"Put my Heart in a Jar and Watch it Pickle" is a melody—also adapted in 2016 as a song without words for piano solo—that unfolds on top of a progression of chords, with a cycle of five bars, that rises a semitone each cycle (E Am Dm B7 G | F …), completing the progression with a total of 60 bars. The melody breaks the regularity of the cycle imposing a phrasing of its own and many times it clashes with the harmony introducing strong dissonances that keep building tension until the end of the melodic line that opens in an increasingly wide register.