Righting Wrongs in Writing Songs

Danny Cope

Cengage Learning (Jan 2008)

Rating:
★★★☆☆

Tags:
Music, Songwriting, Composition, Reference, Education

Musicttt Songwritingttt Compositionttt Referencettt Educationttt

This book gives both aspiring and seasoned songwriters a powerful new approach to writing songs, focusing on common obstacles in the songwriting process and techniques to help songwriters overcome them. Each chapter goes to the root of a specific songwriting problem and provides exercises to help readers over the hurdles and put their new skills to work. Topics include writing approach, purpose, structure, melodic significance and construction, basic music theory, word meaning, word design and arrangement, chords, and how they are all pieced together. Along the way, a song is created to act as a case study and a demonstration of what each exercise can result in. The lessons are fun, informal, and include fresh suggestions and exercises born out of the author's experience in teaching songwriting at the college level. The book's companion website provides audio clips to accompany the relevant exercises and examples presented in the book.
This book is able to cover all of the major aspects of songwriting while keeping everything entertaining and enlightening. It really doesn't matter what level of a song writer that you are ... I very highly recommend it."
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer"

Righting Wrongs

in Writing Songs

Danny Cope

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I would like to dedicate this book to my incredible wife, Andi, whose love and support are amazing.

Acknowledgments

There are a lot of people who I feel incredibly indebted to when it comes to this book. I have been so supported and encouraged along the way that I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to Andi, Milly, Neve, Mum, Dad, Matt, Ben, Craig Golding, Kathy Dyson, Stefan Gordon, Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Brian Morrell, Katie Chatburn, Mark Marrington, Gary Hudson, Jamie Taylor, Charlotte Orba, Jez Pritchatt, Pete Sklaroff, Bhupinder Chaggar, Darren Sproston, all my colleagues at Leeds College of Music, Geraldine Latty, Simon Nelson, Ric Neale, Catherine Steers, Mark Garvey, and Cathleen Small.

About the Author

Danny Copeis currently the Course Leader on the BA (Hons) Popular Music Studies degree program at Leeds College of Music in West Yorkshire, England (the largest specialist Music Conservatoire in the U.K.). For the past six years, he has lectured in songwriting, song production, and popular music performance, and he has worked as a session bass player for the past 12 years.

Danny has a publishing contract with Daybreak Music Ltd. in the U.K., has released four solo albums, works as a songwriting consultant to the Open University, and has delivered songwriting seminars around the U.K. In addition to working as a writer, player, and educator, he has also written and presented a tutorial DVD

entitled Everything You Need to Know about Setting Up a Bedroom Studio, published by Music Sales Ltd., and he has been commissioned to write and produce backing tracks for use in several large corporations’ marketing materials.

Table of Contents

Introduction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … xi

1

We Don’t Know What We’re Trying to Achieve

1

What Is Songwriting? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 1

A Little Bit of Mathematics … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 5

Back to the Music … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 6

The Delivery … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 7

Songwriting Is an Art… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 8

Back to the Layers … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 8

Product Doesn’t Indicate Process … … … … … … … … … … … . . 11

Product Can Inform Process … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 11

Can We Learn to Write Songs? … … … … … … … … … … … … 12

Everyone Is Different … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 15

Writing Enough … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 17

Setting Standards … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 18

Do You Love Songs? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 20

Writing Location … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 21

Nurturing … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 23

Co-Writing … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 25

Collaborative Approaches … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 25

Writing a Part Apart … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 27

Conclusions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 29

Solution: Know What Works for You and What Doesn’t… … … … … … . . 29

2

We Don’t Know Why We Are Writing

31

What Makes a Good Song? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 31

Where Is the Appeal? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 32

The Power of Association … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 32

Who Has the Right to Decide What Is Good and What Isn’t? … … … … … . 35

Who Actually Does Decide?… … … … … … … … … … … … … 35

How Do People with These Jobs Make These Decisions? … … … … … … . 41

What Informs These Decisions? … … … … … … … … … … … … 42

How Do We Know What Works? … … … … … … … … … … … … . 44

Who Are We Writing For? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 46

Who Will Perform the Songs? … … … … … … … … … … … … . 48

Who’s Supposed to Be Listening to Them and Buying Them? … … … … . 48

Does a Song Have to Be Successful to Be Good? … … … … … … … … . . 49

Ask the Right Questions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 51

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Breadth and Depth … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 51

Conclusions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 53

Solution: Know Why You Are Writing before You Finish … … … … … … . 53

3

We Don’t Present Our Songs as Effectively as Possible

55

Functionality … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 55

How Do We Know How Long Our Songs Should Be?… … … … … … . 57

Why Do We Have Sections at All? … … … … … … … … … … … . 59

How Do We Decide How Many Sections We Want? … … … … … … . . 60

Simplicity… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 63

Expectation and Balance … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 64

Structural Components … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 66

Chorus… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 66

Refrain… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 68

Verse … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 68

Pre-Chorus… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 70

Middle Section… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 72

Intro … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 75

Outro… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 77

The Link … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 79

Form … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 79

Other Form Considerations … … … … … … … … … … … … … 80

Editing… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 82

Mechanical and Compositional Editing … … … … … … … … … … 83

Why Edit? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 83

Consideration of Balance … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 86

Conclusions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 88

Solution: Assess the Structural Effectiveness of the Song … … … … … … . . 88

4

We’re Not Sure What Our Melody Is All About

93

What Is a Melody? … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 93

Two Key Responses … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 93

What’s Important about Melody? … … … … … … … … … … … … . 94

It Should Be Singable … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 94

It Should Be Interesting … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 98

It Should Be Memorable (with Hooks) … … … … … … … … … … 99

Variation and Repetition … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 100

Variation … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 100

Repetition … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 101

How Important Is Melody? … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 102

Comparison to Groove … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 103

Comparison to Chord Sequence/Riff … … … … … … … … … … . 104

Comparison to Arrangement … … … … … … … … … … … … . 105

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

vii

Comparison to Volume … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 105

Comparison to Lyric … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 106

Solution: Think Carefully about the Role Melody Plays in the Songs We Write . . 107

5

Notes Fall Out of Our Heads without Us Thinking about Them

109

Scales… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 109

Chromatic Scale… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 110

Diatonic Scale … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 112

Major Scale … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 113

Minor Scales … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 114

Pentatonic Scales … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 117

Modes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 118

Naming Notes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 119

The Names We Give Different Notes … … … … … … … … … … . 119

Intervals … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 120

Tonal Confidence… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 122

The Hierarchy of Chromatic, Ltd… … … … … … … … … … … . 123

What This Hierarchy Tells Us … … … … … … … … … … … … 126

Confidence versus Character … … … … … … … … … … … … . 128

Melodic Motion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 128

The Three Alternatives… … … … … … … … … … … … … … 128

The Characteristics of These Alternatives … … … … … … … … … 129

Type of Motion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 130

Solution: Understand the Role and Effect of the Notes That We Employ… … . 134

6

Rhythms Fall Out of Our Heads without Us Thinking about Them 137

Framework … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 139

Meter… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 139

Time Signature… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 140

Identifying the Meter of a Song … … … … … … … … … … … . . 141

Confidence and Stress … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 144

Time Values … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 146

Note Duration … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 146

How We Write Down the Note Lengths … … … … … … … … … . 146

Dotted and Tied Notes … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 147

Character of Note Duration… … … … … … … … … … … … . . 150

Playing with Stress Points … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 152

Playing with Rhythmic Stress… … … … … … … … … … … … . 153

Note Length Combined with Placement… … … … … … … … … . . 155

Combining Tonal and Rhythmic Implications … … … … … … … … … 156

Solution: Assess and Understand the Role and Effect

of the Rhythms That We Employ… … … … … … … … … … … … . 157

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7

We’re Not Sure What We’re Trying to Say

161

Stanza … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 161

What Is It Supposed to Say? … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 164

The Package … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 165

The Nucleus… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 165

The Theme… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 165

Finding the Idea … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 166

What’s the Point?… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 166

The Delivery … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 167

Context … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 167

The Fact and the Feeling … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 168

The Four W’s … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 169

Combining Fact and Feeling … … … … … … … … … … … … . 174

Working Toward the Structure of the Song … … … … … … … … … . . 175

Verse … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 175

Chorus… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 178

Title … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 179

Pre-Chorus… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 180

Middle Section… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 182

Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 184

Solution: Lyric Mapping … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 184

8

We Take Too Long to Say Too Little

187

Denotations and Connotations … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 187

Synonyms … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 187

Other Useful Resources … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 188

Idioms … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 188

Quotations… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 190

www.onelook.com … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 191

Figures of Speech … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 191

Tropes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 192

Metaphors … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 192

Similes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 196

Personification … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 198

Metonymy and Synecdoche … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 200

Pun … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 202

Oxymorons … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 203

Schemes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 205

Inversion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 205

Repetition … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 206

Additional Things to Try … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 209

Playing on a Saying … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 209

Words within Words … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 210

Solution: Say More in Less and Figure Out Figures of Speech … … … … … 211

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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9

We Don’t Take Meter and Rhyme Seriously Enough

215

Meter… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 215

Syllables… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 215

Scansion… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 216

Feet … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 216

Meter… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 217

Metric Variation … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 218

Substitution … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 220

The Musical Elements of Speech … … … … … … … … … … … … . 222

Syllable Length … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 222

Relative Pitch… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 223

Stress-Timed Language … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 223

What’s the Point?… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 226

Altering the Perceived Speed … … … … … … … … … … … … . 226

Rhyme … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 227

How We Mark Them… … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 227

Different Types of Rhymes… … … … … … … … … … … … … 228

The Rhythmic Qualities of Rhyme… … … … … … … … … … … 231

Using the Rhythmic Qualities of Rhyme to Our Advantage … … … … . . 233

Tracking Down Rhymes in Rhyming Dictionaries … … … … … … … 235

Letting Rhyme Dictate the Words? … … … … … … … … … … . . 236

Solution: Manipulate Meter and Rework Rhyme … … … … … … … … 237

10

We Don’t Think about How to Grow a Lyric

241

Brainstorming … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 241

Case Study: Easier Done Than Said … … … … … … … … … … … . 242

Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 253

Solution: Try and Work within Some Sort of System … … … … … … … . 253

11

We Don’t Think about How We Grow Our Melodic Ideas

257

Melody as a Means of Communication … … … … … … … … … … . . 257

Keywords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 257

Identifying a Keyword through Repetition… … … … … … … … … 258

Building Melodies … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 261

Keyword Length and Content … … … … … … … … … … … … 261

Combining Repetition and Variation … … … … … … … … … … . 262

Plotting the Route … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 264

Starting with Lyrics and Guidance … … … … … … … … … … … 264

Melodic Framework … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 265

Contour … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 268

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Pillar Notes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 271

Rhythmic Pillar Notes … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 271

Rhythmic Passing Notes … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 273

Tonal Pillars… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 274

Tonal Passing Notes… … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 277

Conclusions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 282

Solution: Purposefully Develop an Initial Idea … … … … … … … … … 283

12

We Write Chords without Understanding Them

285

Building Basic Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 285

Triads … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 285

Diatonic Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 287

What We Call Them … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 287

Relative Minors … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 288

Diatonic Chords in Minor Keys … … … … … … … … … … … . . 289

Circle of Fifths… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 290

Cadence … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 293

Harmonic Function … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 295

Coloring Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 297

Inversions and Slash Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … . 297

Extensions … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 299

Alterations … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 302

Borrowed Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 303

Solution: Think about How Chords Relate to Each Other… … … … … … 308

13

We Don’t Think about How We Use Chords

309

Repetition and Variation … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 310

The Chords … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 310

Harmonic Pulse … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 312

Harmonic Rhythm… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 314

Combining These Tools for Variation … … … … … … … … … … 314

Other Ways to Generate Contrast … … … … … … … … … … … 315

Harmonizing a Melody … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . . 315

Making an Unconfident Note Sound Secure … … … … … … … … . 316

Making a Confident Note Sound Unsure … … … … … … … … … . 317

So What Can We Do with All This Knowledge? … … … … … … … . 318

A Case Study … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … . 320

Solution: Learn to Appreciate the Context That Harmony Gives a Melody … . 324

A

References

327

Index

329

Introduction

I hope you have noticed that this book is titled Righting Wrongs in Writing Songs, as opposed to just Righting Wrongs in Songs. Much as I would like to be able to, I can’t provide you with a definitive list of proper and correct ingredients that are guaranteed to make every song you write amazing. Subjective opinion is always going to be a real and present issue, and there is no way around it. I make no apologies for it, either. One man’s nectar is another man’s poison, and although that can be frustrating on some levels, it’s actually one of the things that makes writing songs such a fascinating and enjoyable thing to do.

I could write a detailed account of how you should write a song if you want it to appeal to my own personal taste, but that would rule out several million other people, and therefore that is probably not such a good idea! Another more useful thing I can do is dig deep into my experience as a songwriting coach and tutor and offer some considered and tested advice with regard to how to make the writing process more informed and productive. The plan is that this process will help with the identification and annihilation of some of the troublesome little issues that have a habit of turning into troublesome big issues when we are writing. In other words, it’s the writing of the songs that we are primarily interested in here, not necessarily the songs themselves.

Throughout my career as a songwriting lecturer, I have continually observed the same barriers to creative output being a hindrance and a frustration to many. Whether they come as the result of our own ignorance or as obstacles of our own design, there are several very real and recurring problems that scupper the plans and temper the ambition of hundreds upon hundreds of songwriters.

The intention of this book is to openly acknowledge these issues and to present measures that can be taken to deal with them effectively. Each chapter deals with a specific problem and explores what is at the root of it before suggesting exercises that are designed to help develop new understanding and skills. With a broad focus on writing popular songs, topics include writing approach, purpose, structure, melodic significance and construction, basic music theory, word meaning, word design and arrangement, chords, and how they are all pieced together. Along the way, a song is developed to act as a case study and a demonstration of what each exercise can result in.

One of the fascinating things about songwriting is that there are so many different routes into it. For example, it may be that you have gotten into songwriting with a keen understanding of music theory already behind you, but with a lack of knowledge of how to put that theory to good use. It may be that you have a solid handle on lyric writing but not the first idea of how to go about putting together a tune. You may already write great songs, but not really have the first idea how you do it or how the music really works. You may have a basic all-around understanding but want to dig a bit deeper and develop your skill set. There are plenty of other angles, too. Although this is one of the things that makes songwriting interesting, it is also one of the things that makes teaching songwriting a little more difficult than I am always entirely happy with! It means that it’s impossible to plot a route through the maze of song crafting that will be of use to everyone on every page.

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I’m happy to acknowledge that there will be some chapters in this book that deal with things with which you may already be well acquainted. Hopefully, though, there will be others that introduce you to some new ideas and concepts that you have never stopped to think about before. Regardless of where you are coming from and what you already know, I recommend that you read every chapter.

Different people approach songwriting in different ways, and it’s possible that the way I deal with some issues in here will be different from how you deal with them, even if you have come across them before.

I love talking to other songwriters about what they know and how they understand the whole process to work. I have been involved in conversations with Doctors of Musicology who could not and would not agree on some apparently basic principles of composition. Not because any of them were wrong, but because there are so many ways to process and understand all of the information we need to apply to writing our songs. No one has a definitive 100-percent, works-all-the-time approach. As Alan Jay Lerner summed it up brilliantly, “You write a hit the same way you write a flop.” It’s such a complicated business that it’s hard to pin down everything we need to know. Even seasoned pros have a hard time explaining how they write their songs from time to time. There is, however, one thing that we can be sure of; it’s through asking the questions that we start to find the answers, and that’s the mentality that has fueled the creation of this book.

In acknowledging that there are all sorts of different types of songwriters out there, I have purposefully included piano roll graphics in addition to traditional score notation wherever possible. I personally don’t believe that being able to read or write traditional notation makes someone a better songwriter, so I have tried to make the musical examples in here as easily accessible to as many people as possible. I do believe that it’s important to be able to step back and look at a graphical representation of a melody or harmony as well as hear it, but a piano roll is just as good at representing a tune as a stave is, in my humble opinion. In fact, dare I say, it’s sometimes even better! In Figure 1.1, I have included an example of one such graphic. Hopefully, it’s pretty clear that the rectangular shapes on the grid represent the durations of different notes according to their placement relative to the piano keyboard on the left-hand side.

Figure 1.1

I have attempted to write this book so that it will read as a study from cover to cover, but it will also be an effective reference of sorts should you wish to dive in and out from time to time. My hope is that you will enjoy it and that it will stimulate, motivate, and encourage you. Where there are pages that deal with things you have already come across, I hope that you appreciate refocusing your mind or find interest in the way the information is presented. And where you discover new approaches and skills, I hope that you are able to take them on-board and employ them in your enjoyment of writing more and more songs.

We Don’t Know What

Problem

We’re Trying to Achieve

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This book has been written in accordance with the assumption that either you want to get into songwriting or you have been writing for a while and are hoping that the contents of this book will help you step toward writing better songs. If you have effortlessly birthed a fair few songs already, or if more like me, you have forcefully and painfully squeezed songs out of your head and heart over an excruciating and frankly unacceptably long period of time, it is likely that you have discovered something that is true for the majority of us. We all have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to writing songs. For some of us, the melody-writing process is a relative breeze, while lyric writing is the weight on our shoulders that brings us down to earth with a distinct lack of elegance.

Alternatively, some will find lyric writing fairly straightforward, but seem incapable of getting anywhere quickly in writing a half-decent tune. Fear not—that is all perfectly normal. Although it can be one of the most rewarding, songwriting can also be one of the most frustratingly difficult pursuits known to man, regardless of whether the writer is a novice or a seasoned pro. No one finds writing an entire song easy all the time. If you find songwriting a battle now and then, take solace in this admission from John Lennon:

“If I had the capabilities of being someone other than I am, I would.

It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it’s torture.”1

What Is Songwriting?

Songs very rarely come out as a whole. More often than not, they come out in stages, where initial ideas result in small chunks and bits. For most, the creation of these bits is generally the first stage. Then, when each of the pieces of the puzzle is evident, the largest and generally most painful part of the process involves piecing them all together so that they work as a coherent whole.

In attempting to get a handle on how we can look at building songs, it is helpful to remember that these pieces can fit together in different ways. Primarily, we have to acknowledge that they will piece together either consecutively or concurrently. For example, a melodic idea may fit together with a lyrical idea that will share the same passage of time concurrently, or that same melodic idea might slot in with another melodic idea that will follow or precede it in any given song consecutively. Figure 1.1 illustrates what we mean by the difference between consecutive and concurrent pieces of a song.

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Figure 1.1

Concurrent and consecutive layers.

Because this introductory passage is primarily designed to paint a holistic view of the different components of songs, we will take the fact that they consist of consecutive elements as given and focus our attention here on the compositional layers that can be stacked on top of each other in parallel. One possible model of this would be where we start with a chord progression (Layer 1), then start humming a tune (Layer 2), and then come up with some lyrics on top at the end (Layer 3).

See Figure 1.2. Ultimately, crafting an entire song means creating these layers so they gel as a whole. Each of these layers will consist of more than just one idea, and the specifics of how to work within each of these layers will be dealt with in some detail later in the book. For now, we are focusing on the fact that these different layers exist and are the fundamental building blocks of the songwriting craft.

Figure 1.2

Layers.

For many of us, just creating one of these layers can be a struggle, let alone creating others that then have to click so they bring out the best in each other.

However, it is the songwriter’s job to marry all of these layers together. As Lamont Dozier (one third of the legendary Motown songwriting team) says, “There’s a marriage between the melody and the harmony—the chords you use that the melody has to stand on—that must be strong. And you have to have the lyrics that work with that melody—there are those three elements, and if you have all three, you will have a song that can stand the test of time.”2

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Although in this book we will artificially separate these layers for the sake of analytical convenience, it’s very rare that these layers are actually crafted entirely independent of each other. For example, it’s rare that a melody will appear without at least a tiny inkling of what part of the lyric will be. The odd smattering of words will usually appear in conjunction with the tunes we write, especially when we are creating the melody with a voice. Similarly, a melody will often seep out when we are developing our chord progressions, and chord changes will naturally start to reveal themselves when we start writing our melodies.

I acknowledge that these layers rarely appear in isolation and that the manner in which they stack on top of each other could quite easily be viewed more as an intermingling of ingredients than a stacking of separate parts, but the point is this: Once we have written our harmony, melody, and lyric, there is nothing stopping us from separating them, unless we count laziness and a distinct lack of interest.

Regardless of whether songs are crafted as clear-cut layers, they can certainly be viewed as such. For example, although a melody doesn’t necessarily have to sit on top of a harmony and can be seen more as a compositional element that weaves its way through rather than over a chord progression, it will have its own unique identities that afford us the opportunity to pay it some close attention after it has been written. That melody remains the same melody regardless of whether it is accompanied by the lyric and underpinning chord sequence.

The same principle also applies to harmony and lyrics. As long as we maintain our appreciation of how and why they slot together, it can be helpful to separate them because it enables us to study them closely and learn more about them. That is what we are striving to do in this book.

Songs don’t just appear in finished form. In fact, there are plenty of professional songwriters roaming the planet who are specialists in one of these layers but who are, if we’re honest, pretty hopeless in others. There are some very gifted lyricists who struggle with writing melodies and vice versa. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good writers. Nor does it mean that they are incapable of making a handsome living out of their strengths. It just means that they know what they’re good at and they focus primarily on developing in those areas. Lesson one, then, is that there is nothing wrong with being better at working in one layer than another. As we’ll see shortly when we take a look at co-writing later in this chapter, we don’t all have to be consummate all-rounders, and it can actually work to our advantage not to be. Sometimes it’s good just to sit back and be grateful that there is at least one layer that isn’t driving us slowly insane!

In addition to the layers of harmony, melody, and lyric, we should also make room for the inclusion of rhythm and structure. We won’t refer to these as layers, because they appear more consecutively than concurrently, but nonetheless, they are also vital players in the songwriting game and will therefore be getting due attention over the coming pages.

With all of these contributing factors in mind, a typical definition of a song might be something like “a formed and rhythmically layered combination of harmony, melody, and lyrics.” I am aware that many studious songwriter types probably have had numerous definitions of what a song is indelibly ingrained in their brains from various sources, but I think we can all agree that a basic definition would be

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something like the one I have just provided. However, is that all a song is? Is it simply a multilayered artistic creation, or is there something more to it than just chords, notes, and words?

Have you ever heard someone refer to “the song in their heart” or something similar? If so, have you ever pondered what that might really mean? I don’t think anyone has ever considered the song in their heart to be merely a stack of musical layers. We really should be thinking of a song as more than just that. A song can be the spirit or guts of what we are trying to say, whether musically or lyrically, and the layers we have looked at are merely the tools that we use to convey that song. Look at it this way: Do you know of any songs that you love, but that do nothing to conform to what you generally gravitate toward purely with regard to their musical construction? I certainly have at least a couple that break every rule I have in the “taste” file in my brain. I expect you will, too. We try to keep them secret, but every now and then our appreciation of them sneaks out in public. I think it’s mean to name them in a book, but there are a couple of boy-band songs that my trained musical mind thinks are rubbish, but that manage to infiltrate my

“proper musician” defenses every time I hear them. I couldn’t categorically state why I love them, but I do.

There are songs that are built with lyrics and clichéd harmonies that would usually do more to annoy and frustrate than to please and intrigue us, but for some reason, we love them and would happily listen to them over and over again. Why?

The only answer we can give is that we love the spirit of them. They make us smile or move us in some other way, and they make us want to listen again. They don’t generally appeal to our intellect in any way, shape, or form, but they grab us nonetheless. If you have songs that provoke a similar reaction in you, then you’ll understand what we’re looking at here. A song can be more than the sum of its parts. It can be the spirit that is revealed through the culmination of the traditional songwriting layers in which we can get so tangled. Figure 1.3 captures this idea in the form of a graphic.

Figure 1.3

A song is more than the sum of its parts.

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A LITTLE BIT OF MATHEMATICS

Sure, a song can just be the sum of its parts. There’s no point in arguing with that.

On the surface, music is basically an outworking of mathematics anyway. If you didn’t know that, then read the rest of this section, and we can enjoy some numbers together. If you did know that, then feel free to jump down to the section entitled “Back to the Music.”

I don’t want to get overly technical here, but there are a few simple truths that we really should appreciate if we’re going to get into this songwriting thing. First, we need to have a basic understanding of how we hear sound. Simply put, sound is generated through something vibrating or oscillating, whether it be someone’s vocal chords, a hollow tube being hurled through the air, a sixth-month-old screaming her little head off (and thus vibrating her vocal cords), or whatever.

When this vibration or oscillation occurs, it disturbs the air particles around it and sets them bouncing into each other. These air particles knock into each other in all directions and set off a chain reaction that’s a lot like a wave. In fact, they are referred to as waveforms.

When these waves of air particles get to our ears, our eardrums vibrate in sym-pathy with them. In doing this, our incredible ears somehow send a signal to our brain telling us that we can hear something. Amazing. What’s important about all of this is that the speed of the vibration will alter the pitch that we perceive and thus convey elements of melody and harmony. Think about a ruler being vibrated over the side of a table. We all know that the further the ruler is extended off the side of the table, the lower the note it generates when we bounce it. If you didn’t already know this, give it a try. A whole world of wonder will open up to you. If the ruler is barely over the edge, then it vibrates relatively quickly because it doesn’t have far to travel up and down. This means that it creates short waveforms, and the shorter the waveform, the higher the perceived pitch. We call the speed of these vibrations the frequency, and it is measured in Hertz (Hz).

To measure the number of Hz, we measure the frequency of a waveform per second. So if a ruler completes a full bounce up and down 80 times in one second, then the resulting pitch is measured as 80 Hz. As humans, we are supposed to be able to hear from about 20 Hz (very, very low) to about 20,000 Hz (very, very high). We use the measurement of kilohertz (kHz) to refer to frequencies of more than 1,000 Hz—it keeps things more manageable. So, 1,000 Hz would be referred to as 1 kHz. In reality, we can’t hear down as far as 20 Hz and we can’t hear as high as 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). Generally, humans rarely get above about 16,000 Hz (16 kHz), and even that figure descends as we get older or we batter our ears with excessive volume and they start to fail. Dogs are much more privileged when it comes to hearing high stuff.

So, a vibrating ruler with only a small length protruding over the edge of the table might complete about 200 full bounces in a second and would therefore be measured at 200 Hz. As the length of the ruler is extended over the edge of the table, the frequency gets lower. This is because the ruler has farther to travel up and down and therefore it completes fewer bounces per second. These fewer complete bounces equate to a lower frequency and therefore a lower pitch. Pitch that we perceive is actually a result of a certain number of waves of air particles hitting our eardrums per second. Different numbers equal different pitches. You likely

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have come across the term concert pitch, and that is usually an A that is specifically measured at 440 Hz. In other words, the pitch to which we tend to tune is the pitch produced by something generating 440 complete waveforms per second.

The amount of mathematics involved here multiplies when we add the fact that a doubling in frequency equals what we perceive as an octave. (I hope you appreciated the use of the terms multiplies, add, and equals in that last sentence.) So, if 440 Hz is an A, then a doubling of 440 Hz to 880 Hz is also an A, but it is an octave higher. Then, if we double the 880 Hz to 1.76 kHz, we get—you guessed it

—another A an octave higher, and so on. There is an amazing quantity of mathematics inside music. Even the scales that we use are essentially the result of some number jiggery-pokery, and rhythm is fundamentally based on divisions of divisions, otherwise known as fractions. If you want to know more about frequency, Hertz, and so on, there are plenty of good books on the topic.

BACK TO THE MUSIC

This book isn’t a physics textbook—I really would not be the right person to be writing it if it was. However, it is important to appreciate that music—on one level, at least—is merely the sonic outworking of combinations of numbers. When you look at it like that, it loses its magic a bit, and it’s the magic that we should get back to now.

If all we heard when we listened to our favorite songs was an outworking of mathematical principles, they wouldn’t have the same impact they do. Some songs make us cry, some make us laugh, some make us want to dance, and some make us want to hide and sulk somewhere. Songs can generate pretty much any emotional response, and it’s not mathematics doing that. It’s the song; it’s the guts that the ingredients we throw together encapsulate. If we responded to music purely on an intellectual level, then it wouldn’t be the global phenomenon that it is. It would just be of interest to a relatively select handful who are intrigued by it in much the same way that statisticians are drawn to their particular fields of interest. My three-year-old daughter loves music, and it’s not because she appreciates the manner in which frequencies interact with each other to vibrate her eardrums so many times per second. It’s because it makes her want to jump up and down or smile or sing along.

Pets can go crazy when music plays, too, and I don’t think Horatio the pet chin-chilla is particularly into any of Pythagoras’ theories, although I guess I could be wrong.…

It’s about significance. It’s about the listener connecting with the song on a level that goes beyond just musical or lyrical stimulation. As writers, we should strive to write songs that reverberate around someone’s soul and not just the inner cham-bers of their ears. As Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie put it, “Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.” 3 In almost every songwriting discussion and interview I have ever read, this consideration of resonance is key. Songs shouldn’t just bounce off those listening to them. They should contain meaning, depth, and something that reverberates deeper than words and sounds ever could.

In attempting to describe the songwriting process and the moment of inspiration when initial ideas are formed, a lot of songwriters talk about songs coming from

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beyond them. Bob Dylan once said, “The songs are there. They exist by themselves, just waiting for someone to write them down. If I didn’t do it, someone else would.” 4 And in an interview published in Acoustic magazine, James Taylor revealed, “I’ve said many times that songwriting and composition are a gift, and something over which I have no control. I don’t decide what to write songs about.

I simply receive them. Sometimes I receive them all at once, and sometimes I only get a little corner of it and I have to work and work and wait and walk the soles off my shoes and lock myself up alone for days, weeks, months in order to finish a song.” 5

The list of writers with this perspective on receiving the origination of their songs goes on and on. Music is more than mathematics, and songs are more than combinations of harmony, lyrics, melody, form, and rhythm. Sure, there are plenty of songs that we can appreciate from a musically intellectual point of view. The melody may be ingeniously crafted, or the harmony may complement the lyric in ways that we wish we had thought of, for example, and that in itself might make the songwriting and song-listening processes rewarding. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, the majority of this book is analytical and not particularly soulful in its approach. What we’re trying to get a handle on here is that if we are going to do a decent job of writing better songs, we need to understand these parameters so that we can use them to good effect. However, we will do well to appreciate that beneath these parameters lies something more incredible and beautiful than we will ever really understand. Music is amazing, and everything in this book should be read and interpreted in light of this fact.

THE DELIVERY

It wouldn’t be right to talk about the guts embedded in a song without spending at least a paragraph considering the significance of the person or people who deliver it to the listener. Vocalists and instrumentalists obviously play a massive role in communicating these songs to us, and it is fair to say that they have the power and opportunity to sell—or, alternatively, completely destroy—a song in their delivery and interpretation of it. We’ve probably all heard a song being butchered at least once in our lifetime, and it tends to be a fairly memorable experience when it happens! What’s important to note here is that vocalists or instrumentalists have to work with what’s there in the first place. They can rob a song of some of its inherent soul and spirit from time to time—that really isn’t very hard to do. What is much harder is to somehow inject that soul and spirit into a song that really doesn’t have much of it there in the first place. Some songs are just great songs that embody a spirit or emotion so effectively that it’s almost impossible to sing them without capturing at least some of the soul inherent in them. Obviously, which songs do and don’t fall into this category is always going to be subject to opinion, but personally, those that spring to mind include “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Paul Simon and “God Only Knows” by Brian Wilson. You will no doubt think of others, and these are the kind of songs that we should be trying to write.

The construction of a song can be likened to the creation of a building.

Architecture is more than just stacking building materials on top of each other. In addition to the physical construction and design, it’s about how buildings spring out of their surroundings and answer to and react with the environment around them.

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A good building is appraised not only through its structural soundness, but also through how at ease it is in its environment. There are a lot of parallels here with song construction and delivery. Not only must a song be “built” well, but it must also sit well where it is found and where it is delivered. The building materials will make the house, but the house doesn’t necessarily make a home. Musical ingredients will make a composition, but a composition doesn’t necessarily make a song.

It needs guts, and in addition to delivering the song accurately and musically, singers and musicians have to try to capture those guts in their performance.

Songwriting Is an Art

In appreciating that songwriting should be more than just throwing together some layers, we have to accept that these layers are fundamental ingredients in the process and that we need to spend time getting to know them. Throwing them together like old tires may lead to something a little superficial, but carefully resting them on top of each other like layers of a Black Forest cake can result in a tasty experience. This layering is an art; there’s no two ways about it. Furthermore, this art can be a pain in the neck.

BACK TO THE LAYERS

Creating layers in isolation is one thing. Creating and gluing layers that seamlessly fit together can be incredibly difficult and annoying. More often than not, we’ll have an idea that we then have to relentlessly pursue until we can get it where we want it, and this chasing can be an exhausting exercise. The reality is that every writer, regardless of experience or skill, will have a collection of snippets of songs lying around. It’s likely that there will be the odd few lines of lyrics scribbled down on scraps of paper, melodic phrases sung to death but as yet unfinished, chord sequences that sound nice but are inconclusive, and possibly a few “vibe-y” tracks stored away on a tape or hard drive somewhere, just waiting to be let loose.

Coming up with the occasional idea here and there isn’t generally that difficult.

What can drive us slowly insane is figuring out where each of these individual moments of brilliance can find its life partners to make truly beautiful music together.

The sad truth is that many of us settle for mismatches when it comes to stacking these layers on top of each other. I certainly have in the past, when I just had to get them out of my system and therefore I foolishly resorted to just dumping them anywhere. Figure 1.4 presents a graphic representation of what we’re looking at here.

“Songwriting is like building guitars. You save wood for many years until it’s ready, until you want a piece of wood like that, and you make an instrument. Or you may have the back and the sides, but you don’t have the wood you want for the face of the guitar. The metaphor is beautiful because a song is like an instrument in that it can be played by somebody else, and it can lay around for years and somebody can pick it up and play it again.”

—Jackson Browne 6

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Figure 1.4

Matched and mismatched layers.

We need to be very careful that we don’t do this. We’re always going to have an increasing collection of fully or partially completed one-off layers with which to work.

We just have to learn to file them away until their perfect life partner comes along and we can marry them off. Didn’t someone once sing that you can’t hurry love?

Like a guitar or any other instrument, a well-balanced song should consist of complementary components that do each other justice. It’s highly likely that one of these layers will be the high-flyer and will take precedence over the others, but it still needs its wingmen to hold it steady. For example, a song with a focus on the lyrical content and construction might attract an audience on the grounds of those lyrics, but the music still has to be there to make it a song. Otherwise, they’re just lyrics. The layers don’t have to be of equal significance and prominence, but they do need to complement each other.

Figure 1.5 illustrates this, where a lyrical focus isn’t supported and a melodic one is. The fact that we might think our lyrics are amazing doesn’t mean that the manner in which they lock in with the other layers isn’t important. They still need to marry up. The principle applies to all layers. A bad lyric will (and, sadly, often does) drag a good melody down, and a bad melody can annihilate a cracking harmonic progression. Complementary layers are a must, regardless of how amazing one of those layers might happen to be.

If we listen to any song with the intention of identifying which layer holds the majority of the attention and does the majority of the work in making the song interesting, it’s generally pretty easy to spot this at any given point. It’s an analytical method of listening that requires a little bit of effort, and therefore we don’t tend to do it naturally, but asking ourselves where the interest lies can be quite revealing.

Once we have identified that layer or those layers, it can be even more revealing to listen for how the other elements are supporting it. For example, it might be that the song in question has a very simple lyric with an obvious, straightforward

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Figure 1.5

Complementary layers.

rhythm accompanied by just one repeating melodic tone. Without a supporting chord progression, this could sound very dull and uninteresting. However, if the chord changes are working hard, they can hold that simple lyric and melody up superbly and make it sound very interesting indeed. They won’t necessarily be attracting all of our attention, because the melody and lyric are important and will sit on top, but it is this layer that is doing the hard work at that point. Later in the same song, it may be that the chord progression sits on just one chord for a bit, while the melody takes center stage for a while and does some daring jumps and runs. The layer that takes prominence is not always particularly clear cut, and there will be times when more than one layer will share the workload, but if we look for it, it’s generally fairly clear which part of the song is doing the hard work.

In writing our songs, we must be careful that we don’t feel the need to make each and every layer a potential focal point all the time. They aren’t all supposed to fight each other at the front of the stage, and writing them so that they do can actually work to the detriment of the song.

It should also be noted here that there are occasions when production elements can come into play in making the song work. When songs have been crafted at a computer and the vibe of the track is an inherent part of the writing process (which is becoming increasingly common in some genres), the arrangement itself can be what holds the attention. Sometimes the arrangement will slot into place after the song has been crafted, but when we are writing at a computer, the arrangement and vibe effectively become a part of the songwriting process. In a lot of dance music, for example, the beat and its inherent rhythm and tonal qualities can maintain the listeners’ interest for quite a while. This then frees up the harmony to be very simple and repetitive, safe in the knowledge that the rhythmic elements are doing the hard and necessary work. Whichever way the song is constructed and regardless of how many different layers and elements are at play, we should always be aware of what part of the song is doing the hard work at any given point. This way, we can ensure that we work with that knowledge rather than against it. It will make our songs stronger, more concise, and more focused.

