That one weird chord in “Sir Duke”

You can feel it all over by Dr. Ethan HeinYou can feel it all over peopleRead on Substack We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life’s release, and I plan to put in some quality musicology on it. I’m starting now, with a look at a single chord in “Sir Duke”, the one that first appears at 0:48 in the chorus: The song is in B major. The chorus goes like this: “(B) You can feel it all (???) over, (Emaj7) you can feel it all (C#m7) over (F#7sus4) people.” All of this except for the mystery chord is plain vanilla Western tonal music. The first chord is the tonic B. The last two chords are ii and V in B major, setting us up for a cadence into the B chord on the next phrase. The Emaj7 is subdominant, like C#m7, and you could think of those chords as more or less interchangeable. Fine. So what about the mystery chord? Well, the melody notes on the word “over” are A-sharp and G-sharp, the seventh and sixth degrees of the B major scale. So what chord could logically go…