.

But then at 0:47 the chorus makes several changes at once. Most strikingly, the guitar part gains a powerful pair of hard-panned doubletracks from what sounds like a different instrument (or at least with very different mix EQ) so that it gives the guitar texture a much warmer and more full-bodied timbre. (To be fair, there’s also some kind of low-end warmth enhancement going on from some kind of bass or synth sound, but it’s clearly been mixed not to draw conscious attention to itself.) On closer listening, the vocal seems to gain a pair of low-level hard-panned doubletracks at that point too (although it could be some kind of ADT effect) as well as more of that room reverb. But none of these things change the fact that we’re still fundamentally listening to two parts: a guitar and a vocal. And that leaves plenty of room for building the arrangement from there, such as when the backing-vocal harmonies and gossamer background atmospherics arrive for the second half of the chorus at 0:58.

The chorus’s four-bar Bm-D-F#m-A harmonic progression got me thinking too, because I wonder whether part of its appeal is the symmetry of its two pairs of rising thirds, almost as if they’re rising-third embellishment on an underlying IV-I root progression – whether you consider that as being a D-A progression with preceding rising thirds of B and F#, or a Bm-F#m progression with following rising thirds of D and A. It’s something that’s struck me about plenty of other songs too.

For example, there’s a pair of falling thirds in Tones & I’s 'Dance Monkey' ( F_#m-D-E-C_#m); Billie Eilish’s 'Everything I Wanted' ( D-E-C_#m-D) features a pair of rising steps; and Doja Cat’s 'Kiss Me More' ( B_bm-E_b-A_b-D_b), Miley Cyrus’s 'Flowers' ( Am-Dm-G-C), and Nirvana’s 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' ( Fm-B_bm-C-F) all use pairs of rising fourths, while Addison Rae’s 'Diet Pepsi' ( Cm-Gm-B_b-F), and Harry Styles’ ‘Watermelon Sugar’ ( Dm-Am-C-G) use falling fourths instead. (I suppose you could even say that a simple I-IV-V-I chord pattern, such as in The Cranberries ‘Dreams’, constitutes a pair of rising fourths as well, but I reckon it’s a stretch to say that this is the reason for that particular progression’s popularity!) What this all suggests to me that is that aspiring songwriters might be wise to explore this concept while searching for promising new harmonic loops, as it seems to me that there are plenty of underused combinations of underlying root progression and intervallic ornamentation out there to be capitalised upon.

Oh, and it doesn’t just have to be something you use for your whole song either, because there are plenty of other tracks which use this idea just for characteristic moments – the pairs of rising thirds that start the chorus of Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ ( Am-C-Dm-F) and every section of The Animals’ 'The House Of The Rising Sun' ( Am-C-D-F), for instance, or the three sets of falling fourths that start the verse of 'Hotel California' ( Bm-F_#-A-E-D-A).