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PRODUCT DOESN’T INDICATE PROCESS

If you find that churning out a song can be as awkward and painful as pulling your tongue out of your mouth, then the chances are that you are doing it right. Stacking the aforementioned layers without any attempt to capture some magic is relatively easy, but it’s also a relatively pointless waste of everyone’s time. Nurturing the guts of your songs through hours of excruciating development and pampering might make you want to forget about being a songwriter with clock-like persistence, but it will generally result in songs people will want to hear and get wrapped up in.

What makes this process all the more painful is that it’s not easy to get treatment for it. Somewhere, someone should talk one of the major drugs companies into developing medication for songwriter’s block and melodic constipation. Writing songs is no fun half the time, but for some reason we keep doing it. Why? Because the result always drives us on, whether because we want the next one to be better or because we were so pleased with how the last one turned out that we just have to put ourselves through it again.

It is often true that the most powerful push into the songwriting arena is hearing a song by someone else that makes us wish we had written it. We then tend to find ourselves wanting to capture some of the magic they have caught, regardless of the layer in which the magic is most evident. The very real and aggravating problem with this is that the product itself doesn’t indicate the process that created it. It’s not possible to hear a song and immediately know how the writer(s) came up with it. For example, a favorite song may have been birthed through a subtle yet exact combination of one slightly out-of-tune guitar, a bad day at work, a south-facing brown leather chair that was inherited from a sorely missed auntie, a lyrical concept that had festered in the author’s head for approximately 13.5

months, and a neat stack of ginger biscuits dipped in a tepid mug of decaffeinated coffee. All of these factors may have contributed in their own way to the writing of what may be considered one of the greatest songs of all time, but we will never know just from listening. Even the greatest piece of research in history won’t reveal everything that combined to shape any given song. It’s just not possible. It would be nice if, as songwriters, we could press a button somewhere to reveal how the song we’re listening to came into being, but unfortunately we can’t. We can look at the ingredients, but not where they came from. We just have to go without that information and make do. And even if we did manage to find out the exact combination of contributing factors, it would be impossible to re-create them. There are too many. However, there is something we can do to improve the way we write.

Read on….

PRODUCT CAN INFORM PROCESS

Listening to a song won’t indicate how it was written, but it will give us pointers for how we can write other ones. If you take one thing from this book that you didn’t already know, make it this next sentence: Analyzing songs and learning from them is by far the best way to intentionally develop your songwriting ability.

We all know of songs that we think are amazing, even if that amazement wears out after the twentieth listen. Some songs just grab us and cry out, “Write one like me!” Some are more subtle and hang around for a while, gradually gaining our

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trust like confidence tricksters. These tend to whisper something like, “I’m still here, and you’re really starting to appreciate me, aren’t you?” Either way they get us, these songs appeal to us. If you’re serious about your development as a song crafter, you should take what you like about these songs and put it under a spotlight. You should then put it through some severe questioning. In other words, when something in a song attracts or interests you, you should ask yourself, “Why does this appeal to me?” Keep asking yourself that question until you get an answer.

It’s very easy to appreciate a song and to attempt to write one like it without ever really getting a handle on exactly what about it speaks to us in the first place. Is it something in the melody, for example? If it is, then we should put some hard work into understanding the melody. The appeal may be nestled in the layers or it may be buried deeper in the guts of the song. Either way, there are observations to be made and lessons to be learned. You might discover that there is a series of notes employed at a certain rhythm over a certain chord that makes the hair on your neck stand up. If that’s the case, then you should make a mental or physical note of it.

Alternatively, you might learn something from the approach to the lyric that goes beyond the mechanics of application and is found deeper in the spirit of the lyrical sentiment and/or message. Through constantly assessing songs that we consider to be good, we will continually learn things that will develop and reinforce our songwriting toolkits. Not only will we gain a better understanding of what appeals to us, but we will also develop our ability to create something that hopefully will appeal to others. We’ll deal with specific questions to ask and processes to explore as the book progresses.

Looking at it like this, it seems blatantly obvious that we should analyze songs that we admire. However, we tend not to do this for a simple reason: Analysis is a bit too much like hard work. We’d rather be creating than analyzing, and if not creating, we’d rather just appreciate a song for what it is rather than looking at how it came to be.

Looking into the inner mechanics of songs that we like can lead to discovering a little too much. It can be like finding out how a magic trick is done, and that can rob us of all the enjoyment that the mystery brings. Some things are just more enjoyable from a distance, and songs certainly can be. However, the business end of writing requires us to get down to business, and that means some hard work.

There are times when we have to look beneath the magic veneer of songs and sacrifice the wonder for some wisdom.

That said, personally, I still think it’s good to have one or two songs that we leave alone. Otherwise, the process becomes a little too calculated and the joy disappears entirely. That can’t be good. We just need to make sure that the song we leave alone isn’t one of our own.

CAN WE LEARN TO WRITE SONGS?

I have heard it said that teaching someone to write a song is like teaching someone to fall in love, and that it therefore can’t be done. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t account for the fact that although we can’t get better at falling in love, we can get better at writing songs. If we look at falling in love at first sight as being comparable to the magic moment of inspiration, then we also need to

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acknowledge that songs need to be worked on in the same way that relationships do. Love at first sight is all very well, but some effort has to be put into arranging the second, third, and fourth sights, and so on! If we choose to look at songwriting as a mysterious process that just seems to happen for some people and not for others, then the assumption is that no, we can’t learn to write songs. We just have to wait for the muse to hit us, and if we’re lucky, we’ll be the proud and fortunate recipients of a little beauty. However, if we look at songwriting as a craft, then yes, it is entirely possible to learn how to write songs.

I know full well that it’s not cool to admit that a song took days, weeks, or months to write. Songwriters like to be able to state that songs just come to them in a magical moment and that they are somehow special because of this. That’s a load of rubbish, though, isn’t it? As Hugh Grant’s character said in the film Music and Lyrics, “Inspiration is for amateurs!”

If you know anyone who has been serious about songwriting for a number of years, ask that person whether he or she has gotten better at it over the years. They will say yes; I’m sure of it. Not necessarily because they have had lots of time to study tutorials and books like this one, but because they have gradually learned lessons as they have progressed and because they are always on the lookout for that elusive good idea, angle, or theme. Some writers do seem to have good ideas come to them more than others, but if you look into it, you’ll discover that those writers never really stop writing, and this means that they are always primed to capture the moment of inspiration when it comes. It could well be that other writers were also privy to the same moment but were off the clock and missed it.

People don’t like being told how to write songs. For some reason, many folks seem to see it as cheating, and we really do need to put this idea to bed. The reality is that we are educated in songwriting; we just like to think we aren’t. We learn all the time when listening to songs. Ask a complete novice to write a song, and chances are there will be parts of the resulting creation that conform to unwritten rules of the songwriting craft. It’s likely that beyond the obvious components of some words and a tune, there will be some form of repetition involved and the song will have differing sections that could be likened, however loosely, to a verse and chorus. The novice will have included these things because they have learned that songs are built with them—even though they have never studied them! The novice’s familiarity with songs over years of listening has informed a degree of skill.

This book acknowledges the fact that skill is developed through familiarity and is intended to encourage purposeful rather than accidental learning. We can pick up new skills and approaches by accident, or we can be serious about it and go looking. By learning techniques and tactics for extracting information out of our own songs and songs by others that we admire, we can do ourselves a favor. We’re taught whether we like it or not. We might as well just go with it!

Most books and tutorials on songwriting mention the “big idea” as being one of the main priorities. Although I don’t contest that having a “big idea” to work with is important, I don’t think that being told this helps much in the crafting of better songs. Sure, it helps get us focused with regard to what the song will be about, but it doesn’t help much with the difficult task of getting our head down and chipping away at our structure, melody, lyric, rhythm, and harmony. Once the moment of inspiration hits, some hard work is required to shape it into something manageable and appreciated.

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In response to the statement, “I can’t imagine for a moment that it’s a 9-to-5

occupation!” James Taylor replied, “No, it’s not, although it becomes that eventually when it’s time to finish songs—when it’s time to write a third verse and a bridge.

The muse hits me whenever it will. I travel with a digital voice recorder which catches all of my thoughts; I’ve done it since the mid ’70s. I have notebooks that I write lyrical ideas in, and I have notebooks that catch melodies and chord changes.

I’ll go to a quiet place for a session in the morning and a session in the afternoon. I’ll sit down or sometimes I’ll go outside and walk, and occasionally if I’m stuck I’ll lie down and take a 15-minute nap. It’s like lowering a bucket into a well, and when I wake up I’ve got the answer, the piece that’s missing. There are lightning strikes in the beginning, but when I’m finishing songs it’s really methodical.”7

I hope that this book will provide some “methodical” approaches that will be useful and offer fresh insight and food for thought. It is intended to highlight the areas where we can learn and to suggest approaches to getting an insight into how the mechanics of songs work. Rather than just hoping that we learn through listening, we can ask questions of songs that we deem to be worthy of scrutiny and force them to tell us their secrets. They aren’t secrets, anyway—we just tend to think of them like that because it makes the whole process more mysterious.

I’m sure you’ve come across a similar statement before, but I’m going to include it here because it’s important. Songwriting is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. Before you start disagreeing with me, I know that the exact percentages can vary from town to town because they vary like accents do, but the principle remains the same. Most creative processes are hard work and can therefore be an uphill battle at times. Spending ages on the same song or group of songs can drive us ’round the bend, but it will usually result in a better song in the end.

Ideally, we will have some songs that we’re still friends with at the end of the process, but we should be prepared to step outside of fun if that’s what it takes to get it right. It’s called song writing because someone has to do the writing—us.

There will be times when writing is no fun. There will be times when we might have to write songs for people who we don’t get on with very well, but if we want to pursue songwriting as a profession, then we have to adopt the professional attitude that will get us through it with a great song at the end.

If we look at songwriting as a serious profession, then we can liken the pursuit of excellence to any other craft or skill. I don’t know of a plumber who would refuse to work on someone’s bathroom because they didn’t like the color scheme.

A true craftsman is someone who can make the best out of what they have in front of them. There is a lot to be said for someone who can be confronted with a task that they don’t relish, but who will nonetheless work to the best of their ability so they can be justifiably proud when they come out at the other end with a job well done. We should strive to have that attitude in our writing. Regardless of whom the song is for, can we provide quality goods every time?

“I believe there is beauty and pride to be associated with excellence on any level.”

—Daniel Lanois 8

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There are times when songs seem to appear far more comfortably and mysteriously than others. I expect you know of some famous songs that the writer claims to have written in a matter of minutes. Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller has stated that “Kansas City” took 12 minutes to write, for example, and in reference to

“Dancing in the Dark,” Bruce Springsteen has said, “It was just like my heart spoke straight through my mouth without even having to pass through my brain.

The chorus just poured out of me.”9

This sort of thing can be intensely annoying to discover, especially if we happen to be in the midst of a five-month bullfight with a stubborn melody that just won’t sit down where we want it to at the time. Even worse, there are some songs that the writer has dreamed. About “Yesterday,” Paul McCartney reveals, “I had a piano by my bedside, and I must have dreamed it, because I tumbled out of bed and put my hands on the piano keys and I had a tune in my head. It was all there, a complete thing. I couldn’t believe it. It came too easy. In fact, I didn’t believe I’d written it.”10

It doesn’t seem fair that some people are able to write things without even thinking about it, but some are. There are things we can do to capitalize on what we dream about when we want to, but there is very little advice to give with regard to how to dream interesting things in the first place. I don’t know why, but regardless of what I think about, I almost always seem to end up dreaming about odd combinations of ladders, motorways, and fish. Not fantastically useful stuff.

Everyone Is Different

I’m afraid it just gets worse. Not only can I offer no assistance in helping you dream better songs, but I can’t even give you a specific road to songwriting success. As we’ve already covered, there is no one route to writing better songs. There are so many different types of songs and reasons why they are enjoyed and appreciated that the use of the word “song” to describe them all can seem ludicrous!

Personality reflects originality, and the way we go about our business can be varied as a result. However, there is light at the end of the composition tunnel. The fact that there isn’t one sure route forward doesn’t mean that there isn’t a route at all. There are hundreds of ways to develop our ability. The trick is identifying what that route is, and then having the determination and willpower to pursue it.

Imagine that a complete song is like a jigsaw puzzle. I know that puzzles are used as visual illustrations for lots of things, and I have tried to come up with another analogy, but the good ol’ puzzle trumps again. Imagine that each piece of this puzzle represents a different element of the songwriting craft. So, one piece might represent use of rhyme to set pace and another might represent use of editing to highlight key moments, and so on. See Figure 1.6 for some visual reinforcement. I should clarify here that I have plucked the names of these pieces out of midair and that their locations in the puzzle have no significance at all. It’s the principle that matters.

As songwriters, we are all working with a puzzle like the one in Figure 1.6. Stay with me now! Each piece is somehow connected to another, and the whole picture isn’t complete until every piece is in place. With this analogy in mind, we have to acknowledge that there are some pieces we haven’t managed to put in place yet.

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Figure 1.6

Fitting the pieces together.

There will be some that we have been desperately trying to find for some time, and some that we aren’t even aware of because we haven’t even gotten close to them.

There will also be some pieces that we have come across but have quickly put down again because we had no idea what to do with them at that point in time.

Although we all have to use these pieces and put them in place at one time or another, there are plenty of different ways to get them down. Some of us will progress very neatly with a system that requires us to turn all the pieces over first and categorize them by color, shape, and so on. Some of us will start with the corner pieces and then work around the edges. Some of us will go in with all guns blazing and with very little in the way of preparation, and others will work with a combination of these approaches.

What’s important is that we get all the pieces in place at one point or another, not the manner in which we get them there. You might notice (especially now that I’m pointing it out) that to get from the piece called “melodic keyword development” to “use of step and leap motion,” we could connect via “use of chord extensions” or we could go a slightly more scenic route through “use of editing to highlight key moments,” “use of borrowed and adapted chords,” and “using rhyme to set pace.” These routes might not necessarily be any good for us, but they may well have been for someone else. There are obviously loads of other pieces to the puzzle that facilitate all sorts of other routes.

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In communicating what we are trying to say in our songs, we can get the idea across well without every piece. As with all puzzles, it is generally fairly clear what the picture is even with some pieces missing. This means that we can effectively communicate as songwriters with a limited toolkit as long as the key pieces are in place. Having acknowledged that, though, it goes without saying that some additional interesting detail can be brought to the picture if every piece is where it should be. We shouldn’t settle for “That’ll do,” when we know that there are possible refinements to be made.

Discovering some new pieces can immediately connect us to even more new skills. It’s a simple illustration, but hopefully it gets across something important.

When we think that we have reached the pinnacle of our private struggle up the songwriting mountain and that we’ll just have to make do with where we are, we’re wrong. We just need to find another piece that fits, and it could well be one that we haven’t even looked at yet. This book will hopefully introduce some new pieces and help you find where they can fit into your picture. Finding them and fitting them in place takes patience and determination, but it’s perfectly doable. I know for sure that there have been times when I have experienced a breakthrough moment when it’s as though I have found a long-lost piece that suddenly gives my picture new perspective and focus. These moments tend not to appear as often as we would like, and they usually come along when we stumble across a new piece by accident, but they do happen and they are worth looking for.

This analogy almost puts songwriting on a par with a decent platform computer game. Exploring is almost as interesting and satisfying as completing the game.

WRITING ENOUGH

“Music breeds its own inspiration: You can only do it by doing it. You just sit down and you may not feel like it, but you push yourself. It’s a work process…. Don’t sit around and wait for something magical to happen in your head or heart.”

—Burt Bacharach11

Imagine for a moment that we are co-writers and that we have just signed a lucrative album deal. Nice! Now add to the equation the fact that we need to write enough material to fill our debut album. How many songs do you think we should write? The immediate question to answer is how many songs do we want on the album, but beyond that is a more important question to ask: How many songs do we need to be able to select from to ensure that we get the cream of those that we write released?

It can be very tempting to write the minimum number required, which in this case would be something like 10 songs. However, that would result in us having to record and release every song that we wrote, and that is generally a bad idea. The truth of the matter is that regardless of how good we believe we (or any other songwriter) are, everyone writes bad songs from time to time. Behind closed doors, even the most decorated and admired songwriting masters have written songs that are

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just plain bad. We don’t hear them because the writers have quality control in place and ensure that the dodgy ones don’t see the light of day, but they do happen.

Quality control is essential, and that quality can be aided to a certain degree by ensuring that we write more than we need.

As a general rule, a ratio of 3:1 tends to be a good idea. If we were to release an album of 10 songs, then this would result in us writing 30 from which to choose.

It might sound like overkill, but there are plenty of writers who work with much more demanding ratios. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, and if you are on fire and rattle out 10 stunners in a row, then that’s all well and good, but the reality is that a fair few bad apples do come along in each batch. Having a ratio-enforced quality control system in place is sensible. First, it enables us to select the best and most appropriate songs for any given project, and second, it leads us to write more and thus develop our songwriting muscles, which is an added bonus.

If we write the minimum that is required of us, it will sound like it to the majority of people—with the possible exception of other people in our band, our legal guardian, and people who want us to like them. Our fellow band members may be so desperate to play new material that they might welcome new material to the set regardless of its quality. (It happens all the time.) Our legal guardian will more often than not be so incredibly supportive that they will tell us they love our songs even if they would never choose to listen to them again. And every now and again we will come across people who are so keen to be our buddy that they will say anything to make it a possibility!

If we are still at the stage of counting how many songs we have written, then chances are we still have most of our best material ahead of us. Proudly announcing that we have written eight songs is often akin to saying that we’ve only just started and haven’t gotten around to writing a decent one yet. There are exceptions to this, but it’s rare that particularly good songs are birthed in the early stages of songwriting development. Water under the bridge tends to mature the process somewhat. One of the advantages of writing plenty of songs and having a considerable back catalog is that we are more likely to have a really good one in there somewhere. The other advantage to having plenty in storage is that we are more likely to let the bad ones go.

The truth is that the majority of songwriters learn to write better songs by writing lots of bad ones. If we get to the point where we’re not tallying up the number of songs that we write, then we are less likely to cling to those that we know aren’t up to scratch. Writing lots of songs is undoubtedly a good thing to do. It’s just a shame that it’s not such an easy process. We should never allow ourselves to fall into the trap of getting songs finished just to increase the tally. Although it takes some pretty impressive determination to go back into battle with a song we previously considered finished so as to lead it somewhere that counts for more, we should aspire to that level of commitment. We should write as many songs as we can, but we should balance the pursuit of plenty with the quest for quality.

SETTING STANDARDS

Here’s a probing question: When you write a song and assess its quality, what are you using as a reference point? What sets the standard? Is it the standard that you

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know you need to be writing at to make a go of it, or is it a lower standard, but one that you know you can just about get away with? Be honest! It’s easy to compare ourselves to other writers of a similar standard and glean some comfort from it, but in aiming parallel to where we are already, we aren’t pushing ourselves forward. The reality of the situation is that if we aim low, we will hit low—or sometimes even lower. That’s no way to improve, and it’s no good to anyone. Aiming low will result in us hitting where no one is looking, and even our own dear loved ones, who would usually adore everything we create, might start to struggle with delivering compliments through a forced grin.

Aiming high is tricky and will probably result in us missing for a while, but we can be sure that our standard will be on the up as a result. I have heard it said that writing a good song is as much luck as anything else, and that’s misleading. Luck does, after all, come with practice, and we should train hard and pursue that elusive standard until we get there, like an athlete pushing through the pain barrier.

The odd stitch or two might be uncomfortable for a season, but the results tend to outweigh the grief. Even the worst songs that we start to create will be better than those that have gone before, and the better ones will be even better still. The result is that the mean average of quality rises, and that’s good for us as writers and for the audience as listeners.

In ensuring that we have quality control measures in place, not only do we need to write enough, but we also need to ensure that we test our songs fairly. It’s not always true that family members and friends aren’t the best people to play our songs to. It depends on how honest they are. We should all have someone that we trust enough to tell us just how bad our songs are. Someone who really cares about us is generally a good place to start.

It’s easy to think that this person should be a musician too, but that’s not always true. Personally, I find it useful to have the insight of another honest writer and that of someone who doesn’t have the first idea about how to put together a song.

The fact that the person doesn’t write doesn’t mean that they don’t listen, and the majority of people hearing our material won’t be musicians anyway. It’s good market research on that level. Put it this way; when we buy or download a song or three, we will always assess it by the same standard as other material we buy. There might be some parameters that vary our opinion slightly, such as whether the song was recorded live, but we don’t forgive a poorly delivered vocal line because we know the singer had a sore throat that day! We think it’s a rubbish vocal. Similarly, we don’t excuse a boring melody because we know the writer can’t write melodies!

We think it’s a boring melody. It’s generally only people who know us personally who will forgive those misdemeanors. It’s not possible to stress enough just how important it is to get an objective, honest opinion on our songs. However, I will try.

It’s really important to get an objective, honest opinion on our songs.

It is incredibly hard to objectively assess the quality of our songs on your own.

Have you ever listened to one of your songs on your own and liked it, and then listened with some friends and realized that it’s nothing like you thought when you were on your own? It happens a lot and can be really embarrassing. We need other people’s involvement to get an honest reaction both from them and from ourselves.

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In his book, On Writing, Stephen King states the writers should “write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” This is a brilliant piece of advice for any writer, whether it be for novels or songs. Don’t ever allow yourself to go fully public with a song without having tested it to some degree first. We will only truly appreciate how good our material is once we have played it to someone and experienced it airing outside of the closed doors behind which we wrote it.

DO YOU LOVE SONGS?

Have you ever asked yourself whether you love songs? More specifically, have you ever asked yourself whether you love songs that are categorized outside of the genres of music you find you gravitate toward most comfortably? In other words, are you able to see merits in songs that you don’t particularly enjoy listening to? If you are thinking, “Yes, I do love songs, regardless of genre,” then ask yourself this:

“Really?!” It’s easy to think that we do, but is there any evidence to support it?

The truth is that regardless of where our own taste leads us, there are little gems of information to be learned from every genre of music and the songs that are nestled within them. Even if we don’t set out to write songs that fit in those same genres, there is nothing stopping us from poking our head in for a moment and gleaning whatever little gems of information we can take back to our own writing.

We’ll look at the nature of these gems and how to identify and work with them when we get down to the nitty gritty over the coming pages. We need to be as holistic as possible in taking on board new ideas. If we stay locked up in our own little box, it’s highly likely that we will keep writing the same song over and over. Try to write in different genres from time to time. The new scenery may be a little uncomfortable, but the change will do you good and ultimately will be a refresh-ing experience. If you do choose to return to where you came from, the traveling will set your home life in a new perspective with new tools at your disposal. As writers we must read, and as composers we must listen. As Lamont Dozier puts it,

“Listen to the great writers of the past, present, and future. If you’re serious about having a career, you have to listen to everything, all types of music—from opera through county and western.”12

Often our dislike of a genre is fueled by our ignorance. I was once invited to an evening where each of the 10 attendees brought two songs that they loved. Once there, we each took turns playing one of the songs and explaining why we loved it. It was a fascinating experience and taught me a valuable lesson. My reason for disliking some music was entirely due to the fact that I didn’t understand it, nothing more. There was one particular song played that I didn’t like at all. I thought it was just plain rubbish, but after a five-minute explanation from the chap who played it, I saw it in a new light and learned to appreciate it. I still wouldn’t buy it or choose to play it around my house, but I now know that it’s actually very well written because I know why it exists and what it is trying to do. If you have never tried something similar, I highly recommend you have a go. It really was a great night out. My eyes and ears were opened to all sorts of new stuff, and that’s something we should actively pursue as writers.

No one expects you to love every song ever written because, as we all know, there are some real howlers out there! However, we have to acknowledge that there are some factors clouding our judgment that we really shouldn’t let get in the way.

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For example, can you love a song for its quality regardless of who is performing it? It can be easy to switch off a recording because we don’t like the tonality of a singer’s voice or because we don’t approve of the way the singer conducts themselves in the public eye, but that has nothing to do with the song itself. A sure sign of a mature writer is the ability to say, “That’s a great song,” in the midst of a crowd who all disagree with you! That happens to me all the time. I’ll quite regularly play for a group of students a song that I consider to be a superb example of how to do something well, only to be greeted with stone-cold faces and looks of apathy akin to those on busts of dead philosophers. The temptation to water down my enthusiasm can be quite severe at times, but I have to stick by my guns and remain adamant that the song is a beaut. Not always easy!

WRITING LOCATION

How seriously do you take your songwriting? The majority of my students to whom I pose this question respond with something like, “Very.” When I then ask where they write, they don’t generally have a definite answer, and that’s a potential issue.

If we are serious about songwriting to the point that we would like to be able to make a career out of it, then it follows that we should be thinking about a work-space. All professionals have their working environment, whether it is an office or a chair in the house, a truck on the road, a flower bed, a hospital ward, or whatever. When we’re earning money, we know that we’re “at work”—wherever that may be. Why, then, is it that so few songwriters have a place of work?

It can be easy to think that taking writing seriously means having a designated room, desk, and so on. That’s not always the case, though. Where we write best will often reveal itself to us as we wander our way through life, and there’s nothing wrong with intentionally acting on that information once it presents itself.

Many people find that they are at their most creative as they are dozing in and out of sleep. If that is the case for you, as the alpha state between dreams and consciousness is at play, then make the most of it. Get a pad or some kind of simple and easily operated recording device by your bed so that you are able to pounce once the idea hits.

I know that I get most of my ideas on the move. Walking is good, but public transportation is better. I don’t know why, but I do know that most of my best ideas tend to come on the bus or train, so I sit there with a pad on my knee just in case. I generally travel for a couple of hours a day, and that is my core work time when it comes to writing. I make a point of exercising the songwriter in me during that time and have found it to be the best time of day and location for me to get cracking.

Wherever you find yourself being most creative, make the most of it. Get yourself into the frame of mind where you are able to pounce on the inspiration should it come. Don’t allow yourself to miss it and be another one of the thousands of would-be songwriters complaining that they never know what to write about because they never went looking. As Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie puts it,

“You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors. During our first few records, I would just kind of wait until I felt like writing. I got some pretty good songs that way, but I firmly believe that being a writer or artist in any capacity, you have to kind of go to work every day and try

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to do what you do. And as crazy as it is for me to say out loud, I am a professional songwriter and singer, and this is what I do for a living. I get paid to do this, and I should treat this as such. It is a job…and it’s a difficult job.” 13

Routine can be very important. Ask any athlete who trains hard for his event and he will tell you that a routine helps maintain fitness and motivation. It helps to have a designated slot that we get used to so it becomes the norm in our daily activities. We should be comfortable with the idea of having songwriting in our daily schedule if we want to write better songs. A friend of mine with some impressive songwriting credentials recently told me that he makes a point of writing a song a day, regardless of whether it is needed for anything in particular.

Maintaining this routine is akin to a runner doing his 10 or more kilometers per day. It’s all part of the process of keeping in the game. The good news here is that although physical fitness is harder to maintain as we get older, songwriting “fitness” needn’t diminish anywhere near as quickly. It’s never too late to get better.

Having somewhere safe to go about creating is also very important. If you share accommodations, do you ever wait for other inhabitants to leave or to at least be out of hearing range before you feel comfortable being truly creative? I have often found this to be the case, especially where melody and lyric writing are concerned!

Sometimes it’s good to be able to sing our little hearts out, safe in the knowledge that we can’t get anything wrong because no one can hear us! It’s not a problem for everyone because we all have different personalities, but if you feel inhibited by your surroundings, then do something about it. It’s important, and you should make room for it where it is an issue. In addition to my public transportation exploits, I also capitalize on an empty house whenever possible—which happens very rarely!

Every moment spent writing is a step toward improvement, regardless of whether we see it. The trick is trying to find a place and time where those moments are as beneficial as possible. Routine is a big part of this. It helps to have a space where we can come back to something that we can find just as we left it, regardless of when and where that might be.

Having said that, a break in the routine can be equally effective. Don’t feel tempted to have to lock yourself away to be better at writing. Although it’s important to act upon when and where we know we are most likely to be at our creative best, we still need to ensure that we are engaging with the world around us. It is, after all, how our songs engage with our selected community and audience that primarily warrants their existence in the first place! Don’t be afraid to let things intrude on what you are doing from time to time. Here’s another quote from Stephen King in On Writing:

“In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

—Stephen King

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It should be acknowledged that where we write will often have an impact on what we write. If we have to wait for creative inspiration to hit, then we might be in trouble because we might not have the infrastructure in place in our daily routine to be able to work with that inspiration. If it strikes while we’re in line at the grocery store, then it helps to know that within the next 24 hours, there is a designated time to unpack the jewel that has revealed itself. Having said that, it may be that there is nothing stopping us from getting the idea recorded when and where it comes to us, and on these occasions, we should try to act on the spot. Mark Knopfler has some interesting words on the subject. “‘Money for Nothing’ was inspired by an appliance-store employee I heard talking about the MTV rock stars on a row of display televisions. I borrowed a bit of paper and actually wrote that song while I was in the store. I wanted to use the language the guy really used. It was more real.”14

If you don’t have a designated writing space and time or the mindset that enables you to capture these moments of inspiration when they strike, give it some serious consideration! There are some pointers at the end of this chapter that should be of use.

In addition to practical considerations of when and where, there are also non-physical issues to consider. For example, it is well documented that some writers struggle to write when they are at ease and enjoying life. Sad though that may seem, a touch of heartache, loneliness, disappointment, or other slice of grief can work wonders for the creative bones in the writer. The number of dollars in the bank account, the quantity of friends who accept invitations to dinner, and how we feel when we look in the mirror will all affect the mental “place” we are in, and these issues are subject to the same level of attention as those previously mentioned. Mental and physical location both play a part in contextualizing what we write, and it’s worth remembering that fact.

Nurturing

“Here’s my idea of a masterpiece: You write a song, you work every day at it for a couple of months. You see, every day I’d get up, and I’d water my plants, and I’d nurture along my thoughts and the trip that I’m on, and that’s my masterpiece…. No masterpiece ever came overnight.”

—Brian Wilson 15

The concept of nurturing a song is something that most successful songwriters are accustomed to. Although the word “nurturing” quite often is substituted for other words, such as “percolating,” “evolving,” “developing,” “germinating,”

“growing,” and so on, the common thread is that these words are all verbs. They all refer to the fact that something is going on. When the writer is crafting a song, the nurturing process is the stage at which the song is being shaped by experience, circumstance, and contemplation. The song hasn’t been shelved somewhere to catch dust, but it has been placed carefully where it has the chance to develop.

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Songs need time to grow and evolve, and the heart, mind, and soul of the songwriter can be the soil in which the initial seed of an idea gets the opportunity to sink some roots and find its feet. Don’t be in a hurry to pop one out. Let it germinate for a bit. Let it intensify. Take time to try and come to grips with where that bit of inspiration came from and figure out the best way to let it grow. Like all seeds, a combination of water and sun will be needed, so in addition to internaliz-ing the initial idea, you also need to externalize it from time to time so that outside influences such as location and circumstance can make their mark. As Brian Eno put it, “Things come out of nothing… the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. The most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing.”16

The situation is all important, and this is why we shouldn’t rush songs. Some grow very quickly, and some take much longer. That’s all absolutely fine, and there’s nothing that says we can’t plant more than one seed at a time anyway.

Sometimes it can be advantageous to have all our attention on just one idea, but more often than not, it can be more beneficial to water a fair few at the same time.

Although it frequently does, the seed doesn’t have to come out of a moment of inspiration. It can come from a more calculated placement that is then planted and watered with contemplation and consideration every now and then. That, too, can lead to interesting results. It doesn’t always, but it can. This can be helpful when we need to write a song for a particular occasion, such as a wedding or a sporting event. There will be times when inspiration isn’t forthcoming and we’ll have to plant lots of seeds in the hope that one of them will germinate and turn into something beautiful.

Sometimes it isn’t the seed that needs to be left for a while, but more of a nurs-ery plant that has started to grow and just needs to be left alone to get on with it.

Too much pampering can lead to destruction. It can be, and often is, the case that the early stages of the song’s evolution and development have gone very positively, only to hit a bit of a roadblock after those initial stages. Railroading the song along just to finish it is never a good idea. The right time to take some time out and allow a song to mature a bit can come more than once and at any stage during the writing process. There are no rules as to how many timeouts should be taken, but it’s important that we remember this is an option.

When asked about how he wrote “Sky Blue and Black,” Jackson Browne replied,

“It was like painting the ceiling of a chapel. You spend three years on your back three inches from the ceiling, trying to get perspective. I could never get enough distance from the relationship that I was writing about to really write about what was going on. I could never tell what the hell was happening. And so that whole beginning verse was written one year and the rest of it was written in pieces in a couple of years that followed.”17

Sometimes—particularly when songs are developed in relatively small chunks—

getting away from the song for a bit, to where we can appreciate the bigger picture, is the only realistic way forward. Even if it takes a few years to get far enough away to take in the whole vista, taking time out will effectively work as time we have put into the writing. The search for perspective isn’t the only reason for holding back on plowing through the process of piecing bits together. Sometimes it’s

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just necessary to ensure that all the pieces are present and accounted for before they are slotted together. There can be few things more frustrating than completing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, only to discover that there are actually only 999

pieces in the box!

Feel free to spend months of preparation getting it right. If we look at songs as being combinations of different ingredients, then we need to acknowledge that some mixtures take a while in the oven before the flavor comes out right. Some cakes will fall to pieces if we take them out too soon. Sometimes the most creative thing we can do is to do nothing and let the idea mature for a bit.

Co-Writing

Going solo is not always the best way to go about writing songs, and regardless of whether we are capable of piecing together the whole process ourselves, we should be prepared to have a go at co-writing. Even if we have churned out many great songs on our own, the experience and perspective of other writers will always be at least slightly different than our own, and that difference warrants some consideration of the benefits of collaboration.

Writing “with the door open” in this sense can mean writing in a bigger “room,”

where more than one person is privy to what’s going on. Sometimes a collaborator is useful even if all they do is just assure us that yes, the song is worth listening to, or no, they would rather eat their own knees than have to listen to it again. As we looked at a few pages back, we will only truly appreciate how good our material is when we have played it to someone and experienced it airing outside of the closed doors behind which we wrote it. Co-writing is a good way to ensure that this happens.

As Glenn Frey says, “I don’t like writing alone. I don’t trust myself. You don’t have to have the conversation with yourself, ‘Is this good enough?’”18 Brian Higgins also makes a good point: “I probably believe that everyone is capable of writing a number-one hit—the thing is, they wouldn’t know they’d written it, and they’d move on to something else, or the bit that they liked themselves would be crap, but there’d be another bit they thought was no good, which was actually excellent. It’s the editing that’s essential. Which is why I tend to work on the principle that anything can be achieved by anybody, so long as one other person in the room knows what they’re doing.”19 Having somebody else in the room who

“knows what they’re doing” works on numerous levels. It may be that the person brings musical insight, but it may also be that he contributes his individuality to the process. Everyone has their own unique experiences and perspectives, and it therefore makes good sense to get insight from other people during the writing process. It encourages honesty, tests a song’s soundness, and can add to the potential ingredients.

COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES

Whether co-writing involves two or more writers, it generally goes one of two ways—very well or very badly. When it goes well, it’s because the team complements each other and genuinely makes things better. When it doesn’t, it’s because

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writers are treading on each other’s toes and getting on each other’s nerves. Not only does it not work, but it invades people’s personal space and tends to send the writing session 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Fundamentally, there are two umbrella approaches to collaboration. The first rests on the premise that successful co-writing is dependent on people finding collaborators who fill the gaps in their skill set.

Many of the most famous and successful songwriting teams (including Goffin and King, Bacharach and David, John and Taupin, and so on) worked because the members of those teams complemented each other in obvious ways. In the cases named, one member of each team brought the lyrics and the other brought the music.

They worked primarily because each member enhanced what the other member of the team brought to the table. That’s a good place to start. It’s good when each member of the team can fit his or her ideas in alongside someone else’s so that they work in a complementary fashion. We really don’t want to be in a position in which there are two or more people trampling on each other’s toes and bouncing around one of the layers—all this does is mean that one of the other elements gets sorely neglected. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of conflict, as we will see shortly, but all layers and considerations need to be looked at. When egos collide, it’s important that the well-being of the song remains the focus.

In addition to the “fitting in” approach, the other collaborative technique thrives on conflict, when two or more contributors actually benefit from head-on collisions. If banging heads together actually creates a spark of magic, then bashing in this sense should be encouraged! Elvis Costello put it perfectly when he said, “When you get two people together, they shouldn’t just agree with each other; there should be some tension and little disagreement, and out of that good ideas come.” 20

Collaboration is about give and take. It’s about being open-minded and being prepared to reshape our own ideas as well the ideas of others. See Figure 1.7 for the most common approaches to collaboration. People often speak of marriage between melody and lyrics, and that’s where co-writing tends to work most successfully because the writers are generally bringing very different skills to the team.

Any marriage requires a bit of give and take, and it’s the same with co-writing. If one of the co-writers brings what they have to the table and point-blank refuses to change it, then they might as well be writing on their own unless they are fortunate enough to have written something that just happens to fit in neatly with someone else’s idea. Conflict shouldn’t be avoided just to keep the peace, though.

Clashing ideas can result in sparks flying, but those sparks can be the source of even better ideas, and the collisions will only shape and chip away at ideas further, which will almost always lead to improvement anyway.

