There are two ways to deal with heartbreak: write a poem nobody understands, or grab a guitar and let it do the sulking for you. The Who chose option two in 1971, and honestly, they nailed it.
This is my MelodyChords take on "Behind Blue Eyes" — the melody and the chords crammed onto one guitar, so you can brood alone in your room without needing a band, a singer, or a therapist.
How this Behind Blue Eyes arrangement works
The whole thing lives in E minor, which is basically the official key of feeling sorry for yourself. The verse is built on gently rolling arpeggios — Em, G, D, Cadd9 — and the trick with a chord-melody arrangement is to keep the sung melody as the highest ringing note while your thumb quietly handles the bass and inner voices underneath. One guitar, three jobs.
The clever bit is the emotional bait-and-switch: the verses mope around in melancholic minor, then the bridge ("when my fist clenches…") snaps into brighter major chords and gets aggressive. That major-to-minor mood swing is doing all the storytelling — the same reason the minor key and its major relatives feel like two sides of one very dramatic coin. Nail the melody-on-top voicing and the song mostly plays itself.
And yes, if you only know this one from the Limp Bizkit version — no shame, Fred Durst cried so you didn't have to. Want the tabs and Guitar Pro file so your fretting hand can suffer in high definition? They're on my Patreon.