Most well-known songs based around a major seven chord?

Hahahaha it's The Cranberries' first single.

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Matthew, knowing your tastes, I think your instinct is probably correct.

yes, "Sugar Hiccup" is Major 7th heaven!

Love - Forever Changes is loaded with them too, very prominent in "Andmoreagain", "The Red Telephone", etc. Bryan MacLean was bigtime into 7ths & 9ths, Major & minor.

this is always what I think of when asked to explain what a maj-maj-7th chord is

Yes, "Close to You" is prob. a textbook example.

major triad + a major 7th added (eg, C-E-G-B)

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the thing about major sevenths is that they're sweet chords; dominant sevenths are brassier, harder. plus, and correct me if i'm wrong, but a major seventh does refer to the major/minor tonality, because in C, a minor seventh can only contain the two flat notes that are in the minor scale, right? minor sevenths are very warm chords, and one of the things about the Beatles around the time of "Hard Day's Night" and "For Sale" is the fact that they were using them; "What You're Doing" is a good example, I think.

Re sweet chords: I've always thought of them as bittersweet, specifically, because they encapsulate both a major triad (C-E-G) and a minor triad (E-G-B).

c-eflat-g-b isn't a minor seventh
right

plus, and correct me if i'm wrong, but a major seventh does refer to the major/minor tonality, because in C, a minor seventh can only contain the two flat notes that are in the minor scale, right?

it doesn't, because when notated on a chart, you'll either see:
C7 : refers to a major chord with a flatted 7th
C-7 : refers to a minor chord with a flatted 7th
Cmaj7 : refers to a maj chord with a maj 7th
C-(maj7) : refers to a minor chord with a maj 7th
C+7 : refers to an aug chord with a flatted 7th
C+(maj7) : refers to an aug chord with a maj 7th, tho at this point, you could also notate as E+(maj7) or G#+(maj7) - or E/C for that matter, if you wanted the scale to be E based instead of C based

also note, for minor scales, you should never take for granted that they are referring to any one particular kind. in jazz, usually you're talking about melodic minors (especially in be-bop and beyond charts - though it really depends on the notes of the melody, all cues about what's "correct" come from there)

Dom, I always thought the default minor scale in jazz is Dorian.

well, dorian is actually not technically "minor" scale - it's a mode, which just happens to share the note intervals of the "natural minor" scale. I wouldn't say it was the default one though - Miles Davis used modes on a lot of his late 50s and early 60s records, but for the most part jazz players were using minor scales that contained major 6ths and 7ths (which the natural [and dorian mode] does not)

and keep in mind, one of the most common things jazz improvisers will do is to add notes that aren't technically in the scale when they improvise - hence you get a lot of "chromatic" figures, or figures that that when taken on their own (apart from the context of the entire solo), seem out of the key entirely. see john coltrane especially

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