Because songs are vehicles for emotions, beliefs, and personalities just as much as for melodies, lyrics, and chord changes, it is often the case that a collaboration will be formed through the marriage of musical and nonmusical elements. For example, when asked to comment on her collaborative approach to writing with Ben Mink, K.D. Lang said, “I have a really hard time writing because I’m not a technical writer at all. I’m a completely guttural and emotional writer. I don’t even know what I’m doing. To this day I could barely tell you if it’s a G chord. Even when I produce, I do it completely on an emotional and instinctual level. And that’s why the collaboration works. Ben is very musical and I am very emotional. So every area is covered.”21

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Figure 1.7

Common collaborative models (two people).

Making sure that every area is covered is essentially what collaboration is all about. It’s about utilizing our own strengths and the strengths of others to maximum effect, regardless of whether those strengths are found in a solid grasp of the technical application of music or in digging out emotive and sensitive issues so that they can bubble on the surface. To this end, a collaborative effort can work when different people are working on the same layer. It may be that one member of the team is bringing the emotive input while the other is contributing the technical know-how, or it may be that egos have been left so far outside the room that some genuine good-spirited collisions, discussion, and sharing can take place.

WRITING A PART APART

“[Bernie Taupin and I] have never actually written anything together.

Never sat down to work in once place. I think I’d kill him.”

—Elton John22

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In practice, some co-writers don’t actually have to be in the same room and don’t ever really need to meet or communicate at all. It takes some of the occasion out of the process, but it does happen a lot. Personally, I’ve had a few songs recorded that were “co-written” with people I have never met. The two or more contribu-tions don’t have to take place at the same time.

In fact, it can sometimes be beneficial for one writer to put down what they have and then hand the baton on without ever expecting to get it back. This approach can avoid arguments, if nothing else, and is commonly employed in the writing of pop songs, where the collaboration takes place between what are generally referred to as trackers and top-liners. Broadly speaking, the roles of these co-writers are very different. The tracker will produce a track that is essentially a roughly produced version of the finished song with chord changes, including a fully recorded arrangement, but without a melody and lyrics. It’s basically the finished song without the vocal part.

The top-liner will then take this track and write the melody and lyrics for the featured vocalist(s) to perform. The song is written through collaboration, but not in the traditional songwriting team sense. It’s more like a production line, and this approach to writing provides a fantastic opportunity for writers who are specialists in their chosen layer(s). A tracker will really appreciate a top-liner and vice versa because they are providing each other with the missing parts of the puzzle. It works both ways, too. The tracker(s) can take a top line and write “underneath” it just as viably. More often than not, this approach to writing takes place within the opera-tional process employed by production teams who produce the song as they write it.

While looking at the manner in which these teams tend to collaborate, it’s also interesting to note that songwriting credits can (and often do) go to people who never actually wrote any of the song at all. Producers and performing artists of a certain status will be able to railroad their names onto the writing credits even when they didn’t write a word or note. This tends to happen when the producer or artist is in a position to lay down the law that if their name isn’t on the credits, then they won’t sing or produce it. Granted, they’re unlikely to put it in such cold terms (we’d hope!), but that is essentially what goes on a lot of the time. The reason for this, of course, is because it looks good for them as artists or producers to have a hand in the creation of the song, and it also enables them to take their share of the financial remuneration the song will bring. Very handy.

Whichever way it happens—whether it’s based on long-term friendship and collaboration, the necessity to get things done, or a combination of both—co-writing requires understanding. Each writer needs to understand what they can bring to the table, and they also need to understand the other contributors, especially where the collaborative effort requires coming to grips with nonmusical and more emotive and personal stimuli.

Collaboration is an approach to writing that should be considered carefully and tried more than once. If you have tried it before and it didn’t work out, then it can be interesting to attempt to put a finger on what went wrong. Sometimes it will simply come down to basic problems with human interaction, but there will be times when there is a lot of taking and not a lot of giving going on, where layers were being argued over rather than built. If you are aware that you have strengths and weaknesses in writing, think about teaming up with someone who complements your abilities, whether that be through providing the missing technical layers or by bringing a more emotive quality to the writing. The results could be quite fantastic!

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Conclusions

As you work your way through this book, you may come across statements that you don’t think you agree with. That isn’t a problem because there are so many different ways of coming at songwriting. Generating agreement isn’t what’s important.

Generating thought is what I am hoping to do in this book. If you find yourself disagreeing with something that you read here, or anywhere else for that matter, just make sure that you know why you disagree. If you have an answer, then it’s likely that you have learned something, even if it’s just a case of being more confident in your own opinion as a result.

I’d like to conclude here that in addition to a song being about piecing together lyrics, melody, harmony, and so on, it’s also about putting yourself through it for the sake of the song. Think about what your layers contain and reveal and do what you can to ensure that they fulfill their purpose. Some parts of the process are easy, some are a pain, and some you might not even know about yet. Go with the inspiration when it hits, but don’t be afraid to dissect the song a bit afterward if you want to try and learn what its construction can teach you. Willingness to explore and put in the effort is vitally important. Chipping away at your songs so that they become a thing of beauty also involves letting life chip away at you like the sea bash-es away at old cliffs. It’s tough going, but the end result can be quite staggering.

Solution: Know What Works for You and What Doesn’t

Each chapter in this book will have an exercise at the end designed to help unpack some of the issues covered therein. Some will be more involved than others, and this one is simple but important. You just need to answer each of these questions and act upon them.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR BEST IDEAS?

d What time of day?

d What location?

If you are not sure that you have an answer yet, then actively pursue answering this question over the next week. Consciously make a note of where and when you generally get inspired. You will probably find that there is some kind of pattern as your daily routine naturally makes room for your brain to get creative.

WHEN CAN YOU SET ASIDE AN HOUR OR TWO A DAY?

d Can you use time during traveling?

d Do you have a lunch break that you can use?

d Does your day generally include activities that allow your brain to roam free even if your hands aren’t?

If you can’t regularly set aside an hour or two a day, then look at making space a couple of times a week. It depends largely upon how much you want to get better.

The more time you are able to put into it, the more you will improve.

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WHAT SYSTEMS DO YOU HAVE IN PLACE TO CAPTURE THE IDEAS?

d Do you have some kind of recording device (Dictaphone/PDA/phone, and so on)?

d Do you have a means of capturing audio even in a public place?

d Do you have a pad or laptop computer that you can keep with you at all times?

Personally, I have often found the cell phone to be a valuable tool because you can record a message on your voicemail pretending that you are talking to somebody else when you are in public. It can be quite entertaining getting the ideas you have into a conversation without people around you knowing what you are up to, and the cunning involved in that process can, in itself, lead to some great ideas!

If you find that the when and where of your best ideas isn’t obvious, then simply ensure that you have the means to capture the idea as much as possible. A Dictaphone or portable recording device of some other kind is easy to keep with you most of the time.

We Don’t Know

Problem

Why We Are Writing

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Not knowing why we are writing is a very common problem. In this chapter, we’re going to explore why we write songs in the first place, in the hope that the answer will help us figure out how to go about writing better ones.

What Makes a Good Song?

The question “What makes a good song?” is almost impossible to answer definitively. Depending on whom you ask, you are almost sure to get a different answer each time you pose the question. I know; I’ve tested it. Here are the answers that I got when I asked three different people at random.

Person number one:

d A strong melodic hook

d Careful attention to structure

d Strong harmonic ideas with melodies interacting in an interesting way d Effective interaction of rhythmic ideas

d Intelligently and thoughtfully written lyrics that make sense

d Appeal for a wide and varied audience

Person number two:

d Interesting textures and colors

d Something a bit different, that dares to venture away from the norm Person number three:

d “Nice” words

d Easy listening with a smooth rhythm

It’s fairly easy to deduce from these answers that one person I asked (person number one) is a musician and therefore gave a well-informed response. The other two were fantastically vague. If we were to take their answers as templates to work with, we wouldn’t get very far. What on earth is a “smooth rhythm,” anyway?!

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WHERE IS THE APPEAL?

The simple truth is this: Just as we all write songs for different reasons, we also enjoy songs for different reasons. Before we get any further with this, stop for a moment and get a handle on what tends to reveal itself to you as “good” in a song.

In the previous chapter, we looked at the importance of identifying the exact characteristics of certain layers that appeal to us, but when it comes to looking at how the general public appreciates songs, there’s a lot more to it. For some, it is the quality of the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical interaction. More often than not, though, it tends to be musicians who appreciate songs on this level, and although musicians are all over the place, there are other factors that warrant serious consideration.

The lure of a song can be found in the quality of the arrangement and the manner in which it is produced. There are plenty of people who love songs primarily due to the sonic quality of the recording that captures it, rather than the compositional elements inherent in its makeup. As a personal example, I love the way Bob Clearmountain mixes tracks, and there are plenty of songs that he has worked on that I love because I think they sound incredible, not necessarily because I like the songs themselves. We would all have to admit that from time to time, the quality of arrangement, production, and mix can be a factor in whether we appreciate songs, and although this is not strictly a songwriting consideration, we can confuse our appreciation of the song with our appreciation of the quality of its production.

Plenty of songs gain a fan base on the grounds of the image and notoriety of those who perform the song, rather than on the musical content. On my way home from work, my route normally involves me walking through a crowd of teenagers who are dressed like Dracula. If I, or anyone else, were to ask any of them whether they like a couple of songs by Barry Manilow or the Backstreet Boys, it is very likely that the majority of them would say no or more colorful words to that effect, even if they had not heard the songs in question. The reality is that the opinions of many (although not all) are shaped by what they believe they are supposed to like, more than their appreciation of purely musical factors. We need to be wary of this point when we write our songs. Regardless of how well we craft them, there are people who won’t like them—not necessarily because they don’t think the songs are well written, but because they think they’re not supposed to like them.

Similarly, the way certain songs make us feel and what we associate with them can be the enduring and driving factor in what draws us to them. This is a tricky one to get a handle on, because there are so many nonmusical factors that will have a bearing on how we respond to different songs at different times.

THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION

Each of us has songs that we associate with times, places, smells, faces, and so on.

It’s intriguing how a song can trigger a memory or a place can trigger a song.

Scientists will be able to explain why this happens, but I can’t. I don’t need to, either. All that’s important here is the fact that it does. Our brains harbor information in a way that enables them to trigger associations all over the place, and these associations are gold dust when it comes to writing. They’re like organic, free-range marketing tools, and they are incredibly important when it comes to evaluating how “good” a song is perceived to be.

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As writers, this poses a bit of problem for us because it is very difficult to ensure that our songs will end up being associated with what we would like them to be connected with. Having said that, it is important to try to facilitate these connections, and the simple things we can do are things that we will probably find ourselves doing anyway. Writing lyrics about specific topics is the most obvious one.

Take a love song—any love song. The sensitively crafted poetic sentiment might help it in its quest to be associated with a loving event of some kind—whether it gets included on a compilation entitled The Loveliest of All the Lovely Love Songs, it’s playing at the end of a party where you finally manage to attract the attention of that special and particularly attractive someone, or it is sent as a gift signifying undying love. However, there’s nothing to say that even the sweetest lyric and the most beautiful tune won’t end up being associated with a decidedly unpleasant event. I certainly know of some “good time” songs that remind me of things I would rather leave in the past….

The music that we employ in our songs will also have a bearing for obvious reasons. A four to the floor, 120-bpm thumper has more chance of being associated with dance-floor antics than flower shows, for example, but all we can do in writing these songs is imply where they should be appreciated and/or used. We can bring them up and send them out the best that we know how, but like kids, there’s no guarantee that they’ll end up where we intended or hoped that they would go. We can’t follow them around, policing their every move and implication. Once we have written our songs and let them fly, they don’t have the power to associate themselves with specific thoughts and occasions. This power isn’t self-generated. The power of association is thrust upon them through situation and circumstance. Although the fact that songs can be associated with events and happenings is undeniably a good thing a lot of the time, it doesn’t necessarily make the songs themselves any good.

All it’s really doing is making them triggers or mascots. They can prompt memories with startling effect and can also become symbolic representatives.

Have you and your significant other got a song that you consider to be “your song?” A large percentage of couples do, and a slightly smaller percentage are happy to admit to it. Generally, it tends to be the song that was playing when they threw themselves into each other’s loving and overwhelmingly receptive arms. In this instance, that special song is probably both a trigger of memories of when the couple got together and a symbol of their love for each other. The lyrics of this song don’t have to have any specific bearing on the couple’s relationship, and the artist or band that performs it is unlikely to be of much significance, either.

In fact, the contents of the song and where it came from are sometimes of no consequence at all. You can bet that the harmonic movement and contour of the melody don’t even get a look in. Where the song appeared in time and place is what makes it special, not what’s in it. When they are in the right place at the right time, songs are capable of triggering memories of those places and times, and there is nothing that we, as writers, can do about it!

It gets even worse when we realize that these songs can also instigate bad memories of bad times and places, and so on. It likely won’t take you long to think of a song that you dislike for reasons that are entirely nonmusical. Maybe it was playing when the woman or man of your dreams decided that she or he wanted to be

“just friends,” or maybe you associate it with an argument or the passing away of a dear friend or family member. Whatever they may be, songs can act as little more than hooks on which we hang experiences, and that fact isn’t about to stop.

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Earlier in this chapter, I purposefully stated that we “have” songs that we associate with events. I have used “have” as opposed to “know” to enforce just how significant our association with these songs can be. We like to feel as if we own them, to some extent. My line of work quite regularly involves me playing songs by all sorts of different artists to large groups of students. I am always intrigued and slightly amused when a student feels the need to inform me and the rest of the class that he or she was a fan of the artist in question “before they were famous.”

The only reason for doing this is because the student wants everyone to know that he or she has a special alliance and connection with the artist. It happens all the time and is a regular reminder of just how important the element of association is when it comes to appreciating artists and their songs.

If you’re a little dubious about the power of association in making songs popular, then simply look at cases in which songs have been purposefully associated with something. An example of this would be to look at how songs have been connected with films. Some of the best-selling singles of all time have been songs that were strongly associated with blockbuster movies at the same time.

“(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” performed by Bryan Adams and featured in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991, spent a ridiculous amount of time at number one in numerous territories. It spent seven weeks at number one on the United States’ Billboard Hot 100, 16 weeks at number one in the U.K., and a frankly unbelievable 39 weeks at the top spot in Canada. The fact that the

“Groover from Vancouver” is Canadian could help explain why it did the best in Canada, but that alone doesn’t explain its phenomenal success. The association with the film does.

“I Will Always Love You,” as performed by Whitney Houston for the film The Bodyguard, was released in 1992 and sold more than four million copies in the U.S. and a further six million in the rest of the world. That’s a fair few copies, and I would wager that the film played a big part in getting the song into people’s lives.

It didn’t sell anywhere near as many copies when Dolly Parton first released it in the early 1970s. Sure, they were different versions with different vocalists, but the film certainly played a huge part in bringing the song to the attention of a substan-tial audience.

Both of these songs are well constructed in their own right, but the fact that they sold in such abundance and that they both happen to be connected with major film releases is more than just coincidence. Especially if we look at the success of other songs associated with films, such as “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic and

“Love Is All Around” from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Sure, the marketing involved with these songs played a big part in making people aware of them, and that had to help, but the fact that people could associate the songs very specifically with the content of the films with which they are connected is also a massive factor. For example, “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”

is all the more successful as a love song because of its association with Maid Marian and that thief in tights. Thanks to the film, the words “I’d die for you”

cease to be an airy-fairy statement and become a proclamation that “I would let the bad guys get me and do unspeakably awful things to me in an old castle somewhere.” It carries more weight, somehow, as the film contextualizes the sentiment for the listener. It enables the listener to visualize the song to a certain extent, and somehow makes it more tangible in doing so.

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Music videos have become part and parcel of a single release, and this is due largely to the same principle. Being able to visualize a song helps the listener interpret and remember it, and it’s not unheard of for someone to buy a single largely on the strength of the video. The use of songs in TV commercials is the same, too.

It’s all about association.

Even without a massive marketing push, there are examples where some songs have sold fairly generously through what they are associated with. “Candle in the Wind” is a brilliant example of this. When Elton John and Bernie Taupin first wrote and released this song in 1973, it was popular and sold well. However, when it was re-worked and released in 1997 in association with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the results were incredible. It sold more than four and a half million copies in the U.K. and more than 11 million copies in the U.S. The fact that it didn’t do as well previously effectively illustrates the way in which association can increase the popularity of a song.

Association lifts the popularity of songs and therefore has a part to play in defining whether a song is perceived to be any good, regardless of the compositional elements that build it. That’s not much use to us as songwriters, though. It may help reveal that getting a good publisher will certainly help get a song out there and that good marketing will help too, but it doesn’t help with the actual creation of the song in the first place.

Who Has the Right to Decide What Is Good and What Isn’t?

I’m pretty sure we would all agree that no one has the right to give a categorical answer as to what makes a song “good.” It just doesn’t seem fair to do it. Some folks love some songs that others hate, and that doesn’t mean that some are right and others are wrong. It just enforces that different songs do different things for different people. That’s good because it keeps things interesting. It’s also annoying because we, as songwriters, would like to get a better handle on it if we had the chance!

I have a degree in popular music studies, and that doesn’t make my opinion more valid than anyone else’s. If my Uncle Angus loves a song, and I hate it, that means precisely nothing other than the fact that my Uncle Angus loves a song and I hate it. I could explain how a song is built with more prowess and vigor than many people could, but that counts for precisely nothing when it comes down to basic taste.

The average Joe doesn’t care how a song is built. He just cares what it sounds like.

There are no rules here. That said, it’s interesting to note that there are some professions within the music industry where deciding which songs are good is effectively a part of the job description. Let’s have a look at them now and see whether there is anything that people with these professions do that we can learn from. If we know what they’re after, we should be able to learn something from them.

WHO ACTUALLY DOES DECIDE?

Although it’s hard to define what makes a good song, it is possible to dictate what will make a song good. There’s a subtle difference to be appreciated here. What makes a good song is what goes into it. What makes a song good (in this chapter, at least) is what comes after it. The next few pages could be seen as slightly contentious, so don’t get too upset with me if I hit a raw nerve. I’m just attempting to bring a few music business truths out of the cupboard where we can all have a good look at them.

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Music Publishers

As you may or may not know, music publishers are often the first and only port of call for songwriters who are seeking to have their songs earn them some cash. If you have no idea what a music publisher does, then I seriously suggest that you look into it immediately. Put very simply, a music publishing company will look after your songs for you and try to ensure that they get printed and/or recorded and therefore played in as many places as humanly possible. They will usually enter into a legally binding contract with you, whereby they administer your songs for you and ensure that you receive money that is due to you when people pay to buy or hear recordings or scores of your work. In return for the publisher doing this, you then agree that they can keep a bit of the cash for themselves as a thank-you.

If only it was that simple! Getting a song published used to mean that it got printed on paper as a score (back in the day when it wasn’t particularly straightforward to record stuff), but it now means a considerable amount more because sheet music is not the only way to get songs out there. In fact, it’s possible to have a song published and for no one anywhere to do anything with it, ever. Having a song published basically means that you have taken steps to work with a publisher and that you trust them to make things happen with your work.

If you write songs that you are hoping to get recorded by somebody else who you don’t know personally, then approaching a publisher is generally the best way to go about making that happen. It’s part of their job to place material with artists and to ensure that the songs are placed where they are likely to be heard. If you write your own songs and hope to get a record deal and perform them yourself, you will still need to sort out some kind of publishing, even if you “publish” the material yourself. In doing this, you will ensure that someone (even if it’s you) is looking out for you, and you’ll have some assurance that what you have written is given every possible opportunity to shine.

Unfortunately, publishing is a frustratingly complicated affair, and there are almost as many different publishing contracts as there are artists. I have a publishing deal for some of the songs I have written, and I had to read the contract thousands of times before it all made sense. I like to consider myself relatively intelligent, and it was still a battle. Thankfully, it’s not my intention or my job to detail what a publisher does here in any depth, so I will stop now. But it’s important that you understand that music publishers have the job of picking out songs that they effectively consider to be good ones and worthwhile of their investment.

I have sent plenty of songs to publishers in the hope that they would like my stuff. I hoped that they would then give me loads of money to help finance the creation of my private helicopter pad and golf course. Once, when I did receive a package back from a publisher, there was a simple letter that read something along the lines of, “After carefully listening to your demo twice, we decided that it was not suitable for our company at this time.” It’s likely that you have come across similar letters in your experience. In my case, I know the publishers were lying to me. How? Because the CD they sent back to me was still shrink-wrapped! That was quite a lesson to learn. Thousands of us want to be writers, and publishers are therefore incredibly busy. They get loads of demos on a daily basis and have to be ruthless in picking out what they deem to be suitable. What we need to figure out is what is good as far as they are concerned, and we will come back to this in a moment or three, once we have looked at a few other professions.

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Artist and Repertoire (A&R) and Producers

If you haven’t come across the term before, an A&R person is chiefly responsible for finding new talent and nurturing that talent so the record label they work for gets the very best out of them. A&R people are probably most notoriously known as the scouts from record labels, who prowl around at the back of gig venues with dark glasses and the latest in mobile office technology. There is actually a lot more to the job than that, though. As the full title, Artist and Repertoire, suggests, the job also involves matching artists to the material they will be singing. Back in the olden days, this was a much more clear-cut exercise, where the job was to match a great singer with a great song. Although this role remains, very often artists will come to the attention of a record label with an impressive collection of songs that they wrote themselves. In these cases, the job isn’t so much finding songs for them to record, but deciding which of them should make it through the quality control process and end up on a record.

Record producers also have this role, and they, too, play a part in deciding what songs are good enough to make it onto the release at this stage. They work closely with the artist and the songs and do their utmost to ensure that they bring the best out of who and what they have to work with. Song selection is therefore a major part of the process for both A&R and producer types.

Developing relationships with publishers is also a major part of the A&R role because, as we have already seen, publishers are very often responsible for bringing new songs to record labels and suggesting that they should be placed with specific artists. There are other parts of the job, including finding and working with producers and being the main point of contact between the artist and the record label. I don’t want to get lost in a description of the role of the A&R person because this isn’t a music business book. What is important is that within the job description of both A&R and producer, song selection is a major component.

A&R people can get a bad name among bands and artists who want to get signed, and the name-calling is generally unfounded in my experience. More often than not, it’s sour grapes that the artist or writer in question has received yet another one of those dreaded rejection letters. Imagine for a moment what it would be like if every demo arriving at a record label bypassed quality control measures and was greeted with shiny white teeth, wild enthusiasm, a massive cash payout, and a five-album deal. First, the cost of albums would skyrocket because the economical implications would be vast. Second, can you imagine what it would be like to walk into your local record shop and try to find something halfway decent? Some would argue that it’s hard enough to find something good as it is. If there were no quality control measures in place, the shops would have to be massive because they would need to stock millions of albums, and a lot of the albums would be really rather poorly conceived and produced.

The current online situation with sites such as www.myspace.com illustrates this

situation well. There are no quality control checkpoints with a lot of sites like this, and there are therefore millions of songs out there. If we just aimlessly surf our way through these sites, it is likely that we will come across more appalling songs than good ones. In light of this fact, A&R people and publishers are actually doing us a favor, and that’s worth remembering from time to time.

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I have heard A&R people referred to as “Eh and Err” people more than once, and I can understand why. They have to make the decision about what is and isn’t a good song on a regular basis, and making that decision is not a walk in the park.

If they make a bad decision and marry the latest star from their record label (who is having a small fortune spent on him or her with regard to marketing and so on) to a song that really isn’t going to do them any commercial favors, then their job is likely to be on the line. For many of us, picking a song that we like is a simple exercise. For A&R people—and publishers, for that matter—it can be the difference between a golden handshake and a helping hand to the front door. It’s important, so how on earth do A&R people get their heads around picking out good songs? Again, we’ll come back to this one shortly.

The Music Press

We musicians tend to have a love-hate relationship with the music press. On one hand, we love them when they say nice things about the material we write and/or produce, and we like them when they compliment work by other artists who we admire. On the other hand, we tend to get fairly upset with them when they don’t appear to understand the masterpiece that we have created and they have negative things to say about it.

If you have had any of your material reviewed, then I expect you know where I’m coming from. The expectation of receiving a review can be very exciting. What people think of our work tends to matter to us. It’s fair to say that it matters more to some than others, and although I expect we all know of people who claim that they couldn’t care less what other people make of their work, I’ll bet they do, at least a teeny-weeny little bit. We all want to be appreciated on one level or another, and having someone say they like our work matters, especially if it’s in print or online where others can see it.

Why is this? I think there are two reasons. First, it’s a nice feeling to have someone publish positive things about us where we know other people will read it. It does wonders for our confidence level and self-esteem. From a commercial point of view, it’s good marketing exposure and will help shift product. From a personal point of view, it can generate that nice, warm, fuzzy feeling that suggests that perhaps the hours we spent crafting the material weren’t a complete waste of time.

Second, the power of print can be quite staggering. Whether the review is published online or in a magazine or journal, the fact that it has been published at all seems to add extra kudos to what has been said in the review. Although it seems a little harsh to say, there are plenty of people who have their opinions shaped for them by reviews they read. I have to admit that even with my high standards and academic music background, a published review of a product tends to affect the way I approach it. If we see a shortlist for the song of the year, it’s likely that we’ll want to hear the songs on it because someone somewhere has said that they are good. That’s the power of print at work.

Here’s an example from my own personal experience. A few years ago, a mate and I decided we would write some fairly daft songs, just to have some fun. We never took them that seriously and recorded them as a project to keep ourselves amused. When we finished them, we thought it would be interesting to post a few of them on a website where we knew we would get some reviews. One of the songs

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was called “Scary Man,” and we wrote it about the Scary Man who almost always seems to be on the last train or bus home. He appears in different forms, but Scary Man almost always shows up. You know who I mean, right? The song falls a fair way short of perfection, and I’m not presenting it as a model of good practice. I’ve included it on the basis of the reviews it received. Figure 2.1 gives you pretty much all you need to know about it, and you can find the audio on the website at

www.courseptr.com/downloads.

Figure 2.1

“Scary Man.”

Here are a couple of the reviews we got back for this one. I have corrected the spelling mistakes they came with for your reading convenience.

d The long and short of it. “The long of it is this is the best song I have ever heard on this site. Kudos for originality, mix, production, guitar tone and licks, piano, vocals, and vibe. I was thinking of saying the track was too long, but then it went into that killer jazz breakdown and I was wishing there was more. The short of it is that there is nothing wrong with this tune. Thanks for de-virginizing my playlist.”

d Tacky. “Okay, at the 2:35 mark I’d had just about enough, but because I’m a good sport I kept listening. The entire tune reminds me of an amateur studio musician who had to come up with a tune in two days. Dudes, do something about the keyboards…anything….”

So, what should I make of these? We got loads of reviews of this song, and the majority of them were actually quite positive (believe it or not). However, if we had just gotten these two, I would probably be fairly gutted, even though it was just supposed to be a bit of fun.

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The fact that reviews get published can very easily cloud the simple truth that the review probably just reflects the personal opinion of one individual. Just one—

not the massive audience that may or may not read the review. We tend to forget that fact when we read reviews. It may well be that the slightly dodgy review that our latest work of art received was written by a 15-year-old school kid on work experience who was given 10 minutes to write a paragraph to fill a column somewhere in the back pages. I’m not suggesting that this 15-year-old’s opinion isn’t valid, but it still remains the opinion of just one person, and that person might have been having a bad day. A review is not hard fact; it is an opinion. We need to remember this when we get them. It can make life less depressing.

Having said all that, the fact remains that reviewers do give their opinions as to the quality and/or value of what they are reviewing, and their opinion can—and often does—influence others. So, when these reviewers review, how do they make their decisions? Is it purely based on whether they happened to like the song when they heard it? Surely there must be more to it than that—that simply doesn’t seem fair. Shouldn’t the mood the reviewer was in when he or she listened and wrote the review be taken into consideration? What if the reviewer just had a major falling-out with their significant other, and they took out all his frustration on the poor undeserving song that was unlucky enough to come up next?

It can work the other way, too, where the reviewer might be on cloud nine and award anything and everything they came into contact with the elusive five-star rating. What about the location in which the reviewer listened to the song? If it was in the car, then it’s possible that the engine noise could have hidden some of the ingenious bass-line composition that holds the harmony together. Perhaps the reviewer was in a place where the power of association was at play, and those surroundings colored their appreciation of the song.

Production factors also come into play here. What if the reviewer was unable to get beyond the fact that they thought the keyboard sound was dated or that they didn’t dig the singer’s individual crooning style? There is a real danger that some reviewers will be unable to get past these irritants and will take it out on the song, which has nothing to do with the manner in which it has been replicated. It’s just not fair, but time and time again, the content or approach of reviews is shaped by things that are actually extraneous to the song itself. In these cases, the song often takes a hit along with whatever encouraged the punch.

DJs

No, I don’t mean dinner jackets. Disc jockeys come in different shapes and sizes and are tailored to fit different occasions, but they all have the role of picking out what they are going to play to their audience on one level or another.

For the classic touring party DJ who does school and birthday parties, youth clubs, and so on, the job is a relatively simple one. It is to pick songs that will fit the mood on the dance floor. Although there are subtle adjustments to the way things pan out, the general shape of the evening tends to proceed as follows. It starts with the involvement of some fairly average party tunes to set the mood, while the boys have their peanut fights and the girls check out each other’s new hairdos and shoes. This then works its way to the “Oh, I like this one” songs—

people are coaxed onto the dance floor, where dancing is preceded by rhythmic

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walking before developing into full-blown shape throwing. Then come the “This song is amazing” tunes, where everyone goes for it. Then you get the “smoochie”

numbers at the end for the goodbye snuggles. Each stage of this process is carefully administered by the DJ, and picking the right songs is a vital part of the proceedings. If it goes wrong, then the party sinks like the DJ sinks behind his decks. Song selection is a big part of the job.

When it comes to radio DJs, the song selection process is much more complicated and can be tricky to get our heads around. Usually, a station will have a collection of playlists on which songs have been specifically selected for a certain amount of exposure on the airwaves. Excuse me while I dive headfirst into another anecdote for the purposes of illustration….

A few years ago, I had just finished recording a collection of what I then considered to be the greatest songs of all time—because I had written them. I now know better, but at the time I was convinced that I was a genius. I sent the CD to a radio station (which shall remain nameless) that had a big audience both over the airwaves and online. I then waited eagerly for the admiration that I was sure I would receive within days. I did get a letter from someone important, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It was another one of those annoying rejection letters, with a slightly odd analogy involving Olympic athletes thrown in for good measure. I remember opening it and being absolutely gutted. Then, literally within a couple of hours, as I was walking down the corridor at work and descending into the songwriting chasm of despair (as many of us do from time to time), I got a call from a DJ at the same station. He proceeded to tell me that he loved my album and wanted to feature it during the week. Would I consider doing a phone interview live on air? Naturally, I said yes, but then I got really confused as to how on earth the playlist worked at their station. It seemed that this DJ had decided to ignore it and play some of my stuff anyway. How we get our songs on these playlists is too much to go into here, but the important thing is that somebody somewhere has a say in what the public should and shouldn’t be listening to. Furthermore, their opinions seem to differ a fair bit! So, how on earth do they make these decisions?

Is it just down to what the controller considers to be good?

How Do People with These Jobs Make These Decisions?

The simple answer to this question is that it rarely has anything to do with whether they actually like the song. It would be foolish to believe that a degree of self-perception and the pursuit of credibility is not involved to some extent, but it has to go beyond that. People with these job descriptions (among others) do have to select good songs, but the definition of a good song is quite different than what we might expect.

Take the role of the music publisher for a second. If you were a music publisher, what do you think would be your main priority? Finding songs that you liked personally or finding songs that you were pretty sure would make you and your company some serious cash? We would all like to believe that it’s the first option, including a lot of music publishers themselves. However, taste is very rarely the principal deciding factor. The music business is called the music business because it’s a business. The majority of people who work in it aren’t actually involved with any of the music at all. They may work with product or units, but that’s about it.

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We’re talking about the accountants, secretaries, marketing managers, office staff, personnel officers, janitors, IT technicians, and so on. Publishers have to make money or they cease to be music publishers and become statistics on the unem-ployed list. It’s the same for all of the professions we have gone through so far.

A&R people need to pick songs they think will make their labels money, not necessarily ones that they want to hear. Every now and again there are exceptions to this, where an operation is set up on a small scale so that decisions can be made relatively free of financial shackles and based purely on the musical merits of a project. However, the very real and present danger of the angry bank manager means that this is rarely a possibility, especially in the current climate of falling record sales and illegal MP3 downloads.

Frank Zappa had a fairly clear opinion on this matter. “The idea of writing a nice tune is the farthest thing from the minds of the people you will be doing business with, and that is the reality of the business.” 1

This opinion comes from someone who self-financed the records that he made and released and chose to avoid the corporate management involved with signing to a major label so as to be free to experiment and try things that weren’t guaranteed to make a lot of money. It’s an admirable path to walk, but even this isn’t free of financial restraints. If songwriting is what is going to earn someone a living, then they have to try to write something that will sell and raise the cash. There are ways to do it so that the music remains the focus, but the perception of the audience who has the money has to be at least a contributing factor in the ways the songs are written, selected, and produced.

DJs aren’t necessarily concerned with playing what they like, although they do occasionally get a chance to do so. Primarily, they need to maintain their audience.

DJs at parties and in clubs want to try to keep people on the dance floor, and that often means playing the same songs over and over again, like every other night.

They will invariably get sick of playing the same playlist all the time, but they do it because it keeps the punters happy, and that’s what pays the bills. Radio playlist selectors and DJs want to maintain their audience, and picking the right songs is a big part of the process.

So, if making cash through shifting product or maintaining an audience is a key driving force behind song selection, how do these people do it? Before I offer an answer to this question, how would you do it? If you were a music publisher, do you think there would be anything you could do to come up with a foolproof routine for picking the right songs to publish?

WHAT INFORMS THESE DECISIONS?

It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I am not the first person to have asked this question. Big business means making big decisions, and big decisions tend to need big research behind them to win over those who hold the purse strings.

In an attempt to be of use to music industry professionals and to raise some cash in the process, a company called Polyphonic HMI has developed a method of scientifically assessing a song for hit potential. If you weren’t aware of this, it might sound quite farfetched, but the principle is actually very clever. Putting it very basically, by analyzing the key musical traits of hits from the last 50+ years, they are able to analyze new songs using the same assessment criteria and then scientifically

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identify similarities between them. The thinking is that if new songs run through their cunning software (called Hit Song Science) are identified as being similar to previous hits with regard to musical construction, then they stand a good chance of being hits themselves. There’s considerably more to it than that, but that’s the general gist of it.

When I introduce my students to this, they generally aren’t sure whether they should laugh or get annoyed, and I suspect it’s possible that you’re in the same place now. However, if you stop to get your brain around exactly what is happening in this instance, it’s evident that these mechanisms are just formalizing an approach that most of us writers have in the way we write anyway. Have you ever heard a song and thought, “I like that, and I’m going to write one just like it?” I bet you have at some point. That’s the same territory that Polyphonic HMI is working in. They’re just taking the guesswork out of whether the songs are similar. We can write songs and think they have a lot in common with songs that we know to be popular, or we can get some nifty computer program to tell us for sure.

“In the beginning I found that I signed with people who loved music and knew where it came from, and in the end I was just signed to a succession of corporations that didn’t like musicians, didn’t trust them, and wished their product was coming out of a machine, not a human being.”

—James Taylor 2

At the moment, it seems as if at least some record companies are taking the results from companies like this very seriously. The songs themselves aren’t coming out of a machine (yet!), but a significant part of their financial viability is being assessed by one. Music business professionals want to make money, and the fact that they respond positively to companies such as Polyphonic HMI reveals something key to this whole process. This is important, so it’s getting its own line: What worked before informs what will work next.

The Listening Public

There are times when we as a listening public influence the opinions of others by telling them what they will and won’t like. In doing this, we are effectively acting as an informal and un-pressed music press. Sometimes this takes place on a very obvious level, where we intentionally tell someone we know of a song that we are pretty confident he or she will like. It’s an instinctive reaction in most of us to immediately want to share something that excites us. The popularity of songs and the artists who communicate them to us is often developed largely through word of mouth, and there’s nothing new there.

However, in addition to these intentional and obvious interpersonal advertisements that songs get, we should also acknowledge that there are numerous online music outlets that effectively employ us as their marketing tools. The line that reads something like, “People who bought this also bought…” is a hugely significant part of the mechanism that targets new audiences. What it is effectively saying is, “We know from past experience that people who parted company with some

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cash for this product also liked these products, so we’re telling you because we’re hoping you’ll give us your money, too.” Online stores such as www.amazon.com

and www.play.com and radio stations including www.pandora.com and

www.last.fm with the associated TuneGlue software at audiomap.tuneglue.net currently maximize this approach to very good effect. It’s not always purely for revenue, though. Sometimes it’s in the interests of the public and the artists whose songs are being spread around the place. I know that I have been led to discover some interesting artists and songs that I would never have been aware of without the introduction these sites made for me. They’re a fantastic resource for us as music fans and writers, and the “what worked before” concept is evident for all to see in the way it works.

