To Know Him Is To Love Him Chords

The Truth About Playing Billy Joel's To Know Him Is To Love Him

Most people who try to play this song for the first time get tripped up by the chord transitions in the verse. It sounds simple enough on the record, but the way Billy Joel voicess those chords makes the movements a lot faster than they appear. I spent about twenty minutes trying to figure out why my version sounded rushed and disjointed before I realized I was using standard open-position shapes when the song actually calls for something much tighter. The song sits in E major at a moderate tempo, roughly 108 BPM depending on how much rubato you'reing yourself. The core progression in the verse cycles through E – A – B7 – C#m7 – E – A – D#°7 – D7sus4 – G – E/G– A before resolving back to the main motif. That descending chromatic line from E down to A is what gives the song its character, and if you don't nail it, the whole thing falls apart.

To Know Him Is To Love Him Chords

Here is the practical breakdown. The verse progression is where most people struggle, so let me walk through it properly. The first four bars go E – A – B7 – C#m7. You are probably already comfortable with those individually, but the speed at which you need to switch between them is what catches people off guard. Try alternate picking with a down-up-down pattern and keep your fretting hand anchored rather than lifting off the strings between changes. Then comes the part everyone misses. After the C#m7, you move E – A – and then into D#°7. That diminished chord is notated differently across various tab sites. Some show it as D#°, some as E°7, and a few just write E7b9. They all work because they are functionally identical in this context, but the voicing matters. Use a D#°7 with the notes D#–F#–A–C, voiced high on the D and G strings. If you strum it open with a standard E shape barreled at the sixth fret, it sounds muddy and loses the forward momentum the song demands. From there the progression descends chromatically: D7sus4 moving to a G major chord, then E/Ginto A. That E/Gis basically an E major with the Gin the bass. You can finger it as a regular E shape but mute the low E string and play the Gon the fourth string first. It takes a second of practice to make it clean, but once you get it, the bass line flows smoothly without any awkward jumps.

The chorus is much more straightforward. It is E – C#m – A – B7 repeated, with the B7 serving as the dominant that pushes you back into E for the next verse. Nothing fancy here. The trick is getting the rhythm right. Billy Joel plays a specific syncopated strum pattern where the accent lands on the "and" of beat two in each measure. If you strum straight eighth notes, it will sound flat and lifeless. Write it out as down-down-up-up-down-up and practice it slowly until your hand locks into that pattern automatically. The bridge section uses a I–vi–IV–V progression in E: E – C#m – A – B7, which is basically the chorus harmony condensed into four bars. Then it modulates up a whole step to Ffor the final chorus, which is where the energy of the song peaks. That Fmajor chord is straightforward, but make sure you are not dragging the tempo when you hit it. The song naturally wants to slow down at this point, and if you let it, you will be behind the band by the end. One thing I ran into that nobody mentions in chord charts is the intro. The recorded version starts with a piano riff that is essentially the verse progression played as arpeggios rather than blocked chords. If you are playing this on guitar and want to replicate the intro, you need to pick each note individually rather than strumming. The pattern is roughly E–G#–B–E–A–C#–E on the higher strings. It is slower than it sounds on the record because of the delay effect Billy uses, but you still need to articulate each note clearly or it turns into a wash of noise.

Another detail that matters is the ending. The song finishes with a variation of the verse progression that goes E – A – B7 – C#m7 and then back to E, but the last bar has a D7#5 that resolves to the tonic. Most chord sheets skip this entirely and just put a single E chord at the end. If you are playing along with the record or with other musicians, that D7#5 is what makes the ending sound complete. Finger it as D#–Fx–A#–D#, or just use a D7#5 shape rooted on the fourth string. I should mention that if you are transitioning from the popular Ukulele or simplified beginner versions of this song, you are going to run into problems. Those arrangements often drop the diminished chords entirely and replace them with simpler substitutions. This works fine for a campfire version but it strips out half the harmonic interest of the original. If you want to play it as Billy Joel wrote it, you need to learn the diminished passing chord and the chromatic bass descent. They are not optional. For practice, I recommend breaking the verse into two-bar segments and playing each one on loop at 60 BPM before increasing the tempo. Do not go faster than 5 BPM at a time. The bottleneck for most players is the A to D#°7 transition, so isolate that specific movement until it becomes muscle memory. Once you can execute that cleanly at 90 BPM, you are in good shape to handle the full verse at tempo.

There is no official chord chart from Billy Joel's publisher that I am aware of, and the tab you find online will vary in accuracy. The best approach is to learn it by ear alongside the original recording. Pause the track after each chord change, replay it several times, and confirm the voicing before moving on. This typically adds about ten to fifteen minutes per section compared to blindly following a tab, but the result is noticeably more accurate.