Chord Of The Week 18/3/17 - An A5add9 from "What Can I Do" by The Corrs

bigjon

The song opens with a sparse-sounding open-voiced A chord - in the context of the song it's clearly a major chord but there's no major third at the beginning, so it sounds quite spacey.

A5add9: 5xx45x

The notes of the chord are
5xxxxx - A the root note
xxx4xx - B the 9th
xxxx5x - E the 5th

If these intervals were stacked in order you would have an Andy Summers-like 579xxx A5add9 chord which is spare-sounding enough, but the effect of moving the 5th upwards outside the confines of the A and the B a 9th apart is to give an even more spacious sound to the chord.

You can hear this chord at 0:01 in the official video for the song:

bigjon

Chord Of The Week Index updated with 189 discussions at
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/598/chord-of-the-week-index