It’s interesting that the word spreads through similarities that are noticed and acted upon by the listener. Whether demonstrating interest through the parting of cash or clicking an “I Like This” button of some kind, the result is that the

“reviewer” of sorts can liken an artist or a song to someone or something that has no real similarity in the ears of another beholder. This likening to other artists and their songs can be very useful as a marketing tool, but it can also be quite detrimental to have a song associated with a scene or genre that it would rather avoid.

Whichever way our opinion gets shared with other people, we have to acknowledge that we, too, have a part to play in exposing songs to new audiences.

How Do We Know What Works?

It’s annoying, irritating, infuriating, bothersome, maddening, aggravating, and the rest of it, but we have to live with it. Like pretty much any kind of business we could care to think of, predicting profits is based largely upon market trends up until that point, and not, as we might hope, upon the level of skill and impassioned soul searching that has gone into writing each song. If a product is currently selling well and is increasing in popularity, then there is good reason to believe that another similar product will do the same, at least for a short while. Figure 2.2 provides a basic visual representation of the general gist of what we are considering here. It’s the same in the music business. It doesn’t take much effort to think of occasions when a new artist has appeared and sold a lot of units, only to be followed by a surge of other artists who are very similar. We have seen it for years in the industry, where artists and their songs come in waves that share the same genetic fingerprint. They then tend to cluster together for musical seasons, where we get the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and so on at one point, and the Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, and the Supremes at another. At the time of this writing, a good example would be the likes of Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Gabriella Cilmi, and so on having a fair bit in common. Obviously, the more we know about each artist or band, the more we will understand their differences, but from a marketing perspective, they all fall under the same umbrellas.

We shouldn’t get confused here with a “who’s best?” and “who came first?” session, nor should we concern ourselves with whether similarities between these artists are the result of blatant emulation or more complicated considerations, such as shared influences and social context. There are hundreds of reasons why various artists and their songs share a similar sound, and that will always happen to a certain extent. What is important here is that we appreciate how the music industry tends to purposefully act upon these similarities, whether they are manufactured or not.

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Figure 2.2

Predicting sales.

If it is noted that a certain type of act with certain types of songs is selling a lot of product, then it makes sense from a business perspective to get a slice of the market share and put out a similar product. What it comes down to is that the music business tends to look backward a lot. It has to so it can play it safe and not risk losing lots of precious revenue. This tends to upset us creative types because we want to look forward and make names for ourselves as pioneers. That’s an issue that doesn’t look like it’s being resolved any time soon. What has come before will always shape what comes next.

“The executives at record companies want something that is gonna sell.

And it’s hard to stick to a craft if nobody wants it. So you find yourself between a rock and a hard place. You want to write good melodies, but you want to survive and you want people to hear the stuff. You wind up joining the bandwagon.”

—Lamont Dozier 3

Just to back up this principle, let’s have a quick visit back to the dance floor.

Imagine you’re a party or club DJ, and the dance floor is emptying a bit. You start to get nervous and wonder what you can do. Short of performing a natty magic trick while standing on your head, the best way to draw people’s attention back to you and to the dance floor would be to spin a tune that you know has always worked in the past. Ask any party DJs, and they will tell you that they have

“bankers” that they bring out on such occasions. What worked before will probably work again. It’s that simple.

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Working with the knowledge of what has gone before is about as safe as it gets when we are trying to decide what building blocks to start with. It’s not all doom and gloom here, though. There are obviously times when new trends and types of songs become popular, so it’s not all governed by corporate finance! Without going into any unnecessary detail, it is worth noting that these new developments usually take place when cash isn’t the driving factor. They usually come out of a subculture that develops in a specific time and place or through the ambition and sheer hard work of a genuine pioneer or group of pioneers whose craft is more important to them than their bank balance. Songwriting shouldn’t always be about money, and it’s great when it isn’t, but it’s hard to separate the two in some contexts.

DJs are always going to be on the lookout for songs and/or tracks that are appropriate for the task at hand and will effectively do their job for them. Music publishers and A&R people want songs that will sell, and the press wants material about which they can write something interesting. In writing songs, we could just think about these people and ensure that we meet their needs, but is that the best way to go about it? Surely there are other things that should shape our approach to writing songs.

Who Are We Writing For?

“It begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.”

—Leonard Cohen 4

It has to be about us as writers, to a certain extent. We’re birthing the songs, after all. Many songwriters refer to their songs as their children, and the reason why is obvious. We have nurtured them into existence. We have taken time to develop them and to bring them up into the big, wide world. They are the result of the combination of our experiences and beliefs and will very often carry our opinions and part of who we are in them. They will bear our resemblance and carry some of our personality. It goes without saying that we need to write for ourselves at least in part. It would be impossible to get any kind of soul and guts into our songs if we didn’t put some of our own experience into them. However, our songs have to leave the nest one day, and at that point what we think of them is just part of the bigger picture.

When we get wrapped up in the songwriting process, it can be very easy to forget something very important. The listener’s gratification is almost always as important, if not more important, than our own. Although we brought them into being, it could be argued that we don’t actually own the songs anyway. As Van Dyke Parks put it, “It’s transcendental. It’s beyond possession. It really is.” 5 An appreciation of who wants the song should be just as much of a driving force as who writes it. This is true regardless of whether the motivation is making a living or writing songs for the benefit of others. Gerry Goffin once said of Carole King and himself, “All of a sudden, we were writing bad songs, and then we keyed into what was happening and what was necessary for the market. We still wrote our share of bad songs, but the majority of them were good. We had, from about 1960

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to 1965, almost 80 Top-30 records.” 6 What’s necessary for the market can be viewed in commercial terms or not, depending on our point of view. The market could quite simply be termed as the audience, and no one says you have to take money from people who enjoy your songs. What’s necessary is what is wanted by others, not just ourselves.

When we put our layers together, we need to think about what’s right for the song, not for our ego. Ask yourself whether you are a generous or selfish writer. If you have never really pondered the thought before, it’s well worth a pause. Do you write songs for yourself and hope that others will appreciate them, or is the motivation behind your songs the fact that you know there is an audience who will appreciate them on one level or another? There’s a lot to be learned from the attitude of Brian Wilson when he says, “First of all, I want people to understand that I’m here to create for them.” 7 Our motivation for writing is what will get us through when we crash into the writer’s block that so often hinders progress.

Without motivation, we aren’t going to get as far as we could or should. We need to be clear why we are writing, and knowing who we are writing for is as good a place to start as any. Do you write for yourself, for others, or for a combination of the two?

“There’s a point at which, when you’re writing, you just have to admit to the fact that sometimes you really don’t care if anybody listens.”

—Pete Townshend 8

For many, the writing experience is a cathartic exercise where the need to “get stuff out” of our heads is just as important, if not more so, than the song that comes out of the exercise. For others, it may be purely for the satisfaction of knowing that we have given people a song from which they can benefit. For some, it can be a combination of both. Neither way is preferable to the other, but knowing why we write can help the process move along more smoothly. We all write songs for ourselves from time to time, but we may not realize they are just for us when we write them.

It’s important to be aware of songs like this when we create them. There’s nothing stopping us from sharing them with others, but we need to be aware that others may not appreciate them on the level that we do. If you write songs for yourself, then they are just that—for yourself and not intended for the world at large. One of my previous students once wanted to share his song with the class. When he had finished playing it, a few members of the group shared their thoughts about it and made suggestions for possible improvements (which is what they are supposed to do in the class in question). When the feedback came back, the writer in question stated that he didn’t care about what other people thought because he wrote the song for himself. If that was the case, he should have just kept it to himself!

Writing for others is a generous approach to writing. Whether it is because we know that targeting a certain audience will reap financial rewards or because we genuinely want to help people out with something from which they will benefit, the fact that the song is destined to head out there is a good piece of information to have when the crafting is underway. It will help us identify the suitability of the layers that build it. For example, there will be times when intensely personal

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content in the lyrics simply won’t be appropriate if the song is for others. There are times when it will. Some audiences will appreciate a middle section in 7/4, and some won’t. Some will enjoy complex extensions and chromatic movement in a chord progression, and some will think it sounds terrible.

Knowing who the song is for will help focus the writer’s creative exploits and is therefore well worth paying close attention to. In reality, a combination of both approaches is probably the best. It enables us to benefit from the writing experience as well as do some good for others in the process.

WHO WILL PERFORM THE SONGS?

The performer(s) of our songs should be a major consideration in the songwriting process. The nature in which the song is delivered to the listener is obviously very important, and authenticity is something that audiences are very keen on. It tends to be important to listeners to believe what the singer is conveying to them. If you have ever spent any time at a singing competition or assessment, it’s likely that you have heard one of the unlucky performers being hit with something along the lines of, “I didn’t really believe you,” from one of the assessors or judges. If the song isn’t conveyed with integrity, then it misses the mark, even if it is well crafted in its own right. The way to avoid this is to ensure that we don’t give performers songs that they can’t pull off convincingly. How do we know what will and won’t work here? We need to look at both musical and lyrical factors.

Some topics are suitable for some genres and not others. Even within those genres, there are performers who will and won’t be able to sing them convincingly. It’s not particularly common to hear manufactured girl bands singing about irrigation methods, for example. It would also be massively unfitting to have obscene language in a gospel song. Obviously, there will be exceptions to standard practice, but the point is valid. When we’re writing songs, we need to have some idea whether our lyrics will be suitable for the artist singing them, as well as for the audience who will be listening.

If we have the opportunity to write for specific artists, we also need to have some idea what they have sung previously. That’s so that we don’t repeat what the artists have already done, and so that we have some idea what they stand for both socially and artistically. We need to ensure that artists will be able to sing our songs physically and with integrity, and that they will be able to perform them to appeal to their audience.

The main way to figure out what and how we should write is to look at what has gone before. We will learn what topics an artist tends to sing about by listening to their back catalog, and any genre-specific information will also come from what the artist has worked on to date. Looking at where artists we are writing for have been helps inform where they are going.

WHO’S SUPPOSED TO BE LISTENING TO THEM AND BUYING THEM?

As well as considering who will be performing our songs, we should also look at who is likely to be receiving them and seek to understand what they want. Different sectors of the public will want different things from songs. Some will want to hear more of what they already know because it’s safe and they are comfortable with it.

Some will want to be challenged to appreciate something fresh and innovative.

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Some will not be too concerned about the musical makeup of the songs as long as they are seen as currently fashionable and the “in” thing to be listening to. Painful though it is for songwriters to confront, for many people, songs are merely social devices attached to subcultures as audio hooks on which to hang identities.

We need to ask ourselves why the song needs to be written in the first place.

Think about this one carefully. If we’re not sure why our song needs to exist, then maybe we shouldn’t be writing it at all. I’m not trying to put you off writing here.

I’m just stating that we need to think about why we do it. If we know why we are writing, then we have a fighting chance of writing some cracking stuff. If we don’t, then it’s likely that our songs will lack the direction they need to make them worthwhile—whatever that direction may be.

Does a Song Have to Be Successful to Be Good?

I would say that the answer to this question is yes. But before you start getting upset with me, hear me out. What do you think of when someone refers to success? Typically, students that I teach assume that success is defined as something like the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence. And they would be right, to a certain extent. For many, success is defined by “getting stuff,” whether that is cash, notoriety, or whatever else they may be after.

That’s not necessarily what success is all about, though. How about this definition—meeting a favorable or desired outcome? That’s more like it. That’s what it’s all about. Using this definition of success, we can say that a good song is one that succeeds in achieving what it was written to achieve. That definition works on every level. If the intention was for the song to make money, then fair enough, but there are hundreds of other reasons to write songs.

Here comes another little story. I have had to write a few songs for weddings in my time. My usual objective in writing songs for weddings is to write something suitably sappy that is nice but not too interesting, so as not to distract the guests from the happy couple, who are usually signing the register while the song in question is being performed. For my most recent effort, I thought I would set a very specific goal, and that was to make the mother of the groom cry. I worked hard at this, and when the day came, despite a slight hiccup with the transpose button on the keyboard I was using, I went for it. Unfortunately, I failed in my quest to get tears out of the mother of the groom. However, I did succeed in making his sister cry her eyes out. Not quite what I had in mind, but I settled for it! The song did pretty much what it was supposed to. It was a realistic and measurable target, and I could be assured that on those grounds, the song was successful. A job well done.

When setting out on the adventure of writing a song, it really helps to know exactly why we are writing it. Knowing the answer before we start saves a lot of aimless meandering. There are hundreds of reasons for writing songs, but just a few possibilities include:

d For the soul (because we have to). This approach would fall mostly under the

“selfish” banner, although it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are those who appreciate hearing the innermost thoughts of a writer, so a self-centered approach can, oddly enough, connect very effectively with those who had no attention paid to them through the song’s crafting. We’ll look in more depth at how this works when we get to lyric writing in Chapter 7.

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d For the cash (because we want to be rich). There’s an unwritten rule somewhere that writing to make money is inherently wrong, and real songwriters don’t do it. Rubbish! If our motives are purely to make money, then it’s possible that some of our songs will lack soul from time to time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to want to make a living out of writing.

Writing a song to try to make some money will probably result in the song targeting a specific audience, and that in itself is not a skill to be sniffed at!

d For the communication (because we have something to say). According to Neil Finn of Crowded House, “The aim of a good song is to, within the context of three minutes, provide a couple of lines that just go ‘Bang!’ in the back of the cranium so that people go, ‘Yes, I know that feeling.’ ” 9 All songs communicate something, and sometimes this something is the motive behind its creation. It may be that we want to share our opinion on a specific topic, or that we want to express our undying love to a special somebody, for example. There are times when mere words simply won’t do the message justice, and crafting a song is the best possible means of communicating it.

d To rally support for a cause. An example might be to raise the profile of a charity providing funds for research into breast cancer, or to provide the rallying cry for the supporters of any given team on their quest to win a certain trophy or tournament.

d To make someone laugh or cry. Weddings are fairly common ground for writing emotive songs, but writing songs for films, shows, one-off performances, and comedy sketches would also be appropriate here. It may also be the case that we want to write some affecting songs to vary the emotional dynamic of a set list.

d To show off how clever we are. Songs like these are usually performed by artists and bands for which the appeal is found in the mastery of instruments.

The songs may feature altering time signatures and make room for self-indulgent half-hour guitar solos, for example. Essentially, songs of this nature tend to exist as platforms for instrumental dexterity to wow the audience, rather than for their own ends. This doesn’t negate the necessity to spend time getting them right, though. A song can do a good or bad job of providing this platform. Knowing what it’s supposed to achieve will aid its creation greatly, and its success is easily measurable.

d To make someone fancy you. Writing a song tends to be much more effective than buying chocolates or flowers, and it can work wonders. It’s a noble quest indeed. Of his song “Diana,” Paul Anka said, “I wrote it to impress a girl. She wasn’t impressed, until it was a million seller.” 10

d To suit a film. The song may include lyrical and/or musical references to certain characters or the storyline, or it may have been inspired to some extent by the script or cinematic imagery, and so on.

d For variation in a set. Sometimes, an artist’s or band’s set of songs will lack a certain something with regard to musical or lyrical content. It may be that a new song needs to be written to provide some as yet missing variation in the combination of songs available in the artist’s arsenal of material.

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These are just the first reasons that come to mind. There are hundreds more, and it would be a waste of paper to attempt to list them all here. Shortly, there will be an exercise for you to explore just how many of these motives there are.

Ask the Right Questions

The quality of a song can’t be judged solely on how many music theory tick boxes it has passed through during its construction. That doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on whether people will like it, and certainly not on whether it will get its job done. “Good” is a very arbitrary word that doesn’t do us any favors when we’re thinking about songs. We’re better off substituting the word “appropriate”

for “good” in the questions we ask.

A useful way to look at this is through the formation of a set list for a gig.

Hopefully, all of the songs on the list are good in that they are well written and enjoyable to listen to. That doesn’t stop one or two of them from being a terrible selection with which to open the gig, though. The function and purpose of songs is inherent in them and needs to be considered when we are appraising how appropriate they are for any given moment or occasion. What they have achieved before or how similar they are to songs that have been successful before is useful information, but so is the information inherent in the songs themselves.

Musicians tend to be quite preoccupied with the degree of skill and difficulty involved in their songs when ascertaining their quality. We need to bear in mind that the majority of our listeners won’t have the musical analysis skills to be able to assess the quality of our songs on that level. Frustrating though it may be, that’s the nature of things. We need to get away from this concept and move toward levels of success instead. As already noted, we don’t tend to like thinking of success because it sounds cold and calculated, and we tend to just associate it with cash.

But that isn’t the case, and we should think about it a lot more than we do. It will lead us to writing songs that are more appropriate for any given task or occasion, and the audience will appreciate us and the songs we write all the more for it.

Breadth and Depth

Armed with the appreciation of what our audience wants or needs, there are fundamentally two paths open to us with regard to how we target them. We can choose where we will aim our songs up front and aim at that target with something that they will appreciate (evidenced through what has worked before). Or, we can start a little more ambiguously with some musical and/or lyrical noodling and see where our song appears to be heading all by itself. The second route can take us around the houses a bit, but as long as we pay attention to where we are heading with it at some point, we should be okay.

Once we know where we are heading, you need to identify the level on which the song will appeal. Is the song likely to appeal to a broad audience or will it be tailored to a much smaller and more specialized niche of listeners? In both of these cases, there is a payoff between breadth and depth that needs to be appreciated and considered. By breadth, we are referring to the size of the audience that will be interested, and by depth we are referring to how deeply the song affects and is taken into the ownership of that audience.

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Typically, a song with a large breadth will not have such depth because it is spread thinly across the audience and is not specific enough to sink its roots down in one place in particular. The polar opposite of this would be to have a song that is written solely for one person, in which that person is named and the song is very specific to just him or her. In this case, the song would have minimal breadth, but would sink very deeply with regard to level of interest due to the personal nature of its construction, specifically with regard to the lyrics.

We need to make choices on this level when we are writing songs because it will inform all sorts of compositional approaches, ranging from lyrical content to genre-specific arrangement and production style. Although they are the most obvious and arguably the most powerful element of songs when it comes to rooting down into an audience, lyrics aren’t the only device for deep impact in this sense.

For example, there are specific rhythms that will be more welcomed by certain audiences than others, and the form on which we build our songs can also impact how deeply they are taken to heart.

There is no right or wrong. There’s room for every kind of song under the sun, and one style will always offset another. It is fair to acknowledge that increased depth does tend to require the sacrifice of breadth to a certain extent (and vice versa), but that is not a bad thing as long as we go into the process with our eyes wide open. Some of the bestselling albums over the past few years in the U.K. have been greeted with a combination of huge sales figures and disdain and contempt from separate corners of the market.

If we stop and think about that fact, it’s really interesting. If we take the album Back to Bedlam by James Blunt as an example, we can note that it was the bestselling album of 2005 in the U.K. and went on to sell millions of copies around the world. We can also note that there are plenty of articles on the Internet that fall

considerably short of complimenting Blunt and his catalog of songs. www.ihate-

jamesblunt.co.nr is just one example! Why did this album do so well if there are

so many who maintain that Mr. Blunt has no depth or soul and that his songs are bland, generic, boring rubbish?

Songs perceived by some as bland are welcomed by others as nice. A song con-demned as boring in one quarter will be appreciated as comfortable in another. It’s all about where the song is supposed to land. We shouldn’t send a bland song into an arena of diehard fans of progressive hardcore, just as we shouldn’t send a kit-ten into a den of Velociraptors. It won’t be appreciated. Simple.

Another recent project some of my songwriting students were involved in was the task of writing the blandest pop song possible. A local radio station approached the college and explained that they were running a feature on why bland songs sell so well. This was directly linked to the massive sales figures achieved by Back to Bedlam from the aforementioned Mr. Blunt. I set my students to the task of writing the most generic and safe pop song possible, and they duly responded by writing songs that essentially targeted a huge audience on a very shallow level. When the same students performed one of the resulting songs on the radio, the response from the listeners was that they really liked it. The response didn’t surprise me at all because the song ticked all the boxes associated with a safe and nice piece of composition. It was a generic love song at mid tempo with a very predictable structure, diatonic harmony, and simple repetitive major scale melody.

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It was not the kind of song that people would connect with on a deep level, but it had a simplistic appeal that could best be described as nice. A large percentage of the song-appreciating public likes nice. It can play anywhere and anytime without drawing too much attention to itself. It’s perfect for so many different occasions.

Conclusions

The key point to take from this chapter is that ideally we should know why we are writing before we start…and certainly before we finish. It helps on two levels. First, knowing where we are heading helps us get there. Second, knowing what we want to achieve enables us to be fairly exact in assessing how successful we have been when we’re finished, and that assessment should sharpen our songwriting tools for the next attempt.

A good song is one that communicates, and one that communicates whatever it was written to achieve, whatever that may be. Think about it….

Solution: Know Why You Are Writing before You Finish

PART 1

Pick three of your favorite albums off the shelf or out of a playlist, and question the reasoning behind the songs that you hear.

d What do you think is/was the purpose of each one’s existence?

d What evidences this in the construction of the song?

d Who’s it for?

PART 2

Apply those same kinds of questions to the songs that you write before you finish them. It’s okay to start without these answers and let the song lead you wherever it will, but knowing where it’s going before you finish will enable you to get through the bit that’s hard work.

d Why write it?

d Who’s it for?

d Is there anything you know that they will want from the song (structure, content, perspective, and so on)?

d Is there anyone in particular who you would like to enjoy or appreciate it?

d How will you evaluate its success?

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We Don’t Present Our Songs

Problem

as Effectively as Possible

3

Although instrumentation and performance undoubtedly play a part in affecting the presentation of songs, the linear arrangement of the core blocks of the composition itself will have a significant impact on how successfully our ideas are conveyed. In this chapter, we will therefore be looking at the different consecutive sections with which we build our songs. Before we can progress, though, we need to agree on the names that we attach to these different sections.

The issue here is that there are some names that mean different things depending on our experience and, to a certain extent, on where we reside in the world. Verse and chorus are names that are universally understood, but bridge tends to create some confusion. For some, it refers to the section that appears just before the chorus, and for others, it’s the name given to a section that doesn’t tend to appear until somewhere midway through the song. To avoid any misunderstanding, we’re not going to use the word bridge here at all. All sections in songs could be said to “bridge”

between what is on either side of them anyway, and it gets too confusing. Instead, we will use pre-chorus for the section just before a chorus and middle section for the part of the song that acts as a departure in the middle. That way, it’s clear even if you choose to substitute the names printed here with names you are more familiar with.

Functionality

Form is calculated and measured. Whether it comes first, as a premeditated structural outline, or is established later through a taming of a free and unrestricted jam that came more out of capturing the moment than intellectualizing the process, it is an essential discipline of the songwriting craft. A good way to start tackling the issue of structure in songs is to consider the role different components play in making structures stand up. One thing common to all solid constructions is that all components work together for the common good. Some elements of the structure are there for aesthetic purposes, and some perform more of a practical role in supporting those bits, rather than crying out for attention themselves. Ideally, all parts will have some appeal, but some carry more of the support burden than others.

Functionality is what defines structural elements. We should ask ourselves what our structural components are supposed to be achieving and whether they are achieving it. It is, after all, the function of a structural section that warrants its inclusion in a song, not its name. When teaching songwriting, I frequently come across a situation in which a song under construction has two different sections, but the writer is not entirely sure which section is which. The writer tends to think that one of them is a chorus, but isn’t convinced about which one. If we look at these sections in terms of their functionality, nine times out of ten the answer is immediately obvious. It’s just that the sections are not being appraised in terms of their functionality.

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Not all structural components in songs are supposed to attract the same amount of attention. Take a look at Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1

No variation.

There’s nothing of any real interest in this picture. There’s no variety or order to be considered. Once we’ve seen one cylinder, we’ve pretty much got the picture down. It’s plain, flat, and uninteresting.

On the other hand, Figure 3.2 has a lot more going for it with regard to generating some kind of interest. Granted, it’s still not much to write home about, but there is variety on the page. Some cylinders stand out more than others, and we can read into that if we want to as the viewer. This hierarchical variation adds interest. A frequent issue in songs that just don’t seem to work is that this sense of hierarchy is missing, the song sounds flat, and the whole thing passes without any sense of journey and associated ups and downs.

Figure 3.2

Variation.

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It can be really helpful to view sections of a song as individual players on the same team. If we appraise them separately and, worse still, train and develop them separately with no appreciation of where they will eventually fit into a team, it’s likely that they won’t ultimately be of any use. They may well develop a degree of individual brilliance, but they will be of little or no use to the team if they are unable to work as a member of a unit. You may have experienced working in a band with what is generally termed a bedroom player. These types of people have the most impressive chops on their own, but are incapable of playing a part that is right for the song or the band when working with other musicians. That’s what I’m getting at here. Teamwork is key. In hierarchical terms, not all players on this team should expect to enjoy the same degree of attention. They should be content with doing their bit, whatever that may be.

Writing bits of songs is not generally a problem for most. The real frustration usually lies in having half verses and choruses filling scrapbooks and mobile recording devices without each of these “players” finding a team that they can work alongside. Finding the team should be our primary focus if we come up against this particular problem. We should try to hold on until the perfect teammates come along, or see whether we already have just the right thing hiding on a long-neglected scrap of paper. Although creating snippets of songs separately doesn’t mean that they can’t work together, and some great songs have come out of a happy accident in this regard, it’s generally a good idea to craft sections of songs so that they have each other’s interests at heart and so that they are all working together toward a common goal. It’s the difference between training players for a big game alongside their teammates or training them alone and hoping that they can play well with the team when it meets up with them on the playing field.

HOW DO WE KNOW HOW LONG OUR SONGS SHOULD BE?

Initially, songs were limited to specific lengths predominantly due to the physical limitations of the discs on which they were to be stored and played. For example, the early standard 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) record could hold somewhere in the region of three to four minutes per side. You may have come across the term

“three-minute pop song,” which has pretty much become a cliché now, but initially, the simple truth was that if you wanted your song cut, you had to work within these limitations, or it simply wasn’t possible to store it. From the ’60s onward, we have seen these limitations lifted through the advent of 45s, then CDs, and on to digital encoding/distribution, but the three- to four-minute format still prevails in most genres. It is certainly still alive and well with regard to songs that get plenty of airtime on radio stations, for example.

There is no one simple explanation for this, but there are a few contributing factors. First, having songs of a similar length makes radio programming and the accommodation of important revenue-spinning commercials all the more straightforward. This is undoubtedly a factor in why songs that fit the bill with regard to length are more likely to get played on air. It’s a similar situation to how many of us structure our set lists when we play a gig (assuming you do that sort of thing, of course). If we’re presented with a 30-minute slot on a stage somewhere, it helps to be able to divide that 30 minutes by an arbitrary figure to calculate how many songs we’re likely to get through. It’s the same thing on the radio.

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Second, and more significantly, we have gotten used to songs being a certain length. The Red Book standard dictates the technical specifications for CD formats. It states that CDs can store up to 74 minutes of audio, but the average length of CD album releases doesn’t currently come close to this limit. Why? Because we have gotten used to albums being a certain length, as dictated by the limitations of the LP. Even when we are presented with the limitless confines of MP3 releases, the majority of album releases still tend to be somewhere around the 10- to 13-song mark, despite the fact that we could feasibly go way beyond that figure.

Over the past 50 years, so many songs have been structured in accordance with established conventions that we have subconsciously learned that this is the way it’s done. These forms will undoubtedly start to change as technology progresses, and we are currently starting to see the three- to four-minute model erode as the Internet provides listeners the opportunity to listen on their own terms, but for the time being this model is still alive and well, and it’s what our audiences expect.

The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Jimmy Webb’s

“MacArthur Park” are all examples of songs that broke the mold with regard to length, clocking in at 7:06, 5:52, and 7:20 minutes respectively. These were all massively successful songs, so it is perfectly possible to break away from convention in this respect, but at the time of their release, they worked as exceptions to the rule—

and this exception was part of the appeal. As Jimmy Webb himself has said, “In 1968, upon the urging of producer Bones Howe, who specifically asked me to alter traditional form, I attempted to incorporate a classical sense of ebb and flow—

‘movements,’ if you like—into a long pop song. The result was MacArthur Park.” 1

If all songs were more than six minutes, then we wouldn’t get to hear many in any given passage of time. That’s a fairly obvious piece of information, but it’s still worth acknowledging. The flip side of this would be to have songs that last no more than two minutes, but then we would often encounter the problem of not having enough time to convey what we want or need to say, regardless of our degree of compositional skill. Essentially, convention in song length has grown out of limitation and has been cemented by familiarity. It strikes a balance between allowing enough time to serve its purpose and overstaying its welcome. In all of this, it ultimately comes down to the fact that songwriters expect their listeners to give up some of their life to spend in the company of each song. We need to make it worth their while, and three to four minutes tends to be just the right amount of time.

If you are reading this and finding your inner self fighting against these limitations imposed on writers, ask yourself why. There is nothing wrong with songs that exceed four minutes, as long as we have a genuinely good reason for them being that length. The problem is that often we have no reason for the length other than the fact that we can’t be bothered to condense them. I have certainly found this to be true of many of my students in the past. Ask yourself whether your songs are the length they are because they simply have to be or because you haven’t yet developed the discipline to be able to say what you want to, both lyrically and musically, in a shorter span of time. There’s a great deal of skill involved in crafting a superb song that says a lot in less than three and a half minutes. That skill is something to be strived for and not dismissed as blind conformity. Keeping our songs at an acceptable length will do two primary things: It will help us target our audience more concisely and effectively, and it will encourage us to rid our songs of dead weight that really doesn’t need to be there.

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WHY DO WE HAVE SECTIONS AT ALL?

Song structure and punctuation have a lot in common. Read this:

LIVEDIN, BESTILL

Do you read it as “live din” or “lived in?” “Be still” or “best ill?” The pauses are important. Similarly, have a look at the following passage of text: remember to help with picking up the table from grannies on the way home you should call Mary on your cell phone you’ll find a number under the name Brian there’s an email address you can use to get in touch with Simon ring me at home

How did you read it? Did you find yourself accidentally starting new sentences without really meaning to? There are different ways of reading this. How about: Remember:

To help with picking up the table from grannies on the way home you should call Mary

On your cell phone you’ll find a number under the name Brian

There’s an email address you can use to get in touch with Simon

Ring me at home

Or maybe:

Remember to help with picking up the table from grannies on the way home You should call Mary on your cell phone. You’ll find a number

Under the name Brian there’s an email address you can use

To get in touch with Simon ring me at home

These instructions can be read and heard differently, depending entirely upon where the pauses are applied, and this fact highlights two important things. First, the breaks in the text are as integral to the meaning of the collection of words as the words themselves. Dividing the text in different places actually results in different meanings. If we aren’t clear where our breaks are in the structural elements of our songs, we can confuse listeners as to what is being said and what they are supposed to be hearing. At face value it’s easy to see this principle just applying to a lyric, but the perceived roles of the melodic and harmonic material will also be aided for the same reasons. It is only when something has finished that we are truly able to appraise how successful it has been in achieving its aims. Divisions create pauses between sections that enable the listener to make value judgments. Sure, the listener doesn’t stop the song and pause to reflect after each verse or chorus, but the divisional lines help the listener appreciate how the song is going about its business.

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Second, divisions make things easier to manage and to remember. Keeping with the punctuation analogy, a song needs sections like prose needs paragraphs.

Dividing pieces of information into bite-sized chunks makes them easier to manage.

It makes them more straightforward to follow, to swallow, and to digest. In reviewing for a test or exam, it is always easier to tackle individual issues than to attempt to swallow all available material in one bite. This book is divided into chapters and further into sections in an attempt to make it easier to manage than it otherwise would be. Clearly defined sections generally aid our appreciation and understanding of songs.

Structure stops rambling. Yes, it imposes rules and restrictions, but that is not a bad thing because it will generally enforce a greater degree of creativity. Some of the most inventive and impressive buildings have had their design manipulated and shaped more by the limitations of the site than by the original inspiration of the architect. There’s something about limitation that brings out the best in creative types because the restrictions serve to focus our creativity and force us to do the best we can with what we’ve got. In this sense, limitations sharpen our ability. Try to see song structure as a limitation that encourages and nurtures the imagination and ingenuity, not as an old, outdated imposition. It benefits the delivery and interpretation of songs and should be embraced as an aid, not viewed as an adversary.

HOW DO WE DECIDE HOW MANY SECTIONS WE WANT?

Just as too many cooks can spoil the broth, too many sections can spoil a song.

Ideally, we want to make our songs memorable. We’ll look at the pros and cons of repetition in some detail when we get to melody, but for now we’ll just accept that repetition is important in making something memorable. If we have a song with lots of sections, then making sure that they all repeat would invariably result in a very long song. The alternative would be to have a lot of sections that never repeat or to end up with something in between. For the sake of illustration, let’s go about reasoning through the song structuring process in a completely staged and logical manner. So, to get the ball rolling, let’s imagine we have a starting point of a song built with the following nine sections (in no particular order): d Intro

d Verse

d Pre-chorus 1

d Pre-chorus 2

d Chorus

d Alternative chorus

d Middle section 1

d Middle section 2

d Outro

Now, let’s assign each section a length of eight measures, and let’s allow enough time to repeat everything twice (except for the intro and the outro). That leaves us with 128 measures (16×8). Now let’s assume that we’re working at a sprightly

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120 bpm. Those 128 measures would last somewhere in the vicinity of 4:16. So, let’s take an objective look at the structural makeup of the song through the aid of a snazzy little pie chart (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3

Song structure 1.

What do you make of this? Because there are many sections, and the territorial ownership of the song is divided very evenly between them, the answer depends largely upon the genre that we are writing in and for. There are some genres, such as those with “progressive” or “alternative” in the titles, that would generally welcome this model with open arms. There are some others, however, that are nowhere near as accommodating. The appeal in songs with lots of sections in them, such as this one, can be in that they provide lots to listen for and think about.

For the intellectual listener, this is not a bad thing because the composer and listener’s relationship may be built more on complexity and linear progression than on familiarity and predictable repetition.

This is why appreciating our audience and market is so important. If we know that we are writing for an audience that tends to like songs to be memorable and predictable, then another approach is generally called for. Regardless of what your approach to this topic may have been up until this point, let me point out that no approach is better than another. It can be easy to look at simple structures as being boring and the result of not being clever enough, and that simply isn’t true.

Sometimes, the smartest thing to do is to the obvious thing. Similarly, there are those who consider writing songs with multiple sections to be trying too hard and ultimately tangling a web that will do nothing but confuse and upset the listener.

That’s not true either, because there are listeners who love to be tripped up and questioned along the way.

So, what can we say objectively about this issue? If we look at the example purely from a real-estate perspective, it’s clear that no one section jumps out and grabs our attention, shouting, “Look at me; I’m the most important one.” To create that, we would need to ensure that at least one of the sections was repeated more often so that it embodied a larger slice of pie. Repeating a section without losing any of the other sections here would result in the song getting considerably longer.

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Another two choruses, for example, would result in a further 16 measures being added to the song. That would equate to a length of 4:48, and remember that this song is motoring along at 120 bpm (albeit in our imaginations). An adjustment to 90 bpm would see the song in its current make-believe state growing to 6:21, and that could comfortably be the length of two other songs put together.

This scenario would also result in giving the chorus just a slightly larger portion of the pie, and it would not make that big a relative difference. The other option would be to eliminate some of the other sections altogether so that these repetitions could be made without the song taking up too much of the listener’s time. Let’s now pretend that we’ve rethought along those lines and have decided to limit the structural squad as follows:

d Intro

d Verse

d Pre-chorus

d Chorus

d Middle section 1

d Outro

Let’s assume that we are still working with sections that last for eight measures and that we still want each section to repeat twice, with the exception of the intro and the outro.

The pie chart in Figure 3.4 still has a similar issue as before in that there aren’t any sections that dominate with regard to song percentage. However, unlike before, we now have some time that we can realistically play with in the length of the song. As it currently stands, we have 80 measures of material, and that equates to 2:40 (assuming that we are still at 120 bpm). This means that we comfortably have about a minute to work with by pretty much any audience’s estimation. A suggestion here might be to increase the number of choruses (perhaps by another two repeats) and to lose one of the middle sections. How about that? That would leave us with what you see in Figure 3.5.

Figure 3.4

Song structure 2.

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Figure 3.5

Song structure 3.

Now we can see that the chorus section is starting to impose some territorial dominance with regard to length. Further, the song will only last 2:56. Although this example deals solely with territorial divisions and temporarily ignores the fact that a section can achieve its hierarchical status through compositional elements other than length, it’s important that we engage with these initial concepts and let our brains stew on them for a bit. It’s easy to write songs with a certain number of sections simply because we always have, rather than appreciating what would happen if we changed our system a bit and strayed from more established structures.

Experimentation is great when it leads to pleasing and interesting results, and we should all have a go at it now and then. What it is important here is that these are the reasons why the majority of popular songs tend to have a relatively small number of sections in them. The fewer sections there are, the more scope there is to repeat them within a given timeframe, and the more memorable they are likely to be as a result. The structures we build can be much more varied than the one we have just worked through. This one is very typically pop in its makeup, and it’s important to appreciate that here. There are plenty of other options that can and do work on a regular basis.

SIMPLICITY

Picture the scene. It’s a festive occasion, and a family or group of friends have sat down to try to enjoy playing a game together. The most enthusiastic member of the group produces a new board game and lifts the lid. Each member of the group is interested in the idea of the game at this point, although they have never played it before. This interest starts to wane, however, once the “games master” has spent 15

to 20 minutes reading through the hundreds of pages of instructions needed to understand how on earth to play the thing. Once the games master has gleaned enough information to understand the basics of the game, the group has completely lost interest and is on to something else that they already know how to play.

