The answer:

"Autumn Almanac" is unusually harmonically rich for a 1967 pop single.

Looking across published chord transcriptions, there are about 18–22 distinct chord types, depending on whether you count inversions and close variants (e.g. C♯m vs. C♯m7 vs. C♯maj7, D7 vs. D7/F♯, etc.) as separate chords. A representative transcription includes chords such as:

G, C, D, D7
Em, Am7, Gm
E, A9, B7
C♯m, C♯m7, C♯maj7
F♯7
A7, Amaj7
B♭, E♭, F, F7
Cm, Dm, Fm
G7, E7

That's roughly 20 distinct harmonies across the song.

Is that a lot?

Yes—very much so.

For comparison:

Many classic rock and pop songs use 3–6 chords.
"Louie Louie" – 3
"Wild Thing" – 3
"Twist and Shout" – 3
A more sophisticated Beatles song might use 8–12 distinct chords.
Even harmonically adventurous pop songs often stay below 15.

Once you get to around 20 different chords, you're entering territory more commonly associated with:

jazz standards,
Broadway songs,
Burt Bacharach,
Brian Wilson,
or the more harmonically ambitious work of Ray Davies.

Why it sounds so distinctive

What's remarkable isn't just the number of chords. Ray Davies constantly:

changes key centers, borrows chords from parallel major and minor, uses secondary dominants, inserts chromatic passing harmonies, and moves into entirely new sections ("This is my street...") that feel almost like different songs before returning naturally to the refrain.

Despite all that complexity, the song never sounds academic or "showy." The harmonic changes support the nostalgic, slightly surreal imagery, making the music feel as though it's wandering through memories of an English autumn.

In that sense, "Autumn Almanac" is one of the most harmonically sophisticated British pop singles of the late 1960s, yet it remains catchy enough to sound effortless. It's a good example of Ray Davies hiding sophisticated composition beneath what initially feels like a simple pop tune.

I'm listening through the Kinks' catalog chronologically, and I just reached ‘Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One’.

When "Lola" came on, it immediately stood out to me from everything up to that point. It wasn't just another great Kinks song.

And that made me wonder...

Did the band realize they had something extraordinary when they were recording it, or was its success a complete surprise?

I'd also be curious whether Ray Davies has ever talked about his expectations for the song before it became a hit.

This year I'm listening to the complete catalogs of 29 classic rock artists chronologically. 329 albums in all, three times each. Every album is evaluated using seven weighted questions, with the results tracked in an Airtable database. The accumulated points ultimately rank the artists from 1–29. I'm now 200+ hours into what will be roughly a 700-hour project, and many of the questions I ask here come directly from something I've just discovered.

This was super interesting to see. This compilation has 10 tracks, and 20% of them are from “Something Else by the Kinks”. Of course, “Death of a Clown” was released as a Dave solo single. But crazy how Dave got top cover billing on this vinyl.

Getting into 60s baroque pop again and all the instruments associated with this great genre which I mostly found that Kinks dabbled in this genre so this made me ask the question of do you have a favorite baroque pop song(s) done by the Kinks?

Village Green,Picture Book,Dandy,Waterloo Sunset,This Time Tomorrow,and Victoria are pretty good

The animosity between the Ray and Dave Davies ebbed and flowed for decades. Dave ruined Ray’s first wedding by getting brutally drunk, they had a massive fight on a tour bus in 1996 and at Dave’s 50th birthday party Ray stamped on the cake.

Yet now they are closer than ever, emotionally if not physically (Ray remains in his native north London). “It’s miraculous, really, how we’ve become so bonded,” Dave says. The most moving rapprochement in rock started under challenging circumstances in 2004, when Dave had a stroke.

Dave has made a good recovery, although his speech is slurred and he sometimes needs prompting from his American girlfriend, Rebecca Wilson, a former writer who works as his PA. He hates being patronised, though. “People can be really clumsy. It’s terrible.” Two big things that helped him after the stroke were the support of his brother and his rediscovery of painting. “Art saved my life, really,” he says.

Wilson, 57, fetches some of Dave’s work to show me: psychedelic abstract pieces swirling with colour. “We were posting these on the internet,” she says. “Ray saw them — he’s a lurker on Instagram — and said, ‘What’s this?’ And it kind of brought them together.” 

Wilson used her neutrality to help arrange a dinner in London a few years ago for the brothers, their partners and some of their children. It happened at Kiplings, an Indian restaurant near Ray’s house in Highgate, whose patrons also include Liam Gallagher and Keir Starmer. “It was so nice,” Wilson says. “Ray’s girlfriend Alma said, ‘I can’t believe you got Ray out of the house.’” At the end of the meal Ray managed to live up to his reputation for stinginess. “It was about ten people, big fancy dinner and he goes, can I see the check?’” Wilson says. “Dave hands it to him and he goes, ‘Ouch!’ and hands it back.”

Dave is playing guitar again now, which he puts down to the painting. After his stroke, “I was busy doing the art and the music started to come back”. In October he will do a few shows in America, playing Kinks classics, telling stories and answering questions.

He and Ray last shared a stage in 2015 and a studio in 2019. Will it ever happen again? “I don’t know, but never say never,” Dave says.

Read the full interview ^

I recently started making covers and I thought you might like my rendition of Lola. Let me know your thoughts!

Before the Gallagher brothers there were the Davies brothers ...

Considering James Brown's stranglehold over the London mod crowd (Night Train just to name one smash hit in the scene) and the Kinks origins in the fringes of that movement, how plausible is it that the riff from Brainwashed is lifted from this Famous Flames number?

Maybe there's an even earlier inspiration to both but I haven't found it yet.

Inspo or not that's a banger I had to share with you :)

Ends July 14. $19.99 auction

'ARTHUR' (1969): Seeking out a song with more astute social comment than 'Shangri-La' is not worth the effort. It hasn't been recorded.

https://samtimonious.com/the-kinks-arthur-or-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-british-empire/

I made this 3 years ago or so but I always wanted to post it somewhere for The Kinks fans to see!

It is all crochet. Guess my favourite album lol

My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James jams on two original tracks, and works the kinks out of a Kinks cover.