There’s a lot to be said for keeping things simple . In the aforementioned situation, the group went with the game that was relatively simple and that didn’t involve them having to wade through instructions to remember how to play it.

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The game was therefore able to serve its purpose. In this case, its function was to facilitate enjoyment, not to facilitate the opportunity to spend 20 minutes reading about it! Where the song’s purpose is to be involved, then sure—write it so that it takes a while to come to grips with it. However, more often than not, a simple structure will aid in the enjoyment of the song.

There will be times when we have many structural bits and ideas that we want to throw into a song, and we’ll have to exercise some discipline in cutting down those ideas into what will actually work as a coherent musical statement. Having an idea doesn’t mean that we have to use it. We should never let ourselves ruin songs by overfeeding them. It won’t sound pretty. You may have come across the acronym K.I.S.S.—keep it simple, stupid. It’s a principle that is applied commonly across a multitude of disciplines and carries weight here, too. Where simplicity has the desired effect, there really is no reason to do anything else. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” This sums up the principle of song structuring beautifully. We want to keep the number and order of sections as simple as we can without oversimplifying them for any given audience.

EXPECTATION AND BALANCE

An understanding of the role of tension and subsequent release is fundamental to all stages of crafting songs. In fact, it is perfectly possible to view the entire songwriting process as an outworking of the principles inherent in putting the listener through a rollercoaster of contrasting rigidity and relief. You can expect to read about the application of tension and subsequent release fairly consistently throughout this book, so I won’t linger on it too long here. I’ll just keep it simple, but no simpler.

Tension relies heavily on anticipation. Essentially, it plays with what is and isn’t expected. As already noted, listeners have grown accustomed to various unwritten rules in the construction of song form. They expect certain things to happen. They expect songs to contain hook lines of sorts. They expect certain types of chord progressions, they expect to hear repetition in melody and structure, and they expect these things because they happen so often. Appeasing this expectation is about satisfying the listeners and keeping them comfortable. Purposefully denying or delaying listeners what they expect or hope for creates tension. Essentially, it all comes down to repetition and variation. Something can only be a surprise if it is not expected, and expectation is generated through the identification of patterns or the employment of repetition. Repetition therefore informs variety and is the catalyst for setting up the unexpected. It’s sensible to avoid including so many unanticipated shifts in melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variation that listeners are thrown unceremoniously from their place of leisure, but excitement and exploration into the unknown warrant the inclusion of the unexpected to a degree. It’s all about balancing the two.

Balance is an important consideration in relation to song structure on two levels.

First, there’s the manner in which it informs the order and weight of the structural blocks that we build with. For example, if a song consisted of nothing but identical choruses, none of them would have anything to contrast with, and the song would quickly become dull as a result. Similarly, a song full of verses and nothing else

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would, in all probability, lose the listener’s attention even more quickly! There would be no variation to keep things interesting. The structural elements that we use as building blocks in our songs should be placed in such a manner that they facilitate the balance of interest and support. We have already seen how the difference between sections is a necessity to maintain interest, but we must also carefully consider the order in which they are placed to ensure that the structures they build remain balanced and don’t fall over.

Second, in addition to consideration of the weight and placement of each section, balance also plays an important role in providing symmetry within the sections themselves. In this sense, balance facilitates strength and helps each section sound predictable, safe, and complete. Exact repetition with regard to the number of measures present in any given section and the employment of repetition therein is where balance is usually grounded in this sense. For example, look at the section depicted in Figure 3.6.

Figure 3.6

A balanced section.

Here we can see a balanced section where the second line repeats the first in length and number and placement of phrases. In listening to this, assuming that tonal and rhythmic content doesn’t dictate differently, the end of the second line is accompanied by a sense of completion. This is because the first line has established a pattern and the second has conformed to it, enforcing its importance in doing so.

It’s neat and tidy, and this neatness plays a big part in keeping the listener happy and secure with what is going on. It sounds planned, comfortable, and composed.

Balanced phrases also make the division of song sections easier to understand.

Have a look at Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7

An unbalanced section.

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Here, we can see that there is no clear parity between the first and second lines, and as a result, it could very easily be interpreted as one long line when heard. This is primarily because there is no balance set out through repetition. The only way to bring some uniformity and balance to this phrase would be to repeat the whole thing again, and that highlights the key point here. Repetition and the resulting balance it will generate provide the framework in which we can manipulate the listener through the expected and unexpected. To move on from just one appearance of the above phrase would, in all probability, jolt the listener slightly. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends largely upon what we are trying to achieve through our placement of structural components. There may be times when this jolting will be the desired effect. An example of this could be when the unbalanced phrase is used in association with—and to highlight—a key lyrical phrase or to enhance the stability of the section that follows it. Careful consideration of the implications of balance in this sense is vitally important in crafting the structure of our songs.

Structural Components

With all of that groundwork covered, we’re now going to focus a little more on the specifics of each structural section that we can build with. There are lots of different ways to appreciate the function of each of these sections, and here, we are going to appraise them from the standpoint of writing pop songs.

CHORUS

In many ways, inquiring as to the purpose of a chorus in the context of a song is missing the point of why it exists at all. If a song has a chorus, then that song should exist because of that chorus, not the other way around. That’s how important it is. Essentially, the chorus should embody the reason why the song was written in the first place, and we’re looking at it first because other sections in songs should be considered in relation to, and in appreciation of it. A chorus should be the hub of all that surrounds it, and all other sections are there to support and complement it in much the same way that a stand is only constructed to hold what will ultimately be placed on it.

Although choruses come first in terms of level of importance, a complexity of their construction is the fact that they don’t necessarily come first chronologically in the writing process. It is fair to say that a chorus will quite often fall into place once its throne has been crafted by the subservient elements that surround it. This doesn’t mean that the late arrival won’t act as the central point that holds the song together. It might just mean that the writer hasn’t fully focused the song’s purpose until the process is well underway. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just yet another fact that highlights that there is no one route to a great song.

When we’re having a discussion with someone and we really want to enforce something important, we tend to keep repeating ourselves. Usually, we pad around the topic a bit and keep coming back to the same point that we really want to bring home. If we acknowledge that this repetition helps enforce what we are trying to say, then it’s easy to see why choruses tend to take ownership of the largest slice of pie. There are some parts of songs that we can we can edit out. There will be times where we might consider removing a verse or halving an introduction, for example.

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Although we may feel that the song suffers slightly as a result, it is possible for the song to survive and live through these kinds of amputations. What a song should not be able to live through is the removal of the chorus. Removing a song’s chorus is akin to removing one’s head. It simply won’t work without it. When we’re appraising our own songs, we should ask ourselves whether our choruses really are that integral to the songs’ success. Nine times out of ten they will be. However, if we find that the loss isn’t that big of a deal, then some alarm bells should ring!

If there is one part of a song that should be easy to learn and remember, it should be the chorus. As already noted, one way to keep it memorable is to keep it simple. In light of this fact, it isn’t hard to see why the majority of choruses tend to contain a limited number of ideas in relation to the rest of the song and why their harmony, melody, and lyrics tend to repeat on each appearance. Where choruses are long, they normally still contain minimal material, but there tends to be a lot of repetition present that just enforces the importance of that material.

It can be helpful to look at a chorus as the marketing slogan for the song that it is advertising. If a song was a company and we wanted people to remember it, the chorus would be the short and simple motto with which we would advertise. Think of an ad that doesn’t actually name or reveal the product it is designed to promote.

It may be viewed as the result of an artsy approach to advertising—and if that’s the desired effect, then fair enough—but when it comes down to highlighting the product in question, it simply doesn’t make sense.

This approach is a good way of illustrating the importance of including the title in a chorus. Have you ever heard a song without knowing its title and wished the song would identify itself so you could hunt it down and listen to it again? I have experienced it a few times, and there is one particular occasion I can remember when a song I heard on the radio didn’t do itself any favors by not revealing its name to me. I would have bought it for sure, because I remember loving it and being thoroughly frustrated when it finished without giving me any idea as to what it was called. The DJ didn’t help me out, either. I could have been a lifelong fan, but I’ve never heard it since and possibly never will again! The chorus effectively acted as a catchy and thoroughly enjoyable slogan without naming the product.

When music is advertised on TV, it’s almost always snippets of the chorus that are played. The intros and verses rarely get a look because they are supportive in nature and not the main attraction. The chorus is the main attraction.

Without wishing to get snared in the complexities of etymology, it’s useful to remember that the word “chorus” has numerous applications. In the context of songwriting, we normally use it to describe a repeating section of a song, but it should be remembered that chorus is also another word for a group of singers who perform together as a choir.

The fact that these definitions share one word is no coincidence. The chorus of our songs ideally should be written so as to be suitable for a chorus to sing.

“Accessible” is a word that is bandied about quite a bit in the appraisal of songs, and this accessibility is never more worthy of consideration than in a chorus. It’s true that there will be some sections of songs where the listener may be denied the chance to sing along due to complexity of tonality or rhythm. The chorus should never be one of these sections—unless we want to keep the listener at a distance, that is. If a chorus can’t sing it, it’s possibly not as effective a chorus as it could be.

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The chorus should be the all-encompassing moment where each choir member (whoever and wherever they may be) can stand as one in singing their little hearts out. Being able to participate is a major draw to many fans of popular songs.

Giving listeners the opportunity to sing along is like giving them the option to buy shares in the company. Not only will it enable listeners to get involved personally, but it will also aid us in our quest to make things more memorable. The chorus should not only lure the listener into wanting to sing along, but it should also fling wide the doors and welcome them on board.

The manner in which we can make things more memorable will be addressed in some detail as we progress through the book, most notably in sections on melody writing. The key thing to ask of our chorus here is, “Do I remember it?” That is essentially what it comes down to. Beyond this, we should strive to make our choruses enjoyable to remember.

REFRAIN

It simply wouldn’t be right to look at the role of a chorus without mentioning the structural component most commonly referred to as a refrain. As I write this paragraph, I am very aware of the fact that the term “refrain” has come to mean different things to different people in different situations. It’s possible that you know it under a different name, and that’s fine because, as I noted earlier in this chapter, it’s the functionality of sections that is important, not the names of the sections themselves.

A refrain (within the context of this book, at least) is best described as a line or two of lyrics that functions as a chorus, but that wouldn’t stand up as a chorus in their own right if heard in isolation from the rest of the song. They are typically found in country, folk, and blues songs where there is a lot of narrative and where there simply isn’t the need or space for a separate section that we would class as a chorus. Where all that is required is a regularly repeating line or two tacked onto the start or end of each verse, a refrain is generally in order. It carries all the weight, importance, and significance of a chorus, but it is streamlined to fit the bill. A refrain will say all it needs to say without going into unnecessary detail. It still acts a chorus in its functionality, but it doesn’t have the structural integrity in itself to hold its own. It therefore can’t be classed as a chorus; it’s a refrain. Examples are found in “Still Crazy After All These Years” by Paul Simon and “The Windmills of Your Mind” by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Michel Legrand.

VERSE

A verse exists primarily to support the chorus or refrain, and it can achieve this both musically and lyrically. It can be helpful to view a verse as a supporting act at a gig. Have you ever headlined a gig and had a supporting act or three on beforehand? If you did, I bet you secretly hoped for two things: First, that they were good enough to pull in and hold onto a decent-sized crowd, and second, that they weren’t anywhere near as good as you! Using this analogy, a chorus needs a verse that is strong enough and interesting enough to warrant the audience sticking with it until the main attraction comes on, but not so good that it steals its thunder when it takes the stage. As a support, a verse needs to be solid and self-assured.

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For this reason, verses tend to be very balanced in their structure. A verse is not generally a good place to disrupt the comfort of the listeners. It should welcome them through the doors (in the case of the first verse, at least) and make them feel relatively at ease and interested. The following verses should be concerned with keeping listeners involved and happy to hang around.

One of the most common problems that I have observed in the songwriting process is the age-old problem of a good opening verse, quickly followed by a complete lack of inspiration and then the unwelcome appearance of the proverbial brick wall. Sadly, the pass code out of this situation is often a lackluster chorus crafted more out of resignation than out of a desire to develop the building blocks set in place by the verse in the first place. We need to be careful that we don’t write verses that blow headline acts out of the water. However, we also should not use that as a reason to write dull and nondescript verses that try to sound slightly less interesting than what may be already be a fairly tedious and wearisome chorus!

This is why an appreciation of the role of each section of a song is so important.

Are they doing what they need to do for the good of the team? We should endeavor to write verses that support and delight but don’t dominate.

In addition to their supporting role, verses should contextualize the other material in the song. If the chorus were the punch-line in a joke, then the verse should be the preamble that makes that last bit funny. Without the punch-line it won’t ever hold an audience for long, but when followed by that killer line, its role—

albeit one at the side of the stage—is fantastically important. A verse’s function can also be likened to that of an avid fan at a gig talking up the act that is about to come onstage to someone who hasn’t heard them before. Whenever I’ve experienced this sort of thing, the fan will usually throw all sorts of peripheral information at me in the hope that it will help me understand where the act is coming from and what they do just that bit better than I otherwise would. Typically, verses give the listener the framework and background behind the story or the perspective, and where appropriate, introduce the character(s), whoever they may be. They give the listener the opportunity to lift the lid a little and find out a bit more detail than the chorus lets on. Musically, they quite often provide the harmonic foundations out of which the chorus can build out.

Because they are never supposed to hog the limelight, there is an unwritten rule in the order of appearance of verses. See Figure 3.8. The two verses that precede the chorus in this song are there to provide context and to set the scene. The third verse provides some additional information once the chorus has summed things up a bit.

From the beginning of this structure, a pattern is set out where the listener is informed that a chorus follows two verses. This pattern is then ignored when the third verse is followed by a chorus instead of the possibly expected fourth verse. This is okay in this instance because the pattern is interrupted by the chorus, which is vastly more important than the verse and has the right to appear wherever it chooses.

Figure 3.8

A chorus interrupting the appearance of a possibly expected verse.

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In Figure 3.9, we can see that that the chronological placement of the verses has been altered. Here, the listener hears one verse followed by a chorus, and a different pattern is established. When the next (second) verse then completes, listeners are completely within their rights to expect another chorus because this is what happened earlier in the song. To have it followed by another verse is therefore unexpected and creates unease. This unease is then compounded by the fact that it has been caused by the unwelcome stage-hungry antics of a lowly verse. This situation is akin to having a presidential speech interrupted by a parking attendant addressing the audience to ask someone to move his Volvo that is obstructing an exit. Verses aren’t that important. If the structure up until that point has indicated that a chorus is about to speak, then it’s generally not a good idea to let a verse get in the way. It should know its place.

Figure 3.9

A verse interrupting the appearance of an expected chorus.

It simply wouldn’t be right to talk about the purpose and functionality of verses without at least a brief mention of padding! When pressed, we shouldn’t ever offi-cially admit that any of our songs contain any padding to fill them out, but behind closed doors, we can admit that it does happen every now and then. We should always strive to make our songs as lean and fat-free as humanly possible, but there are occasionally times when we might run slightly short of good ideas and slightly too close to a deadline! The bottom line is this: If we have to pad our song at all, we need to make sure that the padding happens in a verse, and preferably not the first one. So that there is no confusion here, let me clarify that I don’t recommend the padding approach at all, but it would be daft not to acknowledge that it does happen. We’ve all had our weak moments!

PRE-CHORUS

Not all songs include or need pre-choruses, and a song is not necessarily better for having one. It’s easy to get in the habit of including them without ever really considering whether they are needed and whether they are filling their role effectively.

Essentially, pre-choruses supply the tension in the tension and release. Their primary purpose is to act as a transitional section that introduces the chorus in a way that the verse can’t or doesn’t. A good way to test the effectiveness of pre-choruses is to pause listening right at the very end of them. If you feel a sense of disappointment at not bearing witness to what is obviously about to take place, then the pre-chorus has done its job admirably. If you are happy to walk away from the song without a nagging feeling and without wondering what would come next, then the pre-chorus isn’t filling its role, and you have to question what it’s doing there in the first place.

Similarly, if you get to the end of the verse and it has led you to expect that something great is about to happen, then a pre-chorus may not be needed at all.

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There is nothing stopping us from following a bit of tension with yet more, so it is possible to follow a verse that has wound up the tension with a pre-chorus that winds up too, just as long as it winds up more by the time it has finished. The same level of tension or less will not be enough and won’t warrant the inclusion of the pre-chorus. It will act as more of a delay than a precursor. See Figure 3.10 for some visual reinforcement.

Figure 3.10

A pre-chorus should create more musical tension than the verse.

There are few things more upsetting in the structure of songs than hearing a verse that has generated the required degree of tension, followed by…wait for it (can you feel the tension?!)…a pre-chorus that does nothing for the song other than add a frustratingly disappointing 15 seconds. This dissatisfaction is compounded further if this pre-chorus actually serves to wind down the expectation already created, leaving the listener with all the tension of a limp, wet lettuce leaf. Pre-choruses should create tension and expectation so that the following chorus can explode in a glorious array of color and wonderment.

This expectation can be generated in different ways. First, there’s the storm before the calm. This is where tension is created through propulsion, where the listener is caught up in a build toward the start of the chorus. Although harmonic and melodic implications will play their part, this momentum can also be generated through the way the song is arranged and performed, where the dynamic increases and the rhythmic intensity builds. Examples of songs with pre-choruses that wind up like this are “Love Changes (Everything) by Climie Fisher and “Mine and Yours” by David Mead. These two are both primarily reliant on the implications of the chord sequence.

Second, there is the calm before the storm. This kind of tension is experienced in the brief pause at the top of a rollercoaster, when riders know that they are about to plummet headfirst at an alarming rate of speed, screaming their hearts out. It’s also like the pause before that nasty someone jumps out from behind something and does something unspeakably unpleasant with that nasty little something in so many films and dramas. Tension can be created in the waiting for the moment we

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all know is about to happen. We hear it regularly in the delay intentionally included before the announcer reads out the name of the winner of a competition. That extra few seconds creates tension through a pause rather than through frantic propulsion. We can employ this technique in our writing, too. Have a listen to some songs, and listen for how tension is created in the pre-choruses. There are plenty out there that rely heavily on an emptying of the arrangement, where the song almost seems to finish just before the chorus arrives. Just a couple of songs that demonstrate this sort of pause at work are “Underground” by Ben Folds Five and “Put Your Records On” by Corinne Bailey Rae. They both wind down for the pre-chorus so as to help the chorus sound bigger when it arrives.

In addition to considerations of how we can generate this tension, we should also look at what happens once it has been created. The dummy climax needs a brief paragraph here. This is where tension and expectation are out in full force, but the song doesn’t deliver as expected. There are plenty of songs where a pre-chorus is included and doesn’t lead to a chorus, but rather goes back to another verse instead. An example of this is “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder. This can be seen as a bit of a gray area because a repeated verse and pre-chorus movement could be perceived as just two verses that both create tension at the end. On such occasions, the functionality of each section has to be called upon to define it. A pre-chorus will generally reveal itself through what it achieves and where it points the listener. Employment of a dummy pre-chorus can work fantastically well when that detour back to another verse actually adds more tension. This will generally work where the verse and pre-chorus are short enough for the listener to feel happy to hang around long enough to get what they know is coming. It’s like the TV

announcer delaying the name of the winner of the show because it’s time to go to a commercial break. However, this technique falls down when the length of time it takes the listener to get through the verse and pre-chorus again is so long that the tension has given way to boredom. It’s all about expectation again. If we deprive the listener of what we have been hinting at for too long, then we’ve lost the game.

A final consideration with regard to pre-choruses is what we can refer to as an implied pre-chorus. Sometimes, a verse will be manipulated so that it modulates up to a higher key halfway through. This modulation generates all the characteristics of a pre-chorus while keeping them applied to a verse. Examples of this sort of thing at work can be found in “Hunting High and Low” by A-Ha and “The One and Only” by Nik Kershaw (performed by Chesney Hawkes). If you listen to them, you will hear the tension increasing in the verses through the employment of the key change. The resulting section still sounds like the second half of the verse because it repeats the first half, but it now has more tension embedded in it. It has an implied pre-chorus characteristic.

MIDDLE SECTION

Like the pre-chorus, the middle section is both transitional and optional. It will rarely sound like a complete entity when heard in isolation because it’s not supposed to, and including a middle section will not necessarily improve a song either.

Again, this depends solely upon whether it achieves what it is supposed to achieve.

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A middle section exists primarily to do two things—to get away from what has gone before, and then to provide a way back in. The getting away is best described as a departure and can work in all sorts of different ways. It can provide additional intensity to a song or it can act as a breather, where previous lyrical and musical muscle flexing is laid to the side for a moment or two while something else is dealt with. I have heard it said that a middle section should be different enough to act as variety, but not so different that it no longer gels with what has gone before.

What’s really important is that a departure takes place. In practice, it really doesn’t matter how far out a middle section takes the listener, as long as a way back in is still possible and works.

“One of the things that I try to be conscious about in writing a song and crafting a song is the concept of bringing it home. That is, there’s a beginning to a song, and there should be an end of a song, and of course there’s the middle. And I like to take the middle any place it wants to go. But whenever I take it to the end, I like to bring it somewhere familiar, some place that people feel it’s resolved, it’s settled; it comes back home at the end, whatever home means.”

—Carole King 2

Lyrically, a departure is commonly worked out through the introduction of a new perspective or angle. It can be a good opportunity to add a new element to the narrative, discussion, or commentary that has gone before. Musically, it provides us with a platform to explore all sorts of opportunities that we haven’t been able to include anywhere else in the song.

Earlier in this chapter, we looked at snippets of ideas as players in a team that needed to find their teammates. Here in the middle section, we can afford to be a little adventurous and play our wildcards! Here, we can let our slightly untamed and unpredictable team members loose on the playing field, safe in the knowledge of two things: First, that they will only have the limelight for a limited amount of time, and second, that this is the section of the song where the listener has grown accustomed to something different happening. It’s the moment in the song where the unexpected is expected. This can take shape through key changes, tempo changes, rhythm changes, stylistic changes, and any other kind of changes we can think of. The section exists solely for this change to take place.

Middle sections often provide a good platform for musicians to demonstrate mind-boggling instrumental dexterity through solos, and they also offer a good opportunity for writers to weave in harmonic tricks and melodic lines that astound all who hear them. Modulations are fairly commonly found lurking in middle sections because they can provide the necessary dose of variation and because they also enable the departure to land back in the main body of the song in a new key.

This is where the second purpose of the middle section finds its feet. The return after the departure is extremely important. It gives writers the opportunity to showcase what is now familiar material in a new light. It’s a double whammy of creative opportunity. In creating as interesting a change as possible, we are actually providing ourselves with an entirely new perspective on our verse, chorus, or whatever else we choose to return to.

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Although the majority of pop songs tend to include just one middle section, it is perfectly possible to include more, and the number included will depend on the overall structure of the song. Their placement should also be governed by implications of overall length and balance, and the return point will obviously be affected by these considerations, too. There are no rules as to where we should go after a middle section, but the length of the song tends to be a good guiding light. To illustrate this point with a song that has just one middle section, have a look at Figure 3.11.

Figure 3.11

What should follow a middle section?

If, as in Figure 3.11, we return to a verse that is followed by a further pre-chorus and a chorus, we are adding a fair chunk of time onto the song. For example, if this song had a verse, pre-chorus, and chorus that lasted for eight measures each at a tempo of 100 bpm, the middle section would be followed by 57 seconds of further material. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that adding a further chorus to hit the punch-line home might be pushing the length of the song a bit too far in this case.

If, as in Figure 3.12, we bypass the aforementioned verse and pre-chorus and flow back into a chorus, we are making our song leaner (shaving off 38 seconds in this case), and we are also buying ourselves the opportunity to include another appearance of that stage-stealing chorus if we want to. In making these decisions, a lot will rest on the actual content of the middle section(s). If we have made the most of the opportunity to depart in grand style, and we have introduced a lot of new food for thought in the lyrics, then it may be necessary to include an additional verse to explain what on earth is actually going on!

Figure 3.12

Following a middle section with a chorus.

“Necessary” is the key word here. A good principle to write by is to only include what we must to make the song work. If, after the middle section, the song needs some additional contextual information, then think about including another verse.

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If it doesn’t, then don’t. If the middle section serves its purpose as a departure but doesn’t generate much tension back into the mainstream of the song, then think about going into a pre-chorus to set up the last chorus(es). If the middle section leads harmonically or melodically into a section of the song so beautifully that it simply must be heard, then by all means go there. Do what needs to be done to make the song work—no less and no more.

The final thing to consider with regard to typical pop-song middle sections is why they so often seem to appear immediately or shortly after the second chorus.

There is a very simple reason for this. They won’t fulfill their role as a departure unless there is something to depart from. Take a look at Figure 3.13.

Figure 3.13

Ineffective placement of middle section.

Here we can see that the middle section appears after the first chorus and that it does take the stage somewhere approximately at the middle of the song. However, if we were to hear this song, the arrival of the middle section would not actually act as a departure. So far we have had the verse, pre-chorus, and chorus just once. The middle section at this point just seems like another section in a through-composed piece. The lack of repetition in the structure of the song means that we aren’t aware of the middle section’s significance. It’s different than the other sections, but so are the other sections all different from each other. If we look at Figure 3.14, we can see that the middle section now appears after a repeat of a run of verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. When we get to the middle section in this song, it now acts as a departure because we have had the main body of the song affirmed through repetition. Its difference is now more noticeable because it stands as the odd one out.

Figure 3.14

Effective placement of middle section.

INTRO

Every song has an introduction, regardless of whether we intentionally write one.

A song has to start somewhere, and that is the point at which the listener is introduced to several key pieces of information, including (but not limited to) the key, tempo, style, groove, and tonality. Listeners tend to be quite savvy at making value judgments almost immediately after a song has commenced, and we need to ensure that we give them every reason to keep listening.

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I am sure we have all made hasty value judgments and sped through or past songs on the basis of not liking the opening 10 seconds or so. Digital formats make it particularly easy to do this. Although we should all strive not to judge a book by its cover, and we are supposed to take time to get to know someone before we assess their character (regardless of whether what they look like actually scares us), this courtesy is very rarely extended to the humble song. If a connection is not made with the listener quickly, then the remainder of the song, no matter how ingeniously crafted it is, is in danger of being swept aside and left unappreciated.

Ideally, a song should be recognizable within the first few measures.

Recently, a radio station approached me and asked if I could set up a songwriting competition with some of my songwriting students. The competition would involve a phone vote from listeners of the station in which each song would be played on the air, and the public would decide the winner through phoning or texting in the name of their favorite. Quite a few students submitted their songs and waited for the phone-in to commence a couple of weeks later. When the big moment came, each song was aired for about a minute because time constraints didn’t allow for the entirety of each song to be played. The next morning, one of my students came to me a little upset that her song had only been aired up to and including the first chorus. She went on to explain that the DJ had cut the song before it had the chance to get to the “good bit,” which was, incidentally, very good.

This taught her a valuable lesson, and hopefully you’ll learn from it, too. We need to do all we can to keep the listener interested in the shortest time possible. It therefore makes a lot of sense to get the good bits up front. The problem with this, though, is that it can cause problems at the same time as it solves other ones. It might help hook the listener up front, but it can also result in the song starting on a high and having very few places to go in terms of getting better or more interesting. We need to make sure that our introduction grabs the listener’s attention right from the start but still leaves the song somewhere to go in terms of increasing interest.

“You know, if I can’t get you in the first 30 seconds, you’re gone.

You’re on to the next channel. You’re channel surfing through music.

And I learned that with the Hollies.”

—Graham Nash 3

We don’t have to reveal everything up front. A significant part of crafting an intro is choosing what and how much we want to give away at the start, and this decision should be informed to some extent by the purpose of the song. If we hope that the song will end up on the radio, we should get down to business quickly and include the good bits without delay. It should be to the point and in the listener’s face. However, if the song is intended as an album track or for a club environment, then purposefully staggering the introduction of different elements might be more appropriate.

It may be that we choose to reveal the hook immediately, but that we extract it from the full harmonic support that surrounds it later in the song. This effectively advertises the song’s purpose immediately but disguises it to a certain extent so that it has room to develop as the song progresses. It may be that we choose to divulge

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the groove and bass line but save the melodic info for later. Essentially, the content of the song needs to be divided into what comes up front and what will be saved to give the song somewhere to go in later measures. There are no hard-and-fast rules in what should do what here, but in trying to grab the listener’s attention early, an obvious approach to adopt is to get the title or hook line in as soon as possible. Plenty of The Beatles’ songs did just this. A quick listen to some or all of the following songs will reveal just how aware they were of the importance of getting the title in early.

d “Help”

d “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl”

d “I’ve Just Seen a Face”

d “Yesterday”

d “Good Day Sunshine”

d “Another Girl”

d “I Want to Tell You”

d “Love Me Do”

d “She Loves You”

d “Can’t Buy Me Love”

d “A Hard Day’s Night”

d “Michelle”

d “I’ve Got a Feeling”

d “Paperback Writer”

d “Penny Lane”

d “Lady Madonna”

d “Hey Jude”

d “Nowhere Man”

d “The Long and Winding Road”

Getting the title in early isn’t a necessity, though. Have a listen to some of your favorite songs and see what is held back to enhance the song as it progresses. There are plenty of lessons to be learned here if we go looking for them.

OUTRO

The purpose of an outro is to ensure that our song finishes well and doesn’t just disappear into nothingness without leaving a lasting impression on the listener. It’s the last opportunity for the song to impose itself on whoever is listening, and we should always strive to leave the listener with something worth remembering.

Although the nature of this section ensures that it will always come last chronologically, we should never let it occur as an afterthought. What we leave listeners with is vital if we want them to come back for more.

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There are various things to consider when looking at how we can end songs. In addition to the moment of conclusion itself, there’s the coda and the fadeout.

Coda

In case you weren’t already aware, the word coda is Italian for “tail.” Armed with this piece of information, it’s easier to grasp exactly what a coda should achieve. It almost always appears at the back end of a song and normally represents the song’s last stand as its body starts to disappear. Although it is an ending of sorts, it’s important to acknowledge that a coda stands as its own section. It’s not merely a slight adjustment of a section already included in the song, but more the result of an intentional development and outworking of other material already included in the minute or three that preceded it. It is an addition and provides an opportunity to include some of the key musical and lyrical information already contained in the song in a new light.

Codas will often include some of the hook information or a development of the harmony that cements the character of the song in the listener’s memory through relentless repetition. As usual, there are exceptions to this, where a song can conclude with completely new material that does nothing to reference what has gone before, but repetition of key material tends to be the formula employed in pop songwriting, at least. It makes sense that this is the case where the song is doing all it can to take up residence in the listener’s memory and to attract as much attention to itself as possible in doing so. It’s a summary and the dying wish of the song as it approaches termination.

A coda enables us to look back on what has gone before. Sometimes this reflection serves as a balancing section, where it is needed to bring the song to its structural and logical conclusion. Sometimes it acts more as a reflective afterthought that only fits into the makeup of the song at the end, rather than being embedded in it. Whichever purpose it fulfills, a coda is a significant chunk of a song that should be crafted to wrap it up neatly.

Fadeout

A fadeout is primarily associated with the production and recording of a song rather than its composition, although there are occasionally times when a fadeout is specifically written into the song itself. From a songwriting perspective, a fadeout can be viewed as bad thing in that it suggests that the author couldn’t figure out how to finish the song. There are those (possibly including you) who behold the fadeout with contempt and with the virulent belief that it is a compositional device employed only by amateurs. If we only employ a fade due to our inability to come up with a viable alternative, then it may not be the best choice because we should be developing our skill set to push through and overcome these limitations.

However, there are times when a fadeout can be intentionally used as a compositional tool even when an appropriate and tasteful ending is perfectly feasible. What this can do is give the listener the impression that the song itself is actually going on forever and it’s just unfortunate that their contact with it had to stop short. This tends to happen over a coda or an instrumental section of some kind where there is repetition of a hook line (or lines) and/or an instrumental of some kind taking place.

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I know that I tend to find myself turning up the volume during an instrumental fadeout of this nature so I can hear what’s going on until the song’s last desperate gasp.

What this actually does for the song is just tease us into wanting to hear more of it.

This in turn then leads to a desire to want to hear the song again. Smashing. That’s something we should aspire to in our writing. If listeners want to listen again, it’s a sure sign that the song has connected with them on some level.

Fadeouts aren’t always a bad thing. It depends on why they have been included and what they are intended to achieve.

THE LINK

It’s likely that you have come across different terminology for this section, but I am choosing to name it the link due to its functional purpose. It exists primarily to link sections together where they won’t join without it or where a small breather is required in the linear progression of the song.

While it’s going about its joining-up business, a link might as well contain as much useful information as possible, and to this end it makes sense to at least consider integrating hook material now and then. A link can range from a couple of beats to a fair few measures and will often work as a reintroduction of the intro.

Whether we call it an intro again in this instance is entirely up to us. It could be seen as introducing whatever comes after it, but I tend to prefer the link label because its primary function is then what we tend to think of when crafting it.

What introduces the whole song well may not work as an intro for the next section of the song at this point, anyway. We don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. That onerous task is left solely to the introduction. The link section has an entirely different function—to link!

Form

We’ve all come across shorthand terminology for song form. Instead of drawing out little charts like those I have included thus far in this chapter, the traditional and most sensible approach to employ is the use of letters to name each section of a song. It’s very simple; each section gets assigned a letter. Repeating that letter means a repeat of that section, and introduction of a new letter is indicative of a new section. For example, Figure 3.14 would be represented as ABCABCDCC, where A is for verse, B is for pre-chorus, C is for chorus, and D is for middle section.

In addition to this, it can also be useful to use lowercase letters to indicate where reduced sections have been included. This can be useful when a song structure is built with the inclusion of half choruses here and there, for example. If the case in point were to have a verse that lasted half the length of the previous one after the first chorus, you could write it out as ABCaBCDCC. Being familiar with this terminology aids in rehearsals and co-writing sessions in that it speeds up the communication process considerably. It’s also helpful when it comes to reading paragraphs about things like other form considerations.

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OTHER FORM CONSIDERATIONS

“I don’t care what part is the chorus. It’s the third section. I call them sections.”

—Burt Bacharach 4

Having painstakingly explored each of the different structural elements, we now have to acknowledge that some songs don’t actually employ any of them in such clear-cut terms. The form that a song takes should be dictated by the song’s purpose, and we should be happy to blow conformity out of the water if that’s the best way to meet our goals. For example, where a song’s focal point is its lyrics, and these lyrics take the shape of a linear narrative, it may well be that adhering to the employment of these structural building blocks actually does more harm than good and that a much more simplistic approach is called for. In this case, a very basic structure alternating between just two different sections, such as ABABAB, may be appropriate.

Furthermore, these sections wouldn’t have to serve the functional purpose of the structural components previously considered either. As already noted, structural elements are built and placed out of the need for variation and balance, and this variation can take different forms. The presence of the A and the B sections in this case could be validated solely by the need for diversity in the harmonic accompaniment to maintain interest, and nothing more.

With the listener’s perception put to one side, the only limit to structural creativity is the writer’s imagination, and as a result, the variation in song form out there is considerable. As a quick illustration of this point, I jotted down just a few examples while touring briefly through the Billy Joel playlist on my MP3 player of choice this morning (see Table 3.1). I have noted the form here as defined by the patterns of harmony and melody. I have not let the lyrics be a guiding factor due to the fact that some of the songs, such as “Piano Man,” have very few repeating lyrics but plenty of sections that share a melody and a harmony. Letting the lyrics play a part in identifying each section would make the resulting analysis incredibly complicated at times, and I don’t want to make this any more complicated than it needs to be.

Also note that some of the examples are actually slightly more complicated than shown with regard to the length of each section. For example, some of the sections in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” have slight extensions in places. I haven’t gone into that sort of detail because it isn’t important here. We’re primarily concerned with the amount of structural variation between the songs.

Notice that the length of each song doesn’t necessarily tally with the number of structured components employed. Although the longer songs do tend to have more sections in them for obvious reasons, comparing songs such as “Uptown Girl” and

“And So It Goes” to “All About Soul” and “Honesty” illustrates this point.

Also note the variation in the number of song forms that have been employed here. If you were to analyze the form of your own songs in the same way, would you find such variation? It’s well worth asking. We can get bogged down in routine very easily, and mastering the art of successful structures is a skill to be worked at.

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Table 3.1 Song Form in Several Billy Joel Songs

Title

Length

Form

“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”

2:50

AABABAa

“Uptown Girl”

3:17

ABCBABCBABB

“She’s Always a Woman to Me”

3:18

AABAaBAa

“And So It Goes”

3:49

ABBCBbCBAac

“Honesty”

3:49

ABABCAB

“Tell Her About It”

3:51

ABBCABCDBCE

“All About Soul”

4:02

ABCDBCD

“River of Dreams”

4:09

ABCBCBBCBBBB

“The Stranger”

5:08

AABCBCDCBCDCBAA

“The Piano Man”

5:37

ABaCDCaBCDBaCECaBCDCa

“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”

7:33

ABBCDEFGHIHIHJKHJIHBBCA

A couple of songs worth pointing out here are “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”

and “She’s Always a Woman to Me.” Both of these songs feature just two sections, but they have been structured in such a way that they work beautifully. Sections reduced in length have been included cleverly to provide structural variation and interest without the need to write anything additional. Have you ever tried that?

Writing a song that lasts for more than seven minutes is one thing. Writing one that is balanced and that works without boring the listener is something else entirely. If you have never tried it, have a go at writing a song with more than five sections (excluding intro and outro) and that lasts for more than five minutes without losing the listener. It’s an interesting experiment and one that will test your understanding of balance and variation. Like so many different things in songwriting, it all comes down to what the song is intended to achieve. The structure of any song should be such that it facilitates that intention as keenly as it possibly can.

Lyrical Theme

We have already seen how a subtle adjustment in the beats per minute can have a considerable effect on the length of a song. When we factor into this the fact that different lyrical themes will have an impact on the tempo of a song, the lyrics themselves can be influential in dictating which forms will and won’t be appropriate.

If we set out to write a song about the gentle, calming lapping of the waves on the seashore, and the purpose of the song is to act as a meditative aid that should give the listener the auditory equivalent of bathing in warm milk, 140 bpm is highly unlikely to be appropriate. It would likely result in a far more frenzied vibe than

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could ever be deemed appropriate. Similarly, if we were to write a song to accompany a manic foot chase through a forest that would be used in a film or a stage show, a slow bpm would do a lot to remove the urgency that the visuals would undoubtedly create.

What the song is about will almost always have an impact on the tempo of the song, and that in turn will also influence the appropriate form. Looking slightly further into the tranquility of the lapping-waves scenario from a moment ago, a slow bpm would, by definition, mean that we would not be able to include as many measures in the song as a faster tempo would afford us. This, in turn, would mean that we would be unable to include too many different sections in the song if we wanted to repeat any of them.

Lyrical Content

In addition to the theme, another thing to think about with regard to lyrics is their physical nature. We have to acknowledge that there is a limit to how fast you can speak and sing. Some of us seem to be able to speak faster, but we all have our limits! Therefore, there will come a point where a maximum bpm is reached, beyond which it is not humanly possible to cram all the words into the allotted timeframe.

You may have experienced this already in some songs you have written. The tempo is quite often defined by the vocalist announcing something like, “I can’t sing that; it’s too fast. Could we do it a bit slower, please?” And there you have it; the tempo of a song is defined by the content of the lyrics. Just like in the previous section, these tempo limitations will directly influence what form will and won’t be appropriate.

Genre

As previously hinted at, certain song structures tend to be much more at home in some genres than in others. For example, the imaginary structure we went through previously of ABCABCDCC would be very appropriate for a pop song, but not nearly as appropriate for a typical club tune. Similarly, a lot of “chill out” songs are written to place much more emphasis on mood setting and gradual builds and fades, and songs written for and performed in the rock or metal genres typically make room for more instrumental sections.

There is no point in assessing the general form of countless different genres here.

There isn’t the room for it, and it’s something that you should do for yourself anyway. There are some tips at the end of this chapter to help you come to grips with the key issues.

Editing

Without wishing to appear like we are going through the painfully obvious here, it is—in my experience, at least—important to clarify exactly what is meant by the term editing within the context of songwriting. This is because editing can take very different forms depending on how we approach the songwriting craft. A

typical dictionary definition of the word “edit” like this one from www.merriam-

webster.com would give us something like:

a : To prepare (as literary material) for publication or public presentation

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b : To assemble (as a moving picture or tape recording) by cutting and rearranging c : To alter, adapt, or refine, especially to bring about conformity to a standard or to suit a particular purpose <carefully edited the speech> <edit a data file> d : To direct the publication of <edits the daily newspaper> e : Delete—usually used with out

MECHANICAL AND COMPOSITIONAL EDITING

For some folks—especially those with a tendency to compose at a computer—the term editing is related most closely to the second definition above, where “cutting and rearranging” can mean the editing of takes captured through recording. An example of this would be where a vocal part has been recorded several times, and the engineer or producer is editing these takes together by comping the best bits from each individual performance into just one. This type of editing is best termed as mechanical editing because it is being applied to a mechanical thing, such as a WAV file or a reel of tape.

The word “editing” is applied to this process regularly, but it’s not the kind of editing that we are looking at as songwriters in the first place. It’s the manipulation of a physical entity that stores the composition, but not the composition itself.

From a songwriting perspective, we need to come to grips with compositional editing, whereby we chop and change around the components of songs during the writing process.

“Cutting and rearranging” can also mean replacing and manipulating different sections of songs before they are recorded, just as much as the editing of the mechanical representations of them. We should constantly appraise our songs as we progress through their construction, and editing should therefore be a continual part of the process. Making value judgments as to what we should exclude from the song taking shape before us should play just as big a part in the process as con-juring up the components that we include.

The third definition from earlier should be considered in this sense, too. Bringing about “conformity to a standard or to suit a particular purpose” should be a high priority in the way we shape our songs. We edit all the time in this sense anyway.

The songs that we end up with tend to contain about 50 percent or less of the ideas that went into their creation. This means that we have effectively edited out the remaining 50 percent or so, and we do so to conform to a standard. Editing plays a big part in this process, and we need to be fully aware of why we are editing as we go about it.

WHY EDIT?

It’s easy to think of editing as merely the process of expurgation. That’s only part of it, though. There’s a lot more to editing than merely ridding a song of anything that is second rate and that makes it last too long. When considered and applied carefully, the odd edit here and there can do wonders for the construction of our songs. Not only will it keep them at the appropriate standard with regard to length, but it will also help raise the standard of quality.

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Here are some reasons why editing should be considered:

d To make room for more of the title/hook line. Previously, in the chorus section, we looked at how most songs will benefit from having the title line placed obviously and clearly to aid people in hunting down the song after they have heard it. Editing a song so that there is room to include more of the title section in it can therefore be a very good idea. Alluding back to the advertisement analogy from earlier, it can be interesting to note just how many times the product in question is mentioned within the space of one TV or radio commercial. It tends to be more than once, and it can be a considerable number of times. The principle is simple: The more times it is included, the more likely the listener is to remember it. Similarly, making more room for the hook line to occupy more of the stage can be a worthwhile pursuit. When you have written a song or are partway through one, you should consider how much priority is being given to the all-important good bits. They may have a perfectly acceptable degree of prominence.

However, it may be that they need more space and time to do themselves justice, and the only way to do that and to keep the song within the expected standard length is to remove another section to allow the good bits more room to shine. Ensuring that the key selling points of the song have the space they need will do a lot to help the listener identify the song after just one listen, and that one listen could be all that is needed to hook the listener.

d To help grab the listener. A well-crafted song should capture the attention of someone who is only half listening, and it will often achieve this through careful placement of the hook. Although we don’t always write these hooks up front and they often appear midway through the writing process as we are getting into it, that doesn’t mean we have to wait until we get to where they first appeared in the writing process before we hear them in the end result.

Consideration of editing should involve doing all we can to grab the listener, and placing the content that will do this attention-grabbing up front should be considered carefully. The phrase “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!” exists for a reason. Listeners want to feel that it’s worth their while investing a few minutes of their lives in listening, and even if they are only half listening, we still need to do something to get them on board early. If the “grabbing”

content is placed at the start and is then followed by a carefully crafted and structured body of the song, we have a fighting chance of having a captive audience for its entirety.

Let’s take an imaginary structure of AABCABCDCC as an example, where A is the verse, B is a pre-chorus, C is a chorus, and D is the middle section. It tends to be a good idea to at least consider what would happen in the song if we put a chorus up front, resulting in CAABCABCDCC. If the chorus is the section we are counting on to snare the listener, then why wait through three sections before the listener hears it? If we have a genuinely good reason, then that’s great, but we should think about it. The occurrence of C at the start in this instance wouldn’t have to be the entire section, anyway. It could just be half of it—or just the title line, perhaps—which would then be written out as cAABCABCDCC. We don’t have to include all of each section on each of its appearances. Where time is of the essence, it can be better from every perspective to have a shortened representation of a section included here and there.

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It should also be noted that the role of seizing the listener’s attention doesn’t have to rest squarely on the shoulders of the hook. Although it would normally be the team member to call on for such occasions, there are other factors that need to be thought through. For example, it may be that the song in question doesn’t want to jump out and grab from the get-go, but would benefit from a more gradual approach instead, where the song would be better served through more focus on mood setting. In that case, we should go with mood setting and wait until the hook needs to appear. In all of these considerations, we just need to ensure that we have considered how editing could help sharpen the song’s claws.

d To make the song a suitable length for purpose. As already noted, it’s the purpose of the song that should be the fuel for editing strategies. If we want a song to be suitable for radio play, then we need to ensure that the length doesn’t prohibit its chances. If the song is intended to work in a play or as part of a film score, then we need to ensure that it contains enough space to afford the dialogue to take place without fighting with the melody and accompanying lyrics. It is often the case that a song will be mechanically edited after it has been recorded so that an instrumental section loops round and round for this purpose, but it can be worth considering this eventuality during the writing process itself.

d To make room for a featured instrumentalist. If it is likely that a song will be performed by a band that features a soloist keen to demonstrate their instrumental dexterity, it’s wise to consider building a platform into the song for this purpose. For example, it may be that the editing process could involve repeating the middle section or adding an additional chorus to act as an instrumental stage.

d To keep the song focused. I think we would all have to admit that there have been times in songs we are writing when we have just “gone off on one” and started to include all sorts of ideas that weren’t really working for the greater good of the song. Similarly, there will be times when we have included small sections in the song that essentially just act as padding and don’t really achieve anything much. We need to do what we can to keep our songs lean and on topic.

If a song doesn’t need something, then we should consider getting rid of it.

It may make sense without all the parts we initially included. See Figure 3.15.

When the song in question is finished, we should stand back from it, take out all the good bits, and then seriously consider throwing all the rest away. If there is a specific reason why some of the remaining bits should stay, then let them plead their case and consider including them, but make them work for it.

Even if they took hours to write and removing them feels like a painful process, we should bear in mind that leaving them in could cause them to spoil the song for many more hours to come, and that could be even more painful!

They should all serve a functional purpose, either by being a focal point or by contributing to setting up another section. Sometimes links are needed as breathers or as devices that tie two otherwise incompatible sections together.

Sometimes we just throw them into the mix because we always have before.

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That’s not a good enough reason. Some parts of a song are vitally important for the message and should therefore be kept. Some are vitally important to the groove and should also be kept. Some are needed to help set up the hook and should also be kept. Some are there because they snuck in without a valid pass, and they should booted out the door.

Figure 3.15

Does the song make sense with sections removed?

CONSIDERATION OF BALANCE

When we are looking at purging our songs of all dead weight, we should keep the consideration of balance at the forefront of our mind. Removing a few measures here and there will help us reduce the length of the song and will ensure that the song is packed with nothing but good stuff, but it may also destroy the balance that most songs will require to keep them standing up!

There will be times when a knocking off balance fits our purposes really well, and on these occasions, editing out a beat or measure here and there can work wonders. This technique is usually best employed at the end of a section, when we want the listeners to unexpectedly find themselves in the next section quicker than they anticipated. Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the role repetition plays in informing the balance of harmonic progressions. Let’s now have a quick look at what happens if we disrupt that repetition through editing out bits. Take the following example, “Ode to Balance.” Also see Figure 3.16.

Ode to Balance

Hold it steady

We need poise to make it land, as planned

Wait till it’s ready

It needs good time to make its stand

What we have here is a verse from a lovingly prepared song about the wonders of balance. It’s obviously not destined for chart success, but it serves its purpose nicely. In its current form, it sounds balanced because it features a repeated four-measure phrase, totaling eight measures. If we were to set about ridding the verse of moments that didn’t feature melody, we could consider removing the second and sixth measures. However, moving these would eliminate the Cmaj7 chord and therefore interrupt the chromatic movement included in the progression from C to Cmaj7 and onto C7 (the B note in the run from C down to B down to B b in the chords). It’s therefore not a very good idea because it’s the descent through these

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tones that gives the chord progression its character. We need to consider the functional purpose of each layer of the song we are editing, and in this case, although it would reduce the length of the song without trampling on the melody or lyric, the harmony would suffer.

However, we could consider removing the second half of the eighth measure because it features no melody, and the chord in question (Fmaj7) has already been sounded for two beats. Basically, there are no harmonic, melodic, or lyrical problems with the removal of the last two beats of the eighth measure. If you listen to this edit, although the melody, lyric, and harmony are not disrupted, the phrase doesn’t sound balanced because it is denied the final two beats that would cement the repetition in place.

Figure 3.16

“Ode to Balance.”

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This is compounded by the fact that the final two beats in the fourth measure are occupied with the lyric “as planned.” Removing the final two beats of the eighth measure would therefore make the verse sound untidy and incomplete to a degree because repetition doesn’t take place. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is entirely up to the writer and should be defined to some extent by the functional purpose of the section. Axing the occasional measure or beat here and there might make the song leaner, but it may also knock it off balance and send it tumbling to the ground.

Conclusions

Consideration of song form should be rooted in an understanding of the purpose of the song in question and specifically concerned with setting it up so that it presents itself in the best possible manner. The process is analogous to arranging lots of information on a page so that it’s all clear and the eye is drawn to what really matters quickly, or dressing a shop window so that the goods on display grab the attention of the passersby. In reality, a lot of our listeners will be passing by our songs as they go about their daily business. They may be enjoying a drink in a café or meandering through a shopping mall, for example. We need to structure our songs so that they have the best chance possible of getting in the way of our potential audience when the audience isn’t even looking for them. A large part of this is ensuring that the team of players in the song adopts a formation that’s suitable for the game ahead of them. Think about editing carefully. If you have some good stuff in the song, you should set it up so that people will hear it and appreciate it.

Solution: Assess the Structural Effectiveness of the Song

PART 1

Pick three of your favorite songs off the shelf or out of a playlist and go through each one in turn, asking the following questions:

d What structural components are employed?

d What percentage of the song is made up of each?

d Where and how often are the key moments placed?

What Structural Components Are Employed?

Listen through each song in turn and write down each section as it appears. Use letters to denote the names of the sections as they appear to make things quicker.

It doesn’t matter whether the sections you hear are traditional, established structural components. Simply assign a letter to each section and repeat that letter if you hear the section again. You will end up with a collection of letters much like those I did when listening through the Billy Joel examples shown in Table 3.1.

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What Percentage of the Song Is Made Up of Each?

After you have the different sections accounted for, list each section name down the side of a page or computer screen. Now listen through the song, counting how many measures fill each section. The best way to do this is to put a mark next to each section name as each measure passes. You should end up with a list that looks something like what you see in Figure 3.17.

Figure 3.17

Measure count for each section.

With all the measures accounted for, you now need to add up the total number of measures, divide 100 by that total, and then multiply that figure by each of the measure counts in turn. See Figure 3.18 for clarification.

If you are sharp-eyed, you will notice that the percentages here actually add up to 100.008, where they should add up to 100. This is because I have rounded up the initial figure I got to stop the numbers after the decimal point from going on for too long. It’s the principle of the thing we’re concerned with here. We can live with eight thousandths off, can’t we?!

Figure 3.18

The percentage of each section.

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In the case of this song, you can see that the chorus occupies the largest percentage, with the verses coming in second place, hotly pursued by the middle section, and so on. When you try this with some of your favorite songs, it should be of interest to you to see how it works out. If you have the means to do so, it can be easier to see these results in the form of a pie chart like the one in Figure 3.19.

Figure 3.19

Pie chart graphically representing the size of each section.

Where and How Often Are the Key Moments Placed?

In addition to territorial considerations, you should also look at the order and placement of other significant structural building blocks.

d Is there anything significant in the order in which the structural components appear?

d How often is the title repeated and where?

d Is there any additional hook information, and if so, how often is it repeated and where?

Seeing as we are working with a fictional song, we can’t be specific about these questions here, but you will be able to with real examples. With regard to the placement of sections, is there anything that stands out as unusual? Does the song have more than one middle section, for example? How long do you have to wait until you get the chorus? Is there any symmetry in the order? Counting the appearances of the title can be interesting, and the results can be quite telling. Make a note of how many times you hear the title, and if the title is not accompanied by the hook material, then make a note of the appearances of any additional hook information that appears as well.

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PART 2

Go through exactly the same procedure with some of your own songs. See whether there are any similarities or significant differences. Do you find that the territorial percentage of each of your sections is considerably different? If so, what can you learn from that fact? Does the process reveal that you include considerably less chorus material than other songs you are a fan of and that you should think about including more, for example? What about the amount of verse material you have?

Are your songs’ structures much more complicated than the types of songs that you aspire to write, or vice versa? Do your songs consist of more or less hook material than other songs you have assessed? Do you have a hook of note at all? How long does the listener have to wait to be told what your song is called? Does that matter?

There are many questions you could ask at this stage, and they are all worth asking. The purpose of this exercise is to compare the structural devices you use in your songs with those employed in the songs that you know you like. Hopefully, in going through these questions, you will be able to pinpoint some issues that could do with some work. In doing that, it should also help you identify the areas of strength.

PART 3

Revisit the songs that you went through for Part 1 of this exercise and use the structural template as a skeleton on which you can build your own song. It is order of the structural components that we are looking at here, not the length of them.

For example, if one of the songs you analyzed had the structure ABABCBCC, then use that structure to build a new song. It doesn’t matter how many measures each song lasted for. Alternatively, try mapping one of your existing songs onto that structure and see what happens. The form of the resulting song may not have been built with a consideration of tension and release at its root, but the results of the exercise can be very interesting.

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We’re Not Sure What

Problem

Our Melody Is All About

4

Before you go on to read any of the following text, have a go at coming up with a definition for melody and write it down somewhere, or at least say it out loud. Be honest and don’t cheat!

What Is a Melody?

It might seem like a very basic thing to answer, but posing the question “What is a melody?” can cause even a seasoned pro songwriter to pause and make a sequence of interesting facial expressions. You may have just purposefully acknowledged something for the first time yourself. We all know what a melody is, but defining it is not always straightforward. The more we think about it, the more we realize how involved a melody is, and it’s not surprising that its definition varies considerably from person to person. Some smart aleck will always come back with the answer, “It’s a girl’s name,” and other answers will invariably include words and phrases such as notes, tones, tune, line, and the bit that’s sung. Others set out to answer the question as if it’s really straightforward, but then seem to have difficulty summing up what they mean concisely.

It’s a very important question to ask songwriters, arrangers, producers, band members, or a whole host of other people, come to think of it. A major stumbling block for many is the fact that what a melody really is isn’t considered before it’s created. As songwriters, we often produce melodies, seemingly out of thin air, without giving any decent consideration to how we’ve come up with them. Or, more significantly (in the context of this chapter), we haven’t thought about what they are supposed to achieve and why they exist at all.

Do you have any songs in which, if you’re honest with yourself, the melody has just happened? If pressed, would you be unable to come up with a considered and concise explanation of why it exists as it does? We need to put ourselves in a position where we are able to have at least a half decent stab at reasoning through the shape and structure of our melodies. As we acknowledged in Chapter 1, this means that we have to think a bit, and it may therefore be a bit of a painful inconvenience from time to time. However, the thought process that goes into putting ourselves in those positions will serve us well in setting us up to create better and more appropriate tunes.

TWO KEY RESPONSES

All the answers that are given tend to fall into two key categories—the technical response and the emotional response. The technical response will usually be something along the lines of, “It’s the key line in a song where there is variation in the tones that are used,” or, “It’s the bit that’s sung, and it goes up and down to create 93

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interest,” or, “It’s a musical string of notes.” A slightly more articulate individual might say something like, “It’s a sequence of tones written with repetition and variation in mind to maintain interest and to generate tension and release.”

The emotional response typically focuses on the affecting qualities of a melody, such as, “It’s the bit in the music where the excitement or sadness is most obvious,”

or, “It’s the tune that the voice sings that makes the emotional content of the lyrics all the more effective,” or, “It’s the bit of the song that moves me.”

Each of these responses is equally valid, and the truth is that a melody means different things to different people and has an extraordinarily powerful and versatile role to play in all music. Some will value a melody on the grounds of how cleverly it is written with respect to an appreciation of musical parameters, and some will enjoy a melody because of how it makes them feel. Others will be fully aware of both of those considerations and apply equal weight to the importance of both.

However we look at melody—and we will be looking at it pretty closely—we should always appreciate its power as both a musically technical and an emotive tool, no matter how analytical we get.

When it comes to neatly defining melody, I propose that a good (although I wouldn’t claim necessarily the best) definition could be, “A sequence of monophonic pitches of specific duration and placement.” The emotive qualities that I alluded to before are left out of this definition, and they are left out on purpose.

Cold and calculated as it may sound, a melody doesn’t have to move us emotionally to qualify as a melody. In fact, it doesn’t even have to sound good at all. If a melody bores us, it doesn’t cease to be a melody; it’s just a boring one. Some definitions of melody are a little more involved and include issues relating to the volume of the pitches played and the inclusion of counter melodies and multiple layers that create polyphony, and so on. There are plenty of definitions out there, and they are usually all accurate in their own way. I’m not claiming that the definition here is the ultimate definition in the cosmos, but it does say what is important in the context of this book.

What’s Important about Melody?

There are as many answers to the question “What’s important about melody?” as there are to “What is a melody?” And again, the different responses will depend largely on the personality types and musical understanding of the people giving them. We’re going to focus on how able to be sung, interesting, and memorable melodies are.

IT SHOULD BE SINGABLE

Because the majority of songs have a lyric, and these words are generally meant to be sung by a human, it follows that it is important for a melody to be singable.

True, this is obvious, but there are factors within this topic that we can (and often do) fall foul of.

Tonal Considerations

Allow me to rattle off a little story. I once wrote a song that I thought was good. I don’t think it’s good anymore because I have since learned that it isn’t, but at the time

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of writing I was convinced that it was amazing. I wrote it at a time when I had a very young daughter in the house—and more precisely, in her crib. This meant that I had to be quiet, which in turn meant that I sang very quietly as I wrote the song, and I had to opt for a fairly pathetic and measly-sounding falsetto to hit higher notes. The only other way to hit them otherwise would’ve been to sing a little louder than my sleeping daughter would’ve been entirely happy with. So, a significant percentage of this song was written in a whisper, although I didn’t intend to use a falsetto voice to sing it on stage or in the studio. It was just because I was being quiet.

I then made the big mistake of recording the guitar, bass, and piano parts without testing how comfortably I could sing the song without any volume constraints.

I assumed that the key in which I wrote the song would be okay, but when it came to singing the thing, I realized I was in big trouble because I couldn’t hit the higher notes with conviction, especially when it came to the key change at the end. This was supposed to be a moment of triumph in the song—a moment where the world suddenly became a better place and anything was possible. After the vocal recording session, it quickly became a moment to skip on to the next song because it was far too high for me.

This taught me a simple lesson, but one that I hadn’t given due consideration to beforehand. If this has never happened to you, then I’m glad. Take it from me; we should always be aware of the register of the vocalist who will be singing our songs. Even if we are going to be singing it and we think it’ll be fine, we should be thorough and check it. We need to ensure that what we are writing doesn’t demand notes that the vocalist is physically incapable of singing without wearing a tight belt or doing whale impressions. If we are writing the song for ourselves and we are singing it properly as we write, then range considerations will automatically be dealt with for obvious reasons as we write the song. If it’s for another vocalist, however, we should make sure we know whom that vocalist will be. If we are trying to write songs for a particular artist, whether a megastar or a friend, we shouldn’t record them at all until we know the appropriate key (unless it is all in MIDI and can be transposed with ease, of course).

All vocalists have a range of notes that they can sing, and good vocalists will know exactly what their limitations are in this respect. Within the tonal markers that set this range, vocalists will know how high and low they can go comfortably, and how far they can stretch on either side of that comfort zone should the need arise. In traditional terminology, this comfortable range is known as tessitura.

Simply put, this is the range of notes in which the vocalist’s singing is most natural and secure. As melody writers, it’s generally okay to steer vocalists slightly outside of this tessitura every now and again, but they shouldn’t be out there for long, and the majority of a melody should nestle neatly within it. Keeping the comfortable range somewhere between an octave and a 10th is sensible. If you don’t yet understand intervals, take it from me for the time being that a 10th is an octave plus two notes in the scale. Outside of the comfort zone, we can generally stretch a couple of tones further on either side, and this equates to somewhere in the region of an octave and a half. This is not an exact science, though. There are specific ranges associated with specific voice types (baritone, tenor, alto, soprano, and so on), but these ranges generally apply to trained vocalists. Even then, there are plenty of untrained singers whose vocal ranges will sneak past the outer limits of these defined ranges.

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By restricting the majority of the range of the melody to something like a 10th, we aren’t necessarily guaranteeing that the notes within the current placement of that given range will be comfortable for the vocalist in question, but we are ensuring that once we transpose it up or down, the distance between the highest and lowest notes isn’t too vast for the vocal cords of most singers.

Have a look at Figure 4.1 for some visual affirmation of what we’re looking at here. It highlights a situation in which the song is initially too high for the vocalist, but is then transposed down to fit within their range. It works on this occasion because the range is within that of the singer in question.

Figure 4.1

Adjusted range.

Consideration of the range of the performer could well have been saved for a more specific section later in the book. The reason why I have included it here is because it introduces us to thinking about the additional vocalist that really counts—the listener. As well as considering the featured vocalist, we also need to think about the audience. Songs aren’t just written for one person to sing. That’s just the outlet. Part of the appeal of songs is that fact that we can all get involved with them if we choose to. For example, we may occasionally find ourselves singing or wailing along, tapping our fingers, or even venturing into some air-guitar show-manship. We tend to enjoy getting involved in material that we like, and writing a melody that enables the majority of people to sing along is a very important part of this. We have already looked at the importance of making choruses accessible, and here we can focus a little more on the practicalities involved in making that a possibility. In an interview with Paul Zollo, Burt Bacharach, one of the most revered and admired melody writers of recent years, said this about melody: “I think if you can make it easy, you’re always doing it better. Easy for a singer, easy for somebody singing along. Because people can’t handle two octaves. They’re listening to a song and they want to sing along, or wanting to remember it in their head, and you’re taking them out of the picture.” 1

We need to make sure that listeners have a realistic chance of singing along wherever possible if we want them to take the song into their lives. Personally, I know there are some songs I like that I would love to able to sing along with, but I can’t because the melodies are just too high for me. The fact that I can’t sing along doesn’t

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mean that I don’t enjoy the song, but it does mean that my appreciation of it is tempered somewhat by frustration at not being able to get involved on the level that I would like to. It is true that we can’t guarantee the songs we write will suit the highs and lows of everybody’s range, but in ensuring that the range of the melody isn’t too vast, we are at least ensuring that a simple harmony line is not out of the question for those with the ability and inclination to slot one in. We don’t have to accommodate the listeners’ vocal cords on this level, but actively seeking to give them opportunities to get involved in the song is a quest well worth pursuing. If songs aren’t written for the listener, then what’s the point of them ever being performed?

In addition to these obvious limitations of range, bear in mind that some sounds are easier to hit consistently and for extended periods of time than others. Not all notes within a vocalist’s range will have the same clarity of tone and sweetness. In case you hadn’t already noticed, some vowels are easier to sing at the extremes of range than other ones are. For example, try singing “hot” on the highest note you can. Make sure it’s your top note—really go for it! Now, stick on that same pitch and sing through these words in the following order: “hut,” “hat,” “hit,” and “heat.”

The only thing in each word that has changed is the vowel sound, but you will probably find that hitting a pleasant and consistently controlled tone as you sing through the list gets progressively harder. I just had a go, and it was not a pleasant experience for those in the vicinity! This is because articulating each different vowel sound requires our mouths to assume different positions, and some sounds require more effort than others.

That’s a very basic summary of the wonderful world of phonetics, and although there is considerably more to it, that’s the general gist and all that we need to concern ourselves with here. The good news is that although there are mountains of technical information that we can take on with regard to how humans create different sounds, we don’t need to have advanced training in phonetics to know what will and won’t be possible to sing. All we really need to do is test melodies, and the best way to do this is simply to sing them.

We should always assess the feasibility of our melodies by singing them before we consign them to the out tray. Further to these articulation issues, there is also the manner in which we arrive at those sounds with regard to their proximity and harmonic comfort next to the tones that precede them. The intervals that a melody employs should be carefully plotted because some are easier to sing than others.

We’ll look more specifically at intervals in the next chapter, but their importance in this issue of singability warrants at least a brief mention here. We need to ensure that we are aware of these difficulties when we are setting the obstacle course for our vocalists to sing their way through. It’s not just a matter of how high and low we send them. The words they land on and the manner in which they get there are also significant factors.

Rhythm Considerations

Just as it is important to consider pitch, it’s also wise to test that it’s possible to sing a melody without going blue and keeling over. They are in the minority, but there are plenty of melodists who write tunes on an instrument rather than their vocal cords, and this approach has its advantages. The main one is that it enables us to avoid the same old lines that automatically roll out of our mouths time and again

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and allows us to look afresh at the available notes waiting for selection. However, if this approach is adopted, we must remember that pianos, guitars, glockenspiels, or whatever are not living, breathing things that need to take in oxygen to remain of any use to anyone.

Because lead melodies almost always end up getting sung, room for breath is vital.

How to breathe is a matter of technique, but where is largely a compositional concern. In addition to the fact that breath is a necessity, we should also appreciate that a lower note generally requires more breath to articulate than a higher one, so it’s wise to leave enough time to take on that breath.

Another factor is personal expression. It can be a good idea to leave room for vocalists to choose where in a melodic line they want to breathe at times, because this gives them the opportunity to put their own personal stamp on the delivery.

Sometimes this isn’t possible, but it is a compositional factor that shouldn’t go unconsidered, especially in genres where decorated and improvised additional melodic flurries—otherwise known as vocal aerobics—are a fundamental component of delivery. We wouldn’t want to rain on the diva’s parade, would we?

IT SHOULD BE INTERESTING

One definition of interest is “to induce or persuade to participate or engage”

(www.merriam-webster.com), and that suits us fine in this instance. As we have

touched on before, a melody doesn’t have to be interesting to qualify as a melody, but the pursuit of writing an interesting melody is certainly noble and worthwhile.

Getting some sort of response out of the listener is surely a desired outcome of the songwriting process, and using the melody to grab the listener’s attention is as good a place as any. Interest can work on a number of levels, ranging from raising the academic’s eyebrow by employing unusual yet strangely effective repetition of intervals, to providing the good ol’ basic hook that for some reason just makes us want to hear it again and again. Wherever the interest lies, it’s important that it’s in there somewhere.

One way to create a melody with some form of interest is to endeavor to write something different than what has gone before. “Fresh” is a word that is bandied around a lot in this department. In reality, doing this is incredibly difficult. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone somewhere has come up with a mathematical conclusion about how many different melodies are possible within a given framework.

Although there will be millions when we take into account variations in both pitch and rhythm, it’s fair to say that a few of those have already been fully exploited.

No one is saying that every melody has to be completely different than those that anyone else has ever written before, because that simply isn’t true. There are a fair few melodies out there that have a lot in common. However, we should strive to write melodies that are different than those that we have written before. A sure sign of a novice melody writer is when all their melodies sound very similar. Look at those you have written with some close scrutiny. When they are stripped away from the accompaniment that goes with them, are they different or do you discover that you basically keep writing the same shape, sequence of intervals, or rhythmic patterns? If you discover that to be true, then I’m sorry to be the one to point it out to you, but you’ll benefit in the long run—honest. The next couple of chapters should help you come up with techniques to overcome this issue.

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Another way to go about creating interest is to ensure that our melody varies as it progresses through the song. I don’t want to steal my own thunder from later in the book, but suffice it to say that changing the notes we use, their length and placement, and the way at which we arrive at them from phrase to phrase and section to section will help add interest to our melody.

IT SHOULD BE MEMORABLE (WITH HOOKS)

Making a melody memorable is a major matter. (I hope you appreciate the alliteration in that sentence.) If we intend for our songs to be smash hits or for people to take them on board at all, for that matter, then they need to be memorable. If we write our melody solely to carry the lyric and not to be of any particular interest in itself, then we might argue that it isn’t so important, but as we’ll see shortly in the “Comparison to Lyric” section, it could easily be argued that melody is very important.

It simply wouldn’t be right to discuss melody writing without spending a little time deliberating the term hook. It’s a word that is so often used in songwriting that it’s easy to use it without ever thinking about what it really means. Forget music for a moment. What’s a hook? Yes, it’s a film, and yes, it’s a golf shot that draws from one side to another, and yes, it’s a type of punch in boxing, but the reason the word is used in melody writing is because in general terms, it’s a word that refers to snatching or grabbing hold of—and more importantly in this context, not letting go.

The perfect hook is the Holy Grail of melody writing. A decent hook will grab the listener and won’t let go, and although we all have to endure our own private little battles with snippets of melody that slowly and progressively drive us to distraction, we generally translate these hooks as being good melodies. Regardless of whether we like them, they are certainly memorable. Not because we try to remember them, but keep in mind that hook is actually a noun and a verb and is, in essence, a device that is designed to grab and that does the grabbing for us without us inviting it or giving it permission to do so.

It’s very rare that a hook will make up an entire melody. It’s most commonly just a fragment that is the signature or most significant and memorable element of the melody. An entire melody is generally too long to work as a hook because its enormity means that it doesn’t have the speed and dynamism to grab us. Smaller sections will be nippier in this regard. A melody consists of both tonal and rhythmic elements, and therefore, so does a hook.

This is well worth bearing in mind when we attempt to write the catchiest melody we possibly can. There are plenty of occasions when writers (including me, at times) have gotten so disillusioned with the quest for the elusive hook in their writing that they have failed to notice that what they had written so far was so close to being the fragment of relentless brain-tormenting melody they always dreamed it would be. If only they made a subtle adjustment to either the rhythm or the pitches! In other words, we can have a series of pitches that sound much catchier in one rhythm than in another. Similarly, we can have a rhythm that would be incredibly catchy if only we put slightly different pitches in it.

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The concept of catchiness here is incredibly difficult to get a good hold on (iron-ically enough). If it was a simple matter of following some basic guidelines, then songwriting would cease to be the mind-boggling, frustrating, yet overwhelmingly satisfying pursuit that it is, and we would all be able to churn out amazing songs like a hit-churning factory. Where’s the fun in that? What we have in our favor, though, is the fact that we can test hooks. We simply throw them out there and see whether they make a catch. Maybe that seems a bit like it has come out of the Neanderthal handbook of melody crafting, but it’s honestly the most simple and effective technique there is.

Personally, I have marked many songwriting assignments in the past where in the accompanying academic critique, the student has proudly referred to their hook as the focal part of the melody. That in itself is fine in theory, although very often the hook to which they refer is sorely absent. A hook is not a hook because we say it is. A hook is a hook because it proves it is by coming after us and grabbing hold of us. We may believe that we have crafted a beauty, but we shouldn’t forget that we have probably heard the song hundreds of times through writing the thing, and we are bound to remember it for that reason alone.

Don’t be afraid to cast a line and see whether anyone gets hooked. If they don’t, it can be annoying and possibly a little embarrassing, but if they do, you will have a good day. The “Old Grey whistle test” is songwriting slang that you have probably come across before. It got its name from a test that songwriters in Tin Pan Alley used to put their songs through. The Old Greys were the doormen, and the story goes that if they could still remember and be heard whistling a tune after they had only heard it a couple of times, then that song had passed the whistle test. We don’t all have doormen, and we don’t all have acquaintances that we call Old Greys, but we can all make use of this sort of test. It’s very simple and revealing.

Like them or loathe them, hooks are an essential part of the songwriting process, and now that they have hooked on, they aren’t going anywhere!

Variation and Repetition

At the root of pretty much any linear-based creative process, one simple question keeps coming back. Should we repeat what we have just done, or should we do something else? Should we stay or should we go? It’s an integral part of many artistic processes and certainly plays a part in crafting melodies. I doubt it would come as a surprise to you to learn that these few pages are not the first to feature words that deliberate over this question. Appreciation of—and rules pertaining to—

variation and repetition have appeared throughout musical history, and the manner in which musical ideas repeat and fluctuate can vary a great deal.

With this in mind, I should make it clear that I am not including development in variation here (in case you’re wondering). We’re going to look at variation as something different—a departure—and we’ll look at developmental ideas in Chapter 11. So, what can we say about the significance of and the difference between variation and repetition in principle? Read on….

VARIATION

Like salt, variation can have different effects in different quantities. No variation can make the finished article a bit boring. Too much can overpower what it is

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supposed to be enhancing. A bit can enhance it and make it all the more pleasurable. On a basic level, if anything varies too much, it can sound unintentional, unplanned, and ultimately like a bit of a mess. If a melody includes too much variation, it can imply that nothing is good enough or important enough to warrant repeating, and that would normally be an undesirable effect.

It can get annoying. Picture the scene: You’ve just gotten in from a day out with someone you live with, and you both slump down in front of the television. Being the generous individual you are, you allow the other person to take control of the remote. She starts skipping through the channels until she finds something that fits the bill. You don’t mind at first, but you begin to get a little agitated as it becomes clear that this skipping is not about to stop. After 10 minutes of relentless channel surfing, you lose it and say something along the lines of, “Would you please stop changing the channel and stick with something?” The key words in this outburst are changing and stick. That’s variation and repetition right there. Continual variation can be frustrating and unnerving. Staying on the same channel for a lifetime would also get quite dull fairly quickly. They say variety is the spice of life, and it’s true. Variation is important because it will introduce new ideas and hopefully prevent our melodies from becoming too dull. Look at Figure 4.2. What is your eye drawn to first?

Figure 4.2

Variation.

It’s the variation. Employed carefully, it’ll make a melody. Use it badly, and it’ll break it. There’s a balance between the two that needs to be weighed carefully, and there will be some pointers on this in the next couple of chapters. For now, just bear in mind that a melody needs to include enough variation to remain interesting, but not so much that it becomes annoying.

REPETITION

Have you ever been in a situation where you made a mistake and realized that the best way to disguise it was to do the same thing again? There’s a beautiful truth that can be used to good effect in so many ways, and it is relevant here. Doing something again makes it sound as if we did it on purpose the first time, regardless of whether we did. Repetition implies no accident.

If you have to memorize a phone number while you’re frantically scrabbling through your surroundings trying to find a scrap of paper and some kind of writing apparatus, how do you do it? I bet you purposefully repeat that number over and over until you have succeeded in your hunt. Generally speaking, if we say something

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over and over, it either means that we really mean it or that we really want to remember it. Either way we look at it, we really want to do something, and it’s intentional. I remember my poor Mum having to constantly repeat herself when she needed to get something into my small, unresponsive, and often unrepentant head.

It was usually something to do with tidying up. You may have similar memories.

My Mum repeated it because it was important, but I can also remember her repeating it because she repeated herself. Repetition enforces importance, and it makes things more memorable. These are useful things to know as far as melody writing is concerned. The flip side of this, however, is that too much repetition can get plain dull. Most of us know someone who sounds boring! Excuse the blunt statement, but it’s probably true. I’m not saying that the person is boring necessarily, but they will sound boring because, in addition to the fact that they ramble on about stuff that not even their own grandmother would put up with, they speak in a monotone a lot of the time. This means that they don’t vary the pitch of their voice and they stick on the same tone for sentences at a time. This would be an example of when too much repetition is a bad thing. Because it’s the opposite of variation, it’s not surprising that both need to be treated similarly. We need to get the balance right.

Repetition is a tool employed in the construction of melodies in all music, whether it be metal, country, jazz, or pretty much anything else we could care to think of. However, repetition can have an effect that some people really don’t appreciate all that much. You might have come across books that frown upon pop music in general simply because the repetition inherent in it can induce a trance state in those who listen to it. That in itself is no secret. Trance music didn’t get its name accidentally, and although those of us who use repetition in our melodies aren’t necessarily trying to hypnotize our listeners, it is fair to acknowledge that we often overlook these qualities when we are writing. The word “repetitive” comes up in some thesauruses when we look up “hypnotic,” and we will do well to be mindful of this when we are writing, regardless of our motives.

We need to think carefully about what we are repeating in a melody, whether it is the rhythm, the tonality, or the combination of the two. We then need to ask ourselves, “Is that worth repeating?” It’s a simple question to ask, but it has great significance. Have a look at Figure 4.3. There we can see nothing but repetition, and the result is that there is no point of interest. It’s solid and secure, but dull. We can create the audible equivalent of this if we overcook repetition in our melodic endeavors. When repetition is nothing but an excuse for being economical with ideas, it’s not operating to maximum effect. Our employment of variation and repetition in melody writing warrants a decent amount of time. The difference between them is the difference between familiarity and boredom.

How Important Is Melody?

Melodies are rarely heard on their own these days. Even when we are re-creating a melody in our head or out loud, we will generally do so with an appreciation of the chord progression that underpins it. I know that and I know you probably know it, too, but for the time being, let’s pretend that harmony isn’t a consideration for just a few more pages. We’re going to isolate the melody layer and do a closer inspection of it.

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Figure 4.3

No variation.

We can all acknowledge that melodies are important, but reality regularly falls short of theory when it comes to evidencing just how important we consider melodies to be in writing our songs, partly because there are so many other things to consider and stir into the mix. We’ve already noted the other layers and contributors as being harmony, lyric, rhythm, and structure, and in addition to those, we’re going to spend a bit of time considering volume and arrangement. Although these additional considerations aren’t strictly song writing parameters, and they tend to contribute more to a song’s conveyance than its ingredients, they do influence our enjoyment and appreciation of songs and are useful when it comes to gauging just how important a melody is.

As we noted a few paragraphs earlier, repetition aids memory. Beyond this, it should also be appreciated that the ability to externalize a musical moment and to repeat it out loud, without the need for any kind of instrument other than a part of the human body, makes that something transportable. We can take it with us wherever we go, and this affords us the ability to remember it through re-creation.

Sure, writing down a lyric or scoring or recording a musical idea commits it to a permanent form where it doesn’t have to be remembered, but when we’re going about our daily business, the ability to reproduce that something out loud and at will makes it all the more straightforward to enjoy. Beyond remembering and enjoying it, this also means that it is possible to share music with other people when the mood suits us, and that also has a significant part to play in the perceived success of a song. In light of this appreciation of the importance of a transportable idea, the next few hundred words will be my attempt at convincing you just how important a melody really is when compared to other elements of songs that harbor some of the enjoyment factor. If I fail, then at least I have tried, and I can go about my business knowing I have done all I can to improve the world we live in.

COMPARISON TO GROOVE

In this section, we are looking at groove as the rhythmic feel of a song as conveyed through instrumentation and arrangement. It’s the vibe element embedded in how the rhythm of a song is put across to the listener, and can exist without a melody being present at all. Usually it will be generated entirely through a combination of beat and harmony.

There is no doubt that plenty of us are suckers for a good groove. If one appears on the radio or through the PA at a gig or out of the sound system at a club, some of us tend to lose control of our dancing feet. There is no doubt that a good groove

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or rhythmic pattern can make a song very enjoyable. Anyone from the two-year-old girl discovering how to boogie for the first time to the obligatory drunk uncle at a wedding reception will testify to that. However, we have to acknowledge that the rhythmic feel of a song is likely to be shared with hundreds of others. Grooves, and the intricate ingredients often involved in their creation, aren’t easy to remember in and of themselves, and even if we do attempt to replicate one with our hands or a couple of HB pencils, it’s likely that the groove we attempt to reproduce has been used in thousands of songs, and we can’t actually pin down the one that we mean.

Some songs have very specific drum patterns or feels associated with them, but it is relatively rare that a groove itself will provide us the best handle to carry a song around with us. In the few cases that it is, it tends to form some kind of hook in its own right. A good example of what we are looking at here would be “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon. Steve Gadd plays the drums on this masterpiece, and as soon as the drum pattern starts, we know the song (assuming we have heard it before). A student of mine once attempted to employ that same drum pattern in one of her songs, and it ended up sounding like “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but with a different tune, set of lyrics, and chords!

There isn’t a vast array of other songs that could be identified by the groove alone. I’m sure you could name a few, but the list would dry up pretty quickly.

Grooves tend to be much more enjoyable in the context of listening rather than in remembering. We are more likely to remember how a groove made us feel than the actual groove itself. Take James Brown’s “Make it Funky” as an example. The drum beat that Clyde Stubblefield played in this song is regarded by many to be one of the best grooves of all time. It is certainly one of the most sampled, and this track has undeniable significance in the history of pop music. Its use in hip-hop alone is testimony to just how much impact it has had on people who have heard it, and there is no denying that it is a great song to listen to. Trying to remember it, however, is nowhere near as enjoyable. It’s almost impossible to re-create the vibe it generates as we go about our daily business. Beyond this, the fact that it has been sampled so many times and features in so many different songs means that it doesn’t associate itself with just one of them. This proves the point brilliantly. It’s rare that a song can be identified by groove alone.

Even if we are able to re-create the complexities of the rhythmic pattern in a song accurately, it’s highly unlikely that we will be able to capture the sonic quality of the groove, too. We should acknowledge that the actual sound of the instrumentation that creates the rhythmic feel plays a big part in conveying that feel, and unless we have a staggering ability to re-create pretty much any sound under the sun and apply processing effects with our mouth and body parts, then the whole groove package will not be transportable. When we’re out and about on our daily business, we can’t replicate and enjoy a groove in the same way that we can a melody.

COMPARISON TO CHORD SEQUENCE/RIFF

Next up, chord sequences and riffs will pit themselves against the might of the melody. We are looking at these two fine pillars of the songwriting craft together because they both share the same quality we need to look at here—that is, they are both polyphonic entities. In other words, they both consist of more than one note at a time (most of the time). It’s true that there are examples of riffs that are monophonic (they voice just one note at a time), and we could quite easily find some

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arrangements in songs where the chord changes consist of just one note from time to time, but for the most part they are polyphonic. Where they are monophonic, they actually support the point that needs to be acknowledged here anyway. That is, they become melodies.

Maybe you are an exception, but there aren’t many among us who have developed the ability to whistle or sing polyphonically, and unless you happen to be highly skilled in the art of Mongolian throat singing, then it’s highly unlikely that you can, either. The upshot of this is that we can’t reproduce polyphonic harmonies and riffs as we go about our daily business like we can with a melody (unless we carry a polyphonic instrument around with us). I have had lengthy debates over this one with students who claim that they can whistle chord sequences. When I ask them to prove it, they whistle or “la” what they consider to be the chord sequence, but in reality they are re-creating a monophonic replica. This duplication that they whistle or sing is generally the top line or bass line of the chord sequence that they have in mind, and is actually a melody. It may not be the melody from the song in question, but they are singing a melody nonetheless. Chord sequences and polyphonic riffs are not transportable in the way that melodies are. When we attempt to re-create them, we end up generating melodic representations of them, and this does more to secure the importance of melodies than anything else.

COMPARISON TO ARRANGEMENT

The way in which the organ and lead guitar parts are voiced in alternate semi-quaver stabs in hard left and right stereo positions may sound incredible when you are listening to it, but it’s not something that you can easily emulate in your head as you are wandering about your daily business…unless, unlike me, you’re an android. A beautiful arrangement can work wonders for a song and is without question worthy of serious effort, whether it’s the way we voice different chords so that they are complementary on different instruments or the way in which the violin parts in the orchestral arrangement interweave in and out of the chromaticism in the piano part in an epic monster of a production. However, if we get back for a moment to the importance of something being transportable, it’s hard to remember and take away an element of the arrangement without it being a melody. As with chord sequences, this fact is evident when we attempt to verbally convey the part of the arrangement that we like to someone. It just can’t be done without the aid of an instrument or two…or three, or four….

COMPARISON TO VOLUME

Have you ever thought that some of the magic you find in the recording of a song starts to disappear after the twentieth listen, and that an increase in volume can give that same recording an added lease on life? There’s a good reason why we feel the urge to turn up music when we like it, and it involves a bit of science—namely, equal loudness contours. A very basic summary of this is follows.

Back in 1933, two chaps named H. Fletcher and W. A. Munson did some experiments to see whether we perceive different frequencies (pitches) to be of equal loudness when they are played at the same SPL ( sound pressure level). Through a series of experiments, they basically discovered that low and high pitches had to be played at an increased SPL to be perceived as being the same volume as mid frequencies.

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In other words, a C right at the bottom of the piano has to be amplified more than a middle C in order to sound as if it is being played at the same volume. This is the reason why most home stereos have some kind of bass and treble boost magic button that makes stuff sound better, often called the loudness button. What this magic button actually does is boost the amplitude of the lower and higher frequencies so that they sound as loud as those between them. What makes this more interesting and relevant is the fact that as the SPL of all pitches is increased, the difference between the perceived volume of the higher and lower pitches relative to those in the middle decreases. This results in a situation in which all pitches are eventually perceived to be pretty much at the same volume, and this in turn means that music effectively sounds more balanced and therefore better when we play it nice and loud.

Volume can make music sound better, but we don’t have volume knobs in our heads, and it’s probably just as well because I and thousands of others would probably blow up our heads if we did! If we have a song stuck in our heads, it’s not because it’s playing particularly loud. It’ll be a good ol’ melody again.

COMPARISON TO LYRIC

Different people place different levels of importance on the lyric of a song, and we don’t need to look into that issue here. What we do need to appreciate is that regardless of whether we’re into lyrics, it’s very rare for someone to remember as much of a lyric as the melody that accompanies it after just two or three listens.

Generally speaking, a well-crafted melody will carve itself a nice little spot in someone’s memory after just one or two listens, whereas a well-crafted lyric may have to chip away for some time before it gets lodged there. This is primarily due to the fact that lyrics don’t tend to employ as much repetition as melodies do. There’s another important fact to add, too: When we do remember lyrics, we tend to remember them in conjunction with the melody.

Have you ever had a go at a pop quiz where you were asked which song includes a certain lyric? In most people’s experience, the main method for getting to the name of the song seems to be to recite all the lyrics that precede or follow that particular lyric until we get to the all-important title. And we almost always employ the melody to help us get there. The melody carries the lyric for us. That’s another big thumbs-up for melodies with regard to how we remember things. Similarly, in trying to relay a song to someone, very few people will simply speak the words without the melody, but plenty sing the melody without the words. Usually we start off with both in unison, and the actual lyrics turn into “do do” and “la la”

as the melody bravely carries on.

This reliance on the transportable element of musical parameters is vital in appreciating just how important a melody really is in the scope of songwriting. In reality, it’s the only part of a song that we can easily reproduce as we go about our daily business. If lyrics were as repetitive as melodies tend to be, then they, too, would be equally transportable, but the fact that they tend to involve a lot more to remember means that they rarely embed themselves into our memories in the same way that melodies do. Even if they were easy to remember, the majority of people would still glean considerably less enjoyment from reciting them in isolation than humming or whistling a melody. I’ve yet to hear anyone inadvertently reciting a monologue of a song’s lyrics. I do, however, regularly hear people whistling or

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humming tunes without really thinking about it. It is possible to reproduce other elements after a fashion, but a melody remains the most enjoyably transportable element of songs. Its monophonic nature means that we can re-create it accurately, and the repetition that it tends to feature so heavily means that we are able to remember it easily, too. Interestingly, the ability to reproduce melodies also makes them all the easier to remember, and so the ability to memorize and reproduce is complementary and works together for the common good.

Solution: Think Carefully about the Role

Melody Plays in the Songs We Write

This exercise is not as formal as some of the others found in this book. It basically revolves around some good, honest evaluation of songs that you have already written. Listen to or sing through a few of what you consider to be your best songs, and then ask yourself the following questions. Be as honest as you can in responding to them. You will probably know the answer that you should give, but is it really the right one?

d How easy is it to sing each melody? What is the range of notes you have used, and does it demand too much or ask too little of the vocalist? Could it do with being stretched or condensed a little?

d How interesting is each melody? When you sing or hear it away from other instrumentation, does it generate much in the way of interest, or does it really need the production or harmonic support to be worth listening to? Is that a problem within the genre you are writing in?

d How memorable is each melody? This is hard to test on your own, and you will probably need to play them through for someone else and ask them what they can remember some time later. If you can’t remember much of the melody yourself, then you may have a few issues to deal with!

Let me end this chapter by encouraging you to think carefully about the role that melody plays in the songs you write. Does it get the attention it deserves?

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Notes Fall Out of Our Heads

Problem

without Us Thinking about Them

5

We’ve already acknowledged that melodies have the tendency to appear intuitively most of the time. There’s no argument there. It’s great when that happens, and we should just be grateful for it. However, it should also be acknowledged that although they do just seem to show up every now and then, these notes don’t just appear at random. They arrive in teams that work together. Just as sports coaches will pick their best players for an upcoming game, so too will our brains pick the appropriate lineup of notes for our melodies. And where a team’s lineup will be informed largely by the nature of the game ahead, our brain’s intuitive selection of notes is informed by the key of the song in question.

Whether the notes arrive to complement some chords we already have in place or they come unaccompanied, the manner in which we have learned how music works by being surrounded by it since our birth means that we are able to instinctively select notes that work together.

These teams of notes are what we know as scales. They are the raw building blocks of tonality and the palette that we have to work with as melodic and harmonic artists. We are therefore going to indulge ourselves in a brief overview of the main scales that we work with in modern Western music and then move on to getting a grip on how to employ them to maximum effect. We aren’t going through this just to give ourselves a hard time. Understanding how notes fit together enables us to be more focused when it comes to appreciating how our melodies do and don’t work, and that is ultimately what we are trying to do here. That said, feel free to skip some of this if you already have a good grasp of music theory.

Things are going to get progressively more involved as this chapter advances, so you may wish to jump back in at the section entitled “Tonal Confidence.”

Scales

The word scale actually has numerous meanings, but the one we’re interested in is the musical one. Even if you’re very new to this songwriting malarkey, I’d be fairly stunned if you haven’t come across a musical scale before. Even so, it’s important to spend a moment considering exactly what a scale is rather than just assuming that you have a good idea about the answer. If we take one of its definitions into consideration—“an instrument or machine for weighing” (courtesy of

www.mirriam-webster.com)—then we are reminded that a scale is actually a means

of measurement. So, what kind of measurements are we talking about when it comes to a musical scale? There are two things: First, there’s the number of notes in the scale, and second, there’s the distance in pitch between these notes. As we shall see, both of these considerations are significant.

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There are different ways of describing scales depending on how they are built.

For example, we can describe them according to the intervals that they are built with (more on intervals in a few pages’ time), in which case we can describe them as chromatic or diatonic (among other ways). Alternatively, we can describe them in terms of how many notes they contain. The most common of these scales as far as we’re concerned here are the heptatonic (seven-note) and pentatonic (five-note) scales, although there are other scales built with fewer or more notes. We can either see scales as being linear, where we view them as progressing from one point to another somewhere else, or we can see them as being spirals, where as they get higher, they circle around so that if we were to tilt the spiral and look at it end on, each note with the same name would appear to be in line in three-dimensional space. See Figure 5.1 for a spiral representation of the C major scale.

Figure 5.1

A spiral representation of the C major scale.

It’s obvious to look at scales linearly because that is more often than not the way that we hear them, especially if we have been forced to play them back and forth in the more tedious moments of music lessons. When we appreciate them as spirals, it highlights the fact that scales are repetitive. In other words, once we arrive back at the note we started with, we have completed the scale—or, more accurately, we have just started another one. Scales always have a point at which they repeat, and it’s usually referred to as the octave because it’s where we arrive at the eighth note in the progression of scales we most commonly use. As we shall look at in a few pages, there are some scales that repeat after fewer notes, but octave remains the name we use regardless.

CHROMATIC SCALE

From here on in, I will be making the assumption that you are working within the Western tonal system. If you aren’t, then hopefully you will be able to pick up the general principles of what we go through and apply them to the scales with which you choose to work. If you’re wondering whether you do or don’t work with the Western tonal system, then it’s highly likely that you do. This system is built upon the usage of a 12-tone scale known as the chromatic scale (see Figure 5.2), and every scale that you are likely to have used up until this point (including the major, minor, and pentatonic scales) is found nestling neatly inside this one.

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Figure 5.2

The chromatic scale

(shown starting on C).

Regarding this scale, there are a couple of things worth noting—the number of notes it includes and the notes themselves.

The Number of Notes

Something that’s important to grasp here is the concept of what is often referred to as pitch class. The fact that scales repeat means that we have more than one of any designated note available to us. There will be one lurking in each new octave at which we arrive. In other words, we can hear two notes in different octaves as being the note C, but they are actually different. They are different pitches, but they share a pitch class. The result of this is that although the chromatic scale consists of 12 different pitches, we aren’t limited to just those pitches in our construction of melody . As we shall investigate further in Problem 12, “We Write Chords without Understanding Them,” the concurrent appearance of three different notes will always create the same chord, regardless of the manner in which they are stacked. In Figure 5.3, we can see five different appearances of the C major chord, proving this point nicely.

Figure 5.3

C major in five different guises.

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However, the same three notes placed in different orders and in different octaves can create very different melodies because the different vertical placements of these notes will create very different contours. The name of a pitch does not limit it to any one octave, any more than the name Tuesday limits that day to a specific week.

In Figure 5.4, we can see the same three notes creating different shapes even though each example shares the notes C, E, and G in the same order and the same rhythm.

Figure 5.4

Three notes creating very different melodic shapes.

This difference in shape is fundamentally important. Any pitch will always serve as that pitch in a chord, regardless of register, but don’t ever fall into the trap of believing that the same principle applies in a melody. Obviously, we have to heed the warnings of venturing outside a safe range of notes, but we can still explore the vertical placement of different notes to some extent. Crafting a melody is a lot like fashioning a sculpture. Everyone has the same raw materials to shape; it’s the shape that we end up creating that counts.

The Pitches Included in the Chromatic Scale

The chromatic scale does not ignore any pitches in the Western tonal system. This might seem a bit of an obvious thing to point out, but it’s worth noting when we consider that every other scale we regularly use picks a selection of these 12 pitches and leaves the rest on the bench. We can employ more than one scale throughout a song, but only one will be used at a time, and it will generally be heptatonic or pentatonic in nature. This means that there will be spaces generated between the seven or five pitches that are used, and instead of contributing to the scale through being audible, these spaces contribute character through their absence.

DIATONIC SCALE

Whereas the chromatic scale is all-inclusive in its selection, the captain of “Team Diatonic” picks out just seven players with which to work. Although I appreciate that the term diatonic might be new to you, the sound of this scale is something with which you will undoubtedly be very familiar (see Figure 5.5).

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Figure 5.5

The diatonic scale.

The best introduction to it is to point out that the layout of the piano keyboard is based on it. If we start on C and play all of the white keys up the keyboard until we get to the B just before the next C, we have played a diatonic scale. Of key importance here (excuse the pun) is the fact that in playing all the white keys, we have locked out all the black ones. In doing this, we have actually varied the distance that we have stepped from one pitch to the next. On some occasions, we have had to skip past a black key (such as the step from C to D, missing the C#), and this distance is known as a whole tone. In two places, we haven’t had to skip anything because we can step directly to the next available pitch (such as the step from E to F), and this distance is known as a half tone or semitone. The variation in the distance of each step employed in the diatonic scale occurs in a precise order and forms a pattern. This pattern is easier to see and understand if we employ some commonly understood shorthand to reveal its secrets. If we use a T to refer to a whole-tone step and an S to refer to a semitone step, we can spell out the diatonic scale as defined by the size and order of these steps as TTSTTTS (see Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6

T’s and S’s representing tone and

semitone steps in the diatonic scale.

MAJOR SCALE

In Figure 5.7, we can see the diatonic pattern providing what I expect you have already identified as the major scale. The scales of C major, D major, and E major are all on show, and although they each consist of different combinations of notes, they are all built with the same sequence of tone and semitone steps.

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Figure 5.7

Major scales. The piano

keyboard shows the

C major scale.

Like any scale, the diatonic scale works in a cyclic manner in which the pitch classes it involves repeat in the same order on each cycle. In Figure 5.8, we can see the cyclic principle of the diatonic scheme working as a clock. Bearing in mind that the chromatic scale is also a cyclic sequence, we can place the diatonic clock template on top of it and spin it around so that it reveals a new major scale on each turn. In Figure 5.8, we can see the C major scale on the bottom left, and the D

major scale on the bottom right, where the template has been spun clockwise over the top of the stationary chromatic scale.

MINOR SCALES

Although the major scale is probably the most frequently used diatonic scale, it isn’t the only one. We also need to acknowledge and appreciate the minor scales, of which there is more than one in active service. There’s the natural minor, the harmonic minor, and the melodic minor scales.

The Natural Minor

The natural minor scale is the easiest of the minor scales to understand, and it serves as a good platform from which to dive into the other two. It is built on the same diatonic pattern of T’s and S’s as the major scale but starts in a different place. Whereas the major scale adheres to the pattern TTSTTTS, the natural minor scale starts on the sixth degree of that progression so that it follows the pattern TSTTSTT (see Figure 5.9).

Seeing as the natural minor scale is also diatonic, we can use the diatonic clock template to highlight it. All we need to do is to acknowledge that the note with a 6 next to it on the clock is actually the first note in this particular scale and work our way around clockwise from notes 6 through 5 to complete it. It’s simple, really.

The minor scale tends to be viewed as a more somber and melancholic equivalent to its major counterpart, and this is due predominantly to the fact that the third note in the scale is flattened (a semitone lower than it otherwise would be).

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Figure 5.8

The cyclic nature can

be seen as being like a

clock. Here we see it

with C at 1 o’clock,

although it could feasibly

be anywhere.

Figure 5.9

The natural minor scale. The piano keyboard shows the A natural minor scale.

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To understand this fact, let’s take the A minor natural scale from a moment ago as an example. If we were to build an A major scale, we would apply the pattern TTSTTTS, starting on an A, to achieve it. This provides us with a C# as the all-important third note.

If we look back to the A minor natural scale (in Figure 5.9), we can see that the third note is actually a plain old C. It is a semitone flat from where the major scale dictates it should be, and it is therefore referred to as minor. This flattened 3rd is of tremendous significance in the way that we build scales and chords and therefore songs. If this is all new to you, and you have an instrument somewhere in the vicinity, try playing the notes A, B, C#, and then playing A, B, C. The minor 3rd will sound more restrained and sober, and this tonal quality and character can be used to great effect. We’ll see how as we progress. In practice, the word natural tends to be dropped from the name of this scale so that just minor is used.

The Harmonic Minor

As you might expect, the harmonic minor is very similar to the natural minor in that it continues to employ the flattened third note in its sequence to achieve the minor tonality. In fact, the harmonic minor developed out of the natural minor, and the two scales only differ in their treatment of the seventh note (see Figure 5.10).

Figure 5.10

The harmonic

minor scale.

This adjustment came about for a couple of reasons. First, there came a point in history when composers wanted to create major chords built on the 5th degree of the natural minor scale (the E in the key of A minor). In building an E major chord, we quickly discover that it requires a G# because that is the third note in the E

major scale. (Try applying the TTSTTTS pattern starting on E to check if you don’t believe me!) This G# is obviously at odds with the G natural from the A natural minor scale, and the G# won the battle, thus the raised 7th. Second, the G was being raised a lot of the time anyway, simply because the semitone step from the 7th to the 8th degree of the scale sounded more expressive and pleasant to the ear.

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Melodic Minor Scale

The problem with the harmonic minor scale is that it employs a step of a tone plus a semitone (an augmented 2nd) between its sixth and seventh notes. This is all very well for instrumentalists, but it’s not the easiest thing to sing! In practice, what ended up happening, especially in vocal music, was that the sixth note was also raised a semitone from its position in the natural minor scale to be more accommodating of vocalists. In the case of the A minor scale we have been looking at, this means that the F is raised to an F#. It’s easier to sing than the harmonic minor scale.

Traditionally, the Melodic Minor scale is said to employ the raised sixth and seventh notes when it ascends, but to revert back to the natural 6th and 7th when it descends. In application, this isn’t always the case but it’s a useful piece of information to know. See Figure 5.11.

Figure 5.11

The melodic

minor scale.

PENTATONIC SCALES

In addition to the heptatonic (seven-note) scales we have looked at so far, we should also acknowledge that there are some other smaller squads that play on the song circuit. The pentatonic scales, of which there are both major and minor varieties, employ just five pitches from the chromatic scale (see Figure 5.12). We won’t dwell on them for any more than a paragraph, but it is important that we acknowledge that they are used a lot as the basis for melody writing. A melody is not necessarily better for including more notes, and there are plenty of songs that feature just these pitches and leave the remaining seven from Team Chromatic on the bench.

We’ll analyze one such example before this chapter is finished.

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Figure 5.12

The pentatonic scales. Notice that there are no semitone steps in a pentatonic scale.

MODES

Our final mission in our exploration of scales is to consider those known as modes.

These heptatonic scales can be confusing and shrouded in mystery, but they are actually very simple to understand. Just like the major and natural minor scales, modes are diatonic and employ exactly the same sequences of tones and semitones in their construction. The only thing that sets them apart is the step of the sequence at which they start. We have already seen how a natural minor scale starts on the 6th step of the pattern of T’s and S’s that builds the major scale. Here we can also see how a Dorian scale starts on the 2nd, the Phrygian starts on the 3rd, the Lydian on the 4th, and so on. The major and natural minor scales are, in fact, modes themselves, although we use them so regularly that we don’t tend to think of them as such. See Figure 5.13 for visual clarification of what these modes are. They are all shown starting on note C.

Figure 5.13

The Ionian mode is better known as the major scale, and the Aeolian mode is better known as the natural minor scale.

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Depending on where you write and who you write with, knowing these Greek names may or may not be useful. If you should need (or want) to store them in your brain, then a simple little mnemonic should help. It goes like this: I opened the door, went to the fridge, opened the lid, and in the mix of things I found an alien, so I locked it in. (I opened the Dorian, went to the Phrygian, opened the Lydian, and in the Mixolydian of things I found an Aeolian, so I Locrianed it in.) Gripping, huh?

Naming Notes

Imagine that you have learned a song in the key of C major and that you have been asked to play it in the key of D major. If your understanding of the notes you use in that song is based on the names of the actual notes, then it’s likely that translat-ing that information into a new key will take a while. When this happens, we have to go through a long-winded process of transposing each note in turn. It makes things considerably easier if we make the most of the fact that scales are built on specific patterns/formations and we give each position its own name or number.

This way, we can refer to each player in the team according to what position it plays, rather than by its personal name. If we do this, we can completely change the lineup of players in the team without having to change the names that we use to refer to them. In other words, we can change the actual notes employed in the scales without having to change the names that we give them, and we can therefore change key (players in the team) without having to change the way that we understand the team to work.

THE NAMES WE GIVE DIFFERENT NOTES

Such is the power and prominence of the use of the major scale in our harmonic system that we tend to use it as a reference point for numbering or naming notes.

Figure 5.14 reveals how we can use numbers to refer to each note in the major scale.

Figure 5.14

The numbers that we

give as applied to the

keys of C major and

A major.

In cases where we do need to refer to notes that aren’t one of these seven, we explain their presence in terms of their similarity to the seven with which we are most familiar. To refer to an A# in the key of A major, for example, we wouldn’t call it Note 2 in the scale (which it is in the chromatic scale of A), but we would call it a #1. It’s the musical equivalent of saying, “You know, it’s the note that’s kind of like A but not quite—it’s a bit higher.” It’s still referred to with the same number that the letter in its name defines it as in the scale, but with additional information that specifies whether it is sharp or flat. When we want to name notes in a minor scale, we use the same principle. Take the scale of A natural minor.

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We would refer to the C in this scale as a b3. The C in its name dictates that it is a 3 of some kind, and the fact that it is a semitone lower than it would be in the A major scale (where it would be a C#) dictates that it is flat. See Figure 5.15 for some visual reinforcement.

Figure 5.15

The numbers of

notes as applied

to the keys of

A major and A

natural minor.

As is often the case with harmonic theory, this terminology isn’t all black and white in practice. It is possible to refer to notes with regard to their position in the formation of “Team Chromatic” (where numbers are assigned from 1 to 12), just as it is possible to refer to the flattened 3rd in a minor scale as simply the 3rd with the understanding that it refers to Note 4 rather than Note 5 of the chromatic scale.

We are going to work with the seven-name system as applied to the major scale (as outlined here), though, because it is by far the most common practice.

The most basic system for naming notes is to stick to numbers, as we just have.

However, there are a couple of other systems for naming these seven notes that you should be aware of. We won’t go into the historical context of how they came about because it isn’t important, but just as a matter of interest, I’ll include them here in Figure 5.16. One of these systems is called Tonic Sol-fa (which you have heard if you have ever sat through The Sound of Music, with “do a deer,” and so on). The other system doesn’t have a specific name, so we’ll call it degrees of the diatonic scale.

Figure 5.16

Tonal naming

systems.

Intervals

Much like we have shorthand for expressing the position of notes in a scale, we also have a similar system for describing the tonal distance between the notes. An interval of any kind will usually refer to a space between two things, whether those

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things are periods of time or more specific items, such as two notes in a scale.

Instead of having to describe the tonal distance between two notes as something like, “The notes are two tones and a semitone apart,” we can simply say, “They’re a perfect 4th apart.” Describing these distances as intervals enables everyone to use the same terminology, to be precise and concise, and to stay happy. So what are the intervals that are most commonly found in songs? See Figure 5.17.

Figure 5.17

Intervals as applied

to the chromatic

scale starting on C.

The lower of the two notes in an interval dictates the major scale by which the size of the interval is measured. When the higher note in an interval is the 8th, 4th, or 5th in that major scale, it is classed as a “perfect” octave, 4th or 5th. So, a G

above a C forms the interval of a perfect 5th because G is the fifth note in the C

major scale. Similarly, an F above a C would form the interval of a perfect 4th, and an octave (an 8th) would be classed as a perfect octave. Assuming we are still working with intervals above a C, when the higher note is in the C major scale but isn’t the 4th or 5th, it is classed as a “major” interval. So, a D above a C would form the interval of a major 2nd. Similarly, an E would form a major 3rd, an A would form a major 6th, and a B would form a major 7th. In addition to this, we can also venture a little higher into the next octave, where a D would be a major 9th, and an E would be a major 10th.

When the interval between two notes is a semitone smaller than a major interval, it is classed as a “minor” interval. So, an E b above a C would form the interval of a minor 3rd because the E is the third note in the C major scale and it has been lowered a semitone. Similarly, an A b above a C would form a minor 6th because A is the sixth note in the C major scale but has been lowered a semitone. When the interval is a semitone smaller than a perfect or minor interval, it is classed as a

“diminished” interval. So, a G b above a C would form a diminished 5th because G is the fifth note in the C major scale, and the “diminished” in the title states that the G has been lowered a semitone. Similarly, it is also possible, although relatively rare in songwriting circles, to have a diminished octave, which in this case would be a C b above a C. When the interval is a semitone larger than a perfect or major interval, it is classed as an “augmented” interval. So, an F# above a C would form an augmented 4th. It’s a 4th of sorts because F is the fourth note in the scale of C

major, and it’s augmented because it is raised a semitone. Similarly a G# above a C would form an augmented 5th, and it is possible, although unusual, to have a C#

above a C forming an augmented octave.

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“What about when I move down to a note?” I hear you asking. The simple answer to this is that the lower note still has dominance in dictating the interval between the notes. So, if we have a C followed by a movement down to an A, you would be forgiven for believing that to be a major 6th (because the A is the sixth note in the C major scale), but you would nonetheless be wrong. It is, in fact, a minor 3rd because, by virtue of being the lower note, the A gets to define the interval.

Figure 5.18

Descending intervals

as applied to the

chromatic scale

starting on C.

Tonal Confidence

All tones are defined by their relationships with each other. In any given key, there is a hierarchy of importance where one tone governs and the others are subordi-nate to it to various extents. If all notes had equal dominance, then there would be no order, and without order, things would be a mess. With this in mind, it becomes evident that the tones we employ are all held in tension with note one of whatever key we choose to be in.

In this section, and for a lot of the rest of this book, we are going to be selecting and using melodic tones on the grounds of how confident they are. When a note in a scale is confident, we mean that it has the independent strength to hold its own when it’s held in relation to Note 1, and that it doesn’t feel like it needs to resolve to another more confident note. In any given key, some notes will sound more confident than others.

There are various ways we could go about organizing this hierarchy, but the most useful way for us songwriters to appraise tonal confidence is to simply listen for the character exhibited by each note in the chromatic scale in turn as we hold it in tension with Note 1. Some notes will sound confident and self-assured, and some will sound uncomfortable and like they want to resolve. If you have never done this, try it. It’s interesting. Pick a key, any key—say C major for the purposes of this illustration—and then play or sing that scale up and down a few times to get the tonality of the key in your head. Now, play the Note 1 (C) on an instrument of choice and try singing the same note. That will sound as confident as it gets, regardless of which octave you play or sing it in. Now try singing an F#. That will sound very insecure in relation to the C, and in comparison will sound like it wants to move somewhere more confident.

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THE HIERARCHY OF CHROMATIC, LTD.

I would like to propose to you that each of the scale degrees we use in our chromatic scale falls into one of six different levels of confidence in any given key. Stay with me, and you’ll see where I’m going.

Tier 1: First

Looking at each of the degrees of the chromatic scale as a member of a company can provide a useful context within which to understand its role and purpose. With this in mind, we can see the first as the president of the firm. It’s the owner of the scale and is ultimately responsible for what happens to it. The first defines where the song is rooted, and it is often referred to as the root note for this reason. In setting the tonal grounding, it also defines the roles of the other workers in the company and acts as the figurehead around which they go about their business. The octave is a fundamental building block in Western harmony, and as such, the first creates markers between which other notes find their own space.

Tier 2: Fifth

Continuing with the company-ranking analogy, the 5th would be the vice president, without whom the president would not have a trusted colleague to bounce ideas off. The 5th is often referred to as the dominant, and with good reason. It plays a fundamentally important role in the building of chords. Take a look at Figure 5.19.

Figure 5.19

The implications

of the 5th.

If the interval of a perfect 5th is present in any chord, it has the power to influence what that chord is and how we hear it. For example, take a G major chord.

It is built with the first, third, and fifth notes in the G major scale: G, B, and D.

(We will investigate chords together in Problem 12, in case you are wondering.) In this chord, we can observe that the interval of a perfect 5th exists between the G

and D. Now, let’s assume that we change the D in this chord to an E so that we now have a chord built with a G, B, and E note. On face value, we could interpret this as a G chord without the 5th and with a 6th instead (the E), but that would be wrong. If we listen to this chord, we can hear that it actually sounds like an E minor chord (where the E is the 1st, the G is the flat 3rd, and the B is the 5th).

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Try it on an instrument if you can, and you’ll hear the shift in how the chord sounds. The reason why it sounds like an E minor chord is because a new interval of a 5th has been generated between the E and the B. Without the presence of the B, we would be left with just a G and an E and therefore without the interval of a 5th at all. With it, however, the E suddenly has a new lease on life and is put in a new context. The 5th assumes an important role because it is the one that reveals the first as important. Without the presence of the E, the B is simply the 3rd above the G, but with the E included, the B gravitates to the E as its vice president and says, “Look everyone, I’ve become a 5th, and that means there’s a root note in here somewhere!”

Of course, there is the odd exception to this, where the 5th is flattened or raised.

Chords that alter the 5th in such a way (diminished and augmented chords) aren’t generally used as often as those that don’t, and where they are, they are used because of the harmonic ambiguity that the lack of the perfect 5th brings them.

The 5th is still implied, but it’s the fact that it is either sharp or flat that gives it a unique harmonic flavor. The functional purpose of the chord is governed by the lack of the perfect 5th, and this does a lot to advertise further the structural dominance of the 5th in the “company.” Without it, a chord has a less sure footing, and this actually emphasizes its hierarchical status all the more.

Tier 3: Third

The 3rd will take the role of a director in the firm, with a responsibility for company policy and direction. We have already acknowledged the 3rd’s role in dictating major or minor tonality of a scale or chord, and such an important role gives the 3rd its status. It doesn’t sound quite as confident as the 5th does, but neither does it want to resolve as much as some of the other notes beneath it in this hierarchy.

Tier 4: Second and Sixth

In any good hierarchical organization, a pyramid shape occurs where the lower tiers of the structure are made up of more staff than those at the top. It’s the same here, where the second and sixth notes share the same degree of confidence. They are both middle management at the firm in that they don’t dictate policy, but they do make interesting things happen. In the scale of C major, for example, the second and sixth notes are D and A. Neither of these notes is needed to build a C major triad, and so they don’t contribute to the senior management of the harmonic organization of the key. We can use them to build other chords with, but none of those chords will be as strong as the chord built on Note 1. Instead of contributing to the strength of a scale, these notes contribute color and interest. The important thing to consider about this tier of tonal confidence at this point is that the notes on it noticeably sound like they want to resolve when they are sung in conjunction with Note 1. Sing or play an A above a C. Can you hear it pulling you toward the G? Try playing a G now, and you should hear the comfort and assurance that the confidence of the G (Note 5 from Tonal Tier 2) brings in comparison.

Tier 5: Fourth and Seventh

The 4th and 7th are full-time employees in the workforce, but they need more support than the managers do. They can’t be left on their own for too long, and they

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tend to need to go to directors or the president fairly regularly. In other words, they will sound relatively insecure on their own, and will want to resolve to other more confident notes when we use them in melodies. For example, try playing an F (Note 4) in the context of C major. You will hear the tension it creates and the need for resolution. Now play an E instead of the F. That’s better. The relative confidence of the E (Note 3) brings a sense of relief and assurance. The fourth and seventh notes have even less perceived confidence than the 2nd and 6th because they are only a semitone from a confident note. Whereas the 2nd and 6th have to move a full tone for resolution to a confident note (to the 1st and 5th, respectively), the 4th and 7th have only to go directly next door to the 3rd and 1st (octave).

Tier 6: #1/b2, #2/b3, #4/b5, #5/b6, #6/b7

These are the part-time employees of the workforce who are called on occasionally to get the odd job done, but without whom the business would still function just fine. These notes have the lowest level of independent strength for reasons similar to those found lurking on Tier 5, but even more acute. It’s important that we don’t confuse confidence with interest here. These notes will undoubtedly sound interesting and contribute a great deal to a melody as a result, but the point here is that they are not confident to hang around for long. They create tension that needs resolving. With regard to harmonic considerations, none of them is the root note, and none of them is even in the major scale. They aren’t leaders in the gang or members—they’re just hangers-on. See Figure 5.20 for a graphical representation of these considerations.

Figure 5.20

Tiers of tonal confidence (in the key of C major).

There are other ways to arrive at similar conclusions when it comes to identifying the strength and functional purpose of each tone within the chromatic scale.

Ultimately the proof is in the hearing and not in the theory. Don’t take my word for it; test the notes yourself and listen for whether you feel the need to move on from them when they are held against note one. You’ll quickly hear what I’m getting at here if you have never noticed before.

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WHAT THIS HIERARCHY TELLS US

All of this harmonic theory is important to understand because it reveals two important things we should always bear in mind when writing melodies. The first is that the greater the distance a note is from Note 1 with regard to its hierarchical status, the greater will be that note’s implied need to move toward a more confident note, where it can hand over the melodic responsibility. Using the Chromatic, Ltd. workforce analogy, if we placed a mere part-timer (any note from Tier 6) in a position of responsibility and prominence, it is likely that they would hot-foot it to someone in a more senior position so that they could take over. They would want to get themselves out of the position they were in through taking action. This principle applies to the notes, too, and the action takes the form of movement to a more senior note (a tier higher in the structure). When we take this piece of information on board, we can use it to good effect in driving our melodies forward or in keeping them more content and self-assured. A note from a top tier will be positive and sure, and this confidence will decrease as we descend through the ranks.

When a note does want to resolve, what happens is that it will naturally want to resolve to the nearest note that has more confidence than it does. It’s the same principle as the part-timer wanting to hand over responsibility. He won’t make the effort to get to the president if he can quickly offload the responsibility to a senior figure who is standing next to him at the time. Have a look at Figure 5.21.

Assuming that we’re still in the key of good ol’ C major, a few examples show how a b6 (A b) will want to resolve to a 5 (G), Note 4 (F) will want to resolve to Note 3 (E), and Note 2 (D) will want to resolve to Note 1 (C).

Figure 5.21

Natural tone resolutions (in the key of C major).

Something worth appreciating here is that Note 2 is actually an equal distance (a tone) from two notes that are both more confident (1 and 3), but it will gravitate to Note 1 because that is the strongest option. Ultimately, every note will be heard in relation to Note 1, and this means that those closest to it will naturally gravitate there more forcefully than those further away. To illustrate this, let’s have another look at Tier 4 of our hierarchy. Here, we could be a little more involved

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and state that Note 6 is actually more stable than Note 2. The reason for this is that although they are both a tone from where they will naturally resolve to, Note 2 is closest to the ultimate finish (Note 1), so it is more inclined to move there a little more quickly than Note 6 is to resolve to the 5. For the sake of convenience in this book, we will class Notes 2 and 6 as sharing the same degree of confidence.

We can class them differently if we want, but we don’t have to, and we won’t here.

The same principle applies to Notes 7 and 4 on Tier 5, where Note 7 is more inclined to resolve to Note 1 than Note 4 is to resolve to Note 3.

A final example would be how Note 5 (G) will want to resolve to Note 1

because, although Note 1 isn’t especially close by, it is the only note that has more confidence than Note 5. We’ll see the considerable significance of the strength created by this movement from 5 to 1 when we explore harmony in Problem 12.

At the Start of Phrases

Starting a passage of melody on an uncertain note will kick it off with momentum because no sooner will it have started than it will want to move to a different note.

It’s as if the melody will start off balance and tumble forward until it finds its feet (on a more confident note). We can purposefully vary the degree of momentum through the degree of confidence in the note we employ, too. For example, a note from the fourth tier will not generate the same degree of expectation of movement as one from the 5th. If you have an instrument on hand, play a low E and then play a C# (6th) above it at the same time so you can hear its relationship with the first.

This might sound a little uncomfortable relative to playing a B (the 5th) at the same time, but okay. Now, keep that low E, and this time place an A# (#4) on top of it.

You should feel the desire to hear that A# move to somewhere more secure (a B

which is the 5th on tonal tier 2) so it can be at peace with itself and the world.

At the End of Phrases

Whereas starting a melody on an unconfident note will enable that melody to push forward in the quest for resolution immediately, ending on one will keep it unresolved and hanging in the air. If the need for movement to a more confident note is not satisfied at the end of a melodic passage, it can sound incomplete. It can therefore be a good idea to employ a relatively unconfident note at the end of a section in a song when we want to make it clear that something else is coming. The unresolved nature of the note will leave us willing it to resolve, and this leaves us hanging on. Finishing on an unconfident note is the equivalent of finishing a sentence with the word and. We find ourselves asking, “And what?”

Conversely, when we do want a passage to sound resolved and complete, using a more confident note will do that for us. The more confident the note, the more final the ending will sound. Have you ever noticed how many melodies end on Note 1? That’s because it’s the boss, and employing it gives the sense of control, returning home, and completeness.

Midway through Phrases

We should always be mindful of the melodic energy generated through the varying degrees of confidence in the notes we can employ. Every note we place in our

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sequences will serve a functional purpose in this regard, whether we appreciate it or not. And although the rhythmic placing of the notes will accentuate their character from time to time (as we’ll see in the next chapter), their degree of confidence will always accompany them wherever they go, whether they are at the start, at the end, or buried in the middle of our melodic lines.

CONFIDENCE VERSUS CHARACTER

The second thing revealed through an understanding of the hierarchical status of melodic notes in any given key is that the relationship between confident and insecure notes is a complex one! In addition to the issues of self-assurance, there is also the issue of character. Just as it is often true that the most interesting and intriguing people can be seen as loose cannons next to more predictable and confident souls, it is also true that where notes are confident, they can be seen as fairly dull and predictable next to insecure but much more exciting ones. In fact, it could be said that a note’s confidence and character are inversely proportional to one another as shown in the natty little graphic in Figure 5.22.

Figure 5.22

Confidence versus character.

This is not drawn to scale, but

it does show the principle.

There is a payoff to be made between a note’s confidence and character, and we should always be wary of this fact when we set them off against each other.

Melodic Motion

Now that we have looked at some of the more intimate character traits of the notes we can use, we need to look at what happens when we build sequences with them.

THE THREE ALTERNATIVES

In acknowledging that our melodies have to move somewhere, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that there are three options open to us with regard to the direction in which we can take them. They are to stay where we are (repeat), go up (ascend), or go down (descend).

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In 1975, Denys Parsons wrote a book entitled The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes. In this book, Parsons developed a technique for notating melodies (named Parsons Code) based entirely upon the fact that melodies can go up or down or stay where they are. The system is very simple. The first note is marked as a *. If the melodic motion doesn’t go up or down (repeats) from that point, it’s notated as an R (for repeat). If the melody goes up, it scores a U (you guessed it—it’s for up), and if it goes down, it gets a D (hopefully for an obvious reason!). Figure 5.23 shows Parsons Code in action.

Figure 5.23

This melody would be scored as *RUUDDD.

What’s interesting about this code and the book that came with it is that they prove that it is often possible to recognize a tune entirely on the grounds of its motion. Rhythm is not taken into account at all, and even so, tunes are often dis-tinguishable purely on directional grounds. That emphasizes just how important melodic motion is.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THESE ALTERNATIVES

When you listen to songs, do you ever think about the direction in which the melody is heading, and how that then correlates with where the melody is direct-ing you? It’s undeniable that the ups and downs of a melody have the power to stimulate emotional response. The problem is that getting a handle on the manner in which melodies achieve this is very difficult. At the root of this problem is the fact the ups and downs necessitate the employment of confident and insecure notes, and the characteristics of these notes will have a bearing on the overall character of the melody’s implied motion. It’s not just about whether they go up or down, but it’s also about the confidence of notes that are used on the way.

Although it is very difficult to be black and white about the character of different directions, it is possible to make some basic observations. The confidence of the notes that we employ on our melodic journeys will obviously have a bearing on the emotional quality of the line, but the direction itself will contribute its own fair share to the perceived character. To test this fact, we can step from an allocat-ed pitch in opposite directions to a shared pitch class. Stepping to the same pitch either side will eradicate the tonal confidence from the proceedings, and we can simply assess the character of motion. See Figure 5.24 for clarity on this point.

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Figure 5.24

Varied motion to

the same pitch class.

In Figure 5.24, we can see and hear the difference in the character of a melody that steps from a C up to G, and then one that steps down to G. Both G’s share the same pitch class, but the results in the character of the melody are very different. Tentatively, we can observe that the ascending motion implies more effort than the descending one. When we get excited, we tend to speak faster and higher, but the same happens when we get delirious and are relating something while close to tears because we are so upset, so an ascending melody needn’t always have positive associations (although it often does). Melodies will often share the traits found in other elements of nature, and this fact is in evidence here. Just as climbing a mountain or walking up some stairs takes some effort, an ascending melody will imply effort, too. It’s about trying. It’s going against gravity. Conversely, a descending motion can imply the opposite. It eases its way down with the assistance of a gentle tug from the Earth’s magnetic core. Finally, a melody that continues on a repeated tone will strike a balance between the two, where there is a sense of rest or preparation for something to happen. It’s not an exact science, but these very general observations are worth bearing in mind.

TYPE OF MOTION

Just as there are three directions, there are also three types of motion. A melody can step to an adjacent note, leap to another note by hurdling at least one other note on the way, or repeat on the same note. Here, we are going to highlight some important considerations with regard to these different types of motion and look at the advantages of varying our employment of them in our melodic lines.

As is the case with so many things in songwriting, consideration of variation and repetition is as good a starting point as any when it comes to evaluating a melodic line’s employment of different types of melodic motion. Obviously, there will always be rhythmic implications that have a say on whether a melody is interesting, but for the next few paragraphs, we’re going to ignore that fact and focus on purely tonal concerns. Rhythmic considerations will be under the spotlight in the next chapter. The first thing that we need to do here is to look at how we hear and identify what is and isn’t step motion.

Have a look at the melody in Figure 5.25. Here we have the melody from the verse of one of my own songs, and I want to draw attention to the motion in the fourth measure. It serves us well in highlighting a key issue when it comes to understanding how step motion works in melodies. In this last measure, we have the

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descending notes C#, B, A, F#, and E (Notes 3, 2, 1, 6, and 5, respectively, in the key of A major). Together, they constitute the entirety of the A major pentatonic scale. If we try singing these last five notes, it sounds like we are stepping between them. At least, there is no obvious leap involved. However, if we look at it theoretically, we discover that there are lots of leaps involved. The movement from the C# to the B jumps over a C, and the B to the A jumps over an A#, and so on. The reason why these leaps aren’t particularly obvious is because of the level of confidence possessed by each of the notes that is being jumped over. They all preside in lesser tiers of tonal confidence than those that are being landed on and are therefore less significant. The confidence a note possesses dictates how much its absence is noticed when it is leapt over. If we think about it, we can hear this principle at work in many heptatonic scale melodies, too. Most theorists ignore the notes

#1/b2, #2/b3, #4/b5, #5/b6, and #6/b7 when recognizing step motion in a melody built on a major scale. For example, most would class the movement from a C to a D in a melody in the key of C major as a step and ignore the C#/D b between them. It makes sense to apply the same reasoning in appraising the motion in a pentatonic melody and to ignore the notes that don’t fit into that scale either. That is what I have chosen to do in Figure 5.25. Here, we can see the inclusion of a row that uses R, S, and L to indicate the nature of motion associated with each note.

Appraising a melody like this can be a really useful exercise because it enables us to intentionally scrutinize how different types of motion are at work in contributing to a melody’s character. This technique doesn’t go as far as identifying the size of, and notes involved in, each leap, but it does start to paint an overall picture of the nature of the motion involved in the melodic line. It also highlights the location of each leap for us, should we wish to come back and analyze them a bit more later. We’ll see how this can be useful in the exercise at the end of this chapter.

Figure 5.25

Notice that Tiers 5 and 6 are omitted from the tonal hierarchy because the pentatonic scale doesn’t include them.

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If we let the scale that builds a melody define the framework in which we assess the character of its motion, it makes the process of appraising the variation in that motion much more straightforward and useful. If a melody is built with a major scale, then all seven notes in the scale will be significant in dictating what is and isn’t a leap. Where a melody is built with a pentatonic scale, the palette of notes is smaller, and only five notes will be significant in dictating what is and isn’t a leap.

If a melodic movement sounds like a step, then it will contribute to the character of the melody as a step, regardless of whether we could theoretically class it as a leap.

Incorporating Variation in Melodic Motion

We have already seen how variation will generate interest, and in seeking to capitalize on that fact with regard to melodic motion, we should bear in mind that there are different ways in which we can generate this variation. For example, it would be easy to rush in here and simply state that a leap is always going to generate more interest than a step, but that isn’t necessarily always the case. Distance of movement alone is not the only thing that can generate tonal interest. The confidence of the notes we are hitting and leaping over will come into play again, too.

For example, assuming we are back in the key of C major once more, the leap of a minor 3rd from an A to a C will generate a very different character than a leap of the same size from a C to an E b. Landing on the C will sound complete, steady, and sure, whereas landing on the E b will introduce a definite minor tonality.

A leap will enhance the character of the note it lands on more than a step would, but some degree of interest will be inherent in the notes involved on harmonic grounds anyway. As another example, let’s take the famous “it’s coming” moment from the film Jaws. The well-known alternating semitone steps in the accompanying theme tune involve stepping on and off an insecure note, and the insecurity of this note generates a considerable amount of interest even though it is just being stepped onto. In this case it isn’t the size of the step or leap that’s creating the interest; it’s the character of the notes themselves. What we can learn from this is that a step won’t necessarily sound less interesting than a leap. It all depends on the notes involved in the movement. We can observe that a leap to a given note will generally magnify that note’s character more than a step to it would, but ultimately, tonal confidence and the size of a leap or step are inseparable when it comes to generating and appraising melodic interest.

As with all of these considerations, it’s true that variation alone can make things interesting, and if the variation comes in the form of a simple step after a series of leaps, then a step will hold more interest than it otherwise would simply by virtue of the variation it will add to the contour of the melody. Similarly, the impact of the size of a leap will be determined by the size of the leaps around it. The size of leap of a perfect 4th will stand out after a series of steps, but less so if it follows a jump of an octave.

As an example of this, think about the world-famous melody to “Happy Birthday.”

As this tune progresses, it is built with simple steps followed by leaps that grow each time they jump up. The first leap is between the first day and to. If we assume the tune to be in the key of G major, it’s from Note 5 (D) to Note 1 (G) and is the interval of a perfect 4th. The next leap is between the next appearance of the day to the to and jumps from Note 5 again (D), but this time to Note 2 (A).

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This leap is slightly larger than the previous one and forms the interval of a perfect 5th. The final leap that we are interested in here comes between the py of happy and birthday and jumps a full octave (from D to D in the key of G major). Here we can see the leap becoming more and more significant to the character of the melody by growing in size each time it appears. The significance of each move will be informed by what has preceded it, and we shouldn’t ever forget this fact. A step won’t always sound dull, and a leap won’t always sound that interesting. We can regard them as their default qualities, but they can be manipulated through the tonal activities that surround them.

Although melodic leaps are undeniably valuable tools for creating melodic interest, a problem with them is that they are not necessarily very easy to sing. It is true that some leaps are easier to sing than others. The difference between singing the relatively easy interval of an octave (C to C) compared to an augmented 4th (C

to F#) is a good illustration of this. However, the fact remains that a leap will be relatively difficult to sing compared to a simple repeat or step from note to note.

If we are thinking about using leaps to incorporate variation, we need to think carefully about how those leaps impact the singability of the line. A few here and there will act as effective variation amidst the relatively solid and secure lines that repetitive and stepwise motion will generate. However, too much melodic leaping around will usually put a melody in danger of sounding disjointed and being fairly hard to sing.

Obviously, there are circumstances where continual leaps won’t sound too disjointed. An example might be when a melody continually alternates between just two pitches that are a leap’s distance apart. On such occasions, we can consider introducing some repetitive or step motion to the line to add the variation that the line will probably benefit from. Either way we look at it, our melodic lines will always benefit from a balance of repetition and variation, regardless of the nature of the melodic motion that is filling each role.

How much thought do you put into varying the type of motion that you employ in the melodies you write? Is it something you really think about or something that just seems to happen? It’s worth spending some time coming to grips with this issue, and the exercise at the end of this chapter should help focus your mind a little!

It’s not easy to clinically separate the characteristics of motion from the character inherent in tonal confidence. However, in an attempt to wrap up this issue, we can observe that the manner in which a melody arrives at a note will not change the character of the note in question, but it will have effect on how much attention we pay it. A step to a note will not magnify its character as much as a leap will, and a repetition of a note will just serve to enforce the role of that note in the melody at that point. Repetitive and step motion will not normally generate the same degree of interest as leap motion will, but it will usually be easier to sing. The best results tend to occur when all three types of motion are offset against each other so that repetition and variation can both work their magic in making a melodic line both interesting and singable.

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Solution: Understand the Role and

Effect of the Notes That We Employ

The best way to develop an employable understanding of the issues covered in this chapter is to go to town in assessing a melody or three. Figure 5.26 shows an example that I have lovingly prepared for you. In addition to the analysis of motion featured earlier, I have also detailed the tonal confidence of each note by naming the tier of tonal hierarchy on which it is found, and written down the Parsons Code.

Figure 5.26

An in depth tonal analysis of “I Need to Be with You.”

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Although I don’t suggest that you go to the pains of drawing graphics quite like this one (because it takes ages!), it is a worthwhile exercise in the long run to assess each note and each section of a song on the same terms. Remember what I said about hard work in the opening chapter? This is some of it. Even if you don’t want to get this involved in assessing the intricacies of your melodies, it is still worthwhile thinking about where and how your melodic ups and downs and use of steps, leaps, and repeats vary from section to section. Here are some examples of the kinds of questions you can throw at melodies once you’ve got down some nitty-gritty: d What can be said about the use of the different tiers of tonal hierarchy? Are there any significant differences between the sections in how they are used?

Does one use confident tones in more abundance than the other, for example?

d Is there anything significant about the type of motion employed in each section?

Does one section use more in the way of leaps than the other, for example?

d Where leaps are employed, do they tend to land on confident notes, or do they ever hurdle over them and accentuate the character of relatively weak notes instead? What can be said about the size of each of the leaps? Do any stand out for any particular reason?

Although all of this might seem very involved, it is actually quite a basic level of analysis! It doesn’t consider the distance of the leaps, the range of the melody, or the manner in which the notes are grouped, for example. (We’ll get there in Problem 11, “We Don’t Think about How We Grow Our Melodic Ideas.”) To demonstrate the purpose of such an exercise, let me just reveal what this analysis has taught me about this song purely on tonal grounds and at first glance.

The melody doesn’t employ anything beneath the fourth tier of tonal confidence in either of the sections analyzed and is built with the major pentatonic scale. I didn’t realize this fact until I sat down and analyzed it. I thought about the motion and repetition and the confidence of the tones, but I didn’t purposefully omit the fourth, seventh, and non-diatonic tones. Both sections include very few leaps of more than a 3rd, and where they do appear, they ascend in the chorus and descend in the verses. This is clearly significant in establishing the tonal character of each of those sections in this song. Furthermore, leaps always end on confident tones (1, 3, or 5 in the scale) and this gives the melody a strong structure for the other notes to bounce off. The chorus includes no repeating notes whereas the verse does, and this fact helps the sections stand apart on grounds of motion, as does the fact that both sections end with runs of step motion but in opposite directions. The chorus makes very little use of the 5th (E) compared to the verse, and this helps the sections stand apart on tonal grounds, too. Each of these pieces of information, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, has now made its way into my understanding of how to build melodies. The more analysis we do, the more we develop our awareness of how successful and less successful melodies present themselves. It’s like a session at the tonal gym. None of it is a waste of time.

There is a lot involved in crafting a melody, and we’ll always miss bits that only an analysis like this or something similar will reveal to us. To benefit from this exercise, it’s best to assess a few of your own songs to see whether you tend to do the same thing from song to song. Do you find that you tend to stick to steps and

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repeats with few leaps, or vice versa? Is there any balance in the way that you employ them from section to section? How do leaps counterbalance steps? How do steps counterbalance leaps? How do you vary the size of leaps where you use them? What about your use of confident and insecure tones? Do you ever write with different scales, or do you tend to just stick with the same group of notes, and so on? Exploring what you do on this level will open up new avenues to explore.

Obviously, this analysis doesn’t even paint half the picture. We’ve already acknowledged that rhythmic implications have been ignored for the time being, for example. However, it is still revealing to see how just the tonal values of melodies we write vary from song to song and section to section.

Rhythms Fall Out of Our Heads

Problem

without Us Thinking about Them

6

Just as it can be interesting to listen to melodies away from harmony, it can also be interesting to hear rhythm separate from tone. It enhances our understanding of what a rhythm will do. Have you ever tried listening to your melodic ideas on just one note to see whether there is any interest generated in just the rhythm? It can be a very interesting and revealing thing to do. If a melody sounds dull on purely rhythmic grounds, then tonal variation can only do so much to improve it. However, rhythmic variation can make all the difference in the world.

Take the melody shown in Figure 6.1. In this example, there’s nothing much to consider at this stage. It’s just the good ol’ C major scale. However, in Figure 6.2, all of a sudden, the melody has ceased to be just the C major scale and has become the first line in the Christmas carol “Joy to the World.” It’s the duration of the notes and pauses that has made this difference. The pitches are exactly the same and are in exactly the same order.

Figure 6.1

The C major scale.

Figure 6.2

“Joy to the World.”

Varied rhythmic content is vital in establishing interesting melodic lines, and it is often on rhythmic rather than tonal grounds that we are more likely to identify similarities between different melodies. Have a look at another example in Figure 6.3.

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Figure 6.3

A mystery tune or two or three….

To avoid copyright issues and to create some added interest, I won’t name them, but there are at least two very popular songs that include these pitches in this order to accompany the title lines of the songs. (The rhythmic information has been disguised to maintain these melodies’ anonymity.) See whether you can figure out what they are. To make it a little simpler, here are a couple of clues. They’re both in 4/4.

One of them starts on Beat 3 of the measure, and the other starts on Beat 2.

Changing both the starting point and the duration of the notes involved turns this run of pitches into two different but equally famous melodies from different songs.

Take a look at another example in Figure 6.4.

If we listen to the relationship between these examples rather than look at them, it is clear that Example 3 sounds more similar to Example 1 than Example 2 does, even though the pitches it employs are different. Here we can hear the importance of the rhythm hitting home yet again, largely because the freedom granted to the rhythm in Example 2 has led to the tones stretching into an additional measure.

Figure 6.4

Rhythm versus pitch.

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It really is very important, but, sadly, it tends to take a backseat a lot of the time when we are thinking about constructing melodies. Not in this chapter, though!

We’re going to have a good look at it and discover that the horizontal adventures of our melodies have just as many affecting variables as their vertical ups and downs.

The topic of rhythm can be addressed on a couple of different levels. First, there are the elements that define the rhythmic construction of the song, such as meter, measures, beats, and so on. We shall refer to the accumulation of these elements as the framework. Second, duration and placement of each note need consideration.

We’ll start by getting a firm grip on exactly what defines and holds up the framework before we look at how we can decorate it with notes.

Framework

If you are already familiar with the concepts of rhythm and meter, then you may want to skip these next few paragraphs and join in again when we get to the section entitled “Identifying the Meter of the Song.”

METER

Where we have a vertical scale against which we measure the different tonal values of pitches, we also have a horizontal scale or framework against which we measure the rhythmic values of notes. This scale is known as the meter, and although there are exceptions, a meter will generally remain fixed throughout a song.

Beat

The word beat obviously has numerous applications in music, but in the context of a discussion about meter, it refers to the basic unit of time in music. If a song gets the feet tapping, then each tap will usually occur on an occurrence of the beat, just like each tick of a metronome is an occurrence of a beat. In the same way that we have seconds to measure time, we have beats to measure rhythm. Unlike a second, though, which remains a fixed amount of time, the time value of a beat is variable according to the bpm ( beats per minutes) thrust upon it. The higher the bpm in the song, the shorter the amount of time between each beat will be. So, a beat acts as an arbitrary value against which we are able to determine other relative time values, and the amount of time between beats can therefore vary according to the tempo of a song.

Measure/Bar

If we were to assess or refer to a song’s rhythm with just beats as a unit of measurement, things would get a bit ridiculous because there would be hundreds of them in any song. Just as it makes sense to refer to 60 seconds as one minute, so, too, does it make sense to refer to a previously agreed-upon number of beats as a measure or a bar, because it enables us to get a handle on the rhythmic information at play in fewer bite-sized chunks.

The divisions of these groups of beats occur in a recurring pattern at regular intervals of time and are usually marked on the stave by bars, which is why many people use the word bar in place of measure. For the sake of convenience from here on, we will just use the word measure and bar bar from the proceedings.

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Something interesting about the placement of these metric divisions is that in addition to enabling us to employ a user-friendly unit of measurement, they also identify the stresses that will be inherent in any rhythm. In the same way that a song’s structure needs some hierarchy in evidence as it progresses through time, a rhythm needs some beats that are more accentuated than others to keep things interesting and regulated. We will refer to these accentuated beats as stress points.

Measures capture and frame the inherent stresses in the rhythm in a uniform way so that a bar line not only marks the beginning of a new chunk of music, but it also maps out the stress points inherent in the rhythm. We’ll look at the nature of these stresses later in this chapter.

TIME SIGNATURE

We write down the type of meter employed in any song through the use of time signatures. “Signed” at the beginning of a composition, after the clef and any key signature, or whenever the signature changes and needs to be brought to the reader’s attention, the time signature is usually written as a fraction with one number above another (see Figure 6.5). If you are self-taught, then it’s entirely possible that you have never really understood what these numbers represent, even though you may be familiar with what 4/4, 6/8, and so on sound like. Simply put, the lower number refers to a unit of measurement relative to a whole note. The number on top tells us how many of that unit are employed within each measure. So, a three on top of a four tells us that each measure consists of three lots of quarter notes (also known as crotchets).

Figure 6.5

Time signatures.

If you have an inquisitive nature, you might be puzzled by a time signature such as 3/4, in which we are effectively saying that there are three quarter notes in a measure. That surely adds up to just three-quarters of a measure, so what about the other quarter? It doesn’t work quite like that. The number on the bottom (in this case, the 4 [quarter note]) is a division of a nominal value that is not an absolute. It determines the relative value of each beat within each measure and doesn’t actually have to correlate directly with the size of the measure. Remember what we said about the arbitrary nature of a beat earlier?

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BPM (Beats per Minute)

A meter gives us many important pieces of information by which we can measure the horizontal values of our notes. What it won’t ever do is dictate the pace at which the song will change from measure to measure and beat to beat. A change in bpm will not change the meter, but rather the speed at which the meter moves.

This means that a song scored in 2/2 and in 4/4 will sound exactly the same with regard to the tempo as long as the bpm doesn’t change.

IDENTIFYING THE METER OF A SONG

So, how do we know the meter of the song that we are writing or listening to? The honest truth here is that sometimes the answer isn’t particularly clear cut. For example, there has been more than one occasion when I have observed fairly heated discussions (somewhere around about shorts-wearing temperature) in which the appropriate meter for the song in question could’ve been either 2/4 or 4/4, and two or more people were fervently presenting their case for their signature of choice.

The reason why the answer wasn’t immediately obvious was because both could have been accurately applied to the song in question. The reason why people were coming down on either side of the argument was because different time signatures tend to imply different feels through the way they frame stress points. More often than not, selecting and working with a meter comes down to striking a balance between feel and practicality.

Feel and Metric Stress

Even when we are not reading the music, we are still able to identify the meter of a song simply by listening to it. How? It’s because of the stress points that are evident in the natural flow of any given rhythm. Sometimes, when we hear a song for the first time, it takes us a few beats to lock into where the groove is. Have you ever noticed that? What we are actually doing on these occasions is waiting for a stress pattern to reveal itself so we can clock its start and end points. Once we have done this, we have effectively identified the meter that “feels” right because it accurately frames each regular occurrence of that pattern. Because this results in the meter framing the stress points, we can and will from here on use the term metric stress to refer to moments of rhythmic accentuation as defined by its placement in each measure.

Hierarchy of Metric Stress Points

Metric stress appears in different intensities, and the stress value of each beat in a measure will always be relative to every other beat. We can see the rhythmic placement of notes within a meter as being similar to the tonal placement of notes in the scheme of a key. Just as the tonal value of a pitch will always be informed by its relationship to Note 1 in the scale, so, too, will the rhythmic value of a note be defined by its relationship to Beat 1 in a measure. In the same way that Note 1 is always the most confident tone in a scale, Beat 1 will have the greatest degree of metric stress in any measure.

Beyond Beat 1, the amount of metric stress associated with each other beat depends on the time signature, but a hierarchy will always be evident regardless of where the stress points fall. We shall refer to these levels of metric stress as primary,

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secondary, and tertiary. In 4/4, for example, Beat 1 carries the primary and therefore most significant stress. Beat 3 carries the secondary stress and can be seen as the rhythmic equivalent of Note 5 in the tonal hierarchy, with less rhythmic emphasis placed on it than Beat 1, but more than 2 and 4. Beyond this, Beats 2 and 4 carry the tertiary stress level, and then we move into subdivisions of the beat that carry no metric stress at all. These different levels of metric stress are graphically presented in Figure 6.6.

Figure 6.6

Typical metric stress patterns found in three different key signatures.

A stress is traditionally marked through the employment of a > (an accent) over the note in question, and to make things clear here, we will employ a larger > for the primary and a smaller one for the secondary stress points. In addition, it can also be helpful to use letter-based shorthand to convey these stress patterns and to use S to mark the primary metric stress, s for the secondary one, and - for anything else. Although tertiary metric stress levels have been included in the diagram in Figure 6.6, they are rarely worthy of much individual consideration in crafting melodies, and the S, s, and - are enough to be analytical.

It’s interesting to note the role the secondary metric stress level (s) plays in defining meter. Imagine for a moment that we didn’t have different intensities of stress and that a note was either stressed or it wasn’t (S or -). If we marked out the typical metric stress pattern found in 4/4, we would usually class it as S-S- because the third beat tends to be more stressed than the second and fourth beats and would therefore need to be marked as such. The issue here is that this pattern could easily be interpreted as two measures of 2/4 because the second stress would be equal to the first and could be seen to mark the start of a new measure as a result.

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See Figure 6.7. The upshot of all of this is that the secondary degree of metric stress is often needed to differentiate between time signatures because the feel is such an important element of defining or recognizing them.

Figure 6.7

2/4 or 4/4?

We can easily test the power that stress points have over defining a meter. If we look at the examples in Figure 6.8, we can see exactly the same rhythmic pattern with identical stress points being scored out in both 3/4 and 4/4. The darker gray on the piano roll indicates the stressed notes. Such is the power of metric stress that if we hear this rhythm played in isolation, we instinctively hear it as being in 3/4.

If we look closer, we discover that the reason for this is that the second stressed note either falls on Beat 4 of the first measure in 4/4, which is a tertiary metric stress point, or on Beat 1 of Measure 2 in the 3/4, which is as strong as it gets. We naturally expect to hear the accentuated beats on the metric stress points, and the meter will adjust to come in line with that if it has the scope to do so.

Figure 6.8

The feel of metric stress.

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Practicalities

In addition to appreciating the role that feel and stress patterns play in dictating a meter, we also need to acknowledge that in being a scale of sorts, the meter needs to be defined to some extent by the size of what it is measuring. We don’t ever say anything like, “Oh, that happened 180 minutes ago.” Instead, we will say something more like “three hours” to convey the same time period. Similarly, we would usually opt for “See you in a week” over “See you in seven days.” The same principle applies in music. We adjust the unit of measurement in accordance with what it is being held next to.

If all melodies had to be built with rhythms that only employed quarter- or half-note beats, things would get very dull very quickly. Conversely, if we adjusted the number on the bottom of a time signature to accommodate the smallest rhythmical unit in a melody, things would get ridiculous! For example, if a melody consists of lots of sixteenth notes, as many do, then we shouldn’t have to place a 16 on the bottom of the time signature. Instead, we can start working with subdivisions of beats. A meter strikes a balance between scale resolution that makes charting the rhythmic course of a melody efficient while still allowing for the inherent stress patterns that will be evident.

CONFIDENCE AND STRESS

The meter provides a framework, not a set of unbreakable rules. In fact, a great deal of the interest inherent in the rhythm of a melody is found where a note ignores the anchor points set out by the meter and sits itself down somewhere in between them. The meter has the power to frame a note’s rhythmic significance but not to force it, just like a calendar has no power over a to-do list but is needed for that list to make any sense.

In Figure 6.9, we can see a two-measure melodic line with tonal qualities left out of the equation. On this occasion, we can see and hear that the first 8th of the measure has been left vacant. If we listen to this example rather than just looking at it, this demonstrates the power of metric stress at work. Although there isn’t a note on it, we still clock Beat 1 in the measure as a strong beat in our heads.

Figure 6.9

Vacated metric stress.

In the same way that tonal values perform a balancing act between confidence and character, rhythmic values exhibit varying levels of confidence and character depending on where they fall against the metric stress points. Where a note lands on a beat with a high degree of metric stress, it will sound very strong but not especially interesting. Conversely, a note that lands on a subdivision of a beat with very

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little metric stress will substitute strength for interest and character. In Figure 6.10, we can see this principle mapped out on another snazzy little graph that is not drawn to scale, but that still shows the principle.

Figure 6.10

We can see Beat 1 having lots of confidence

but little character compared to the tipping

of the balance for subdivisions of the beat.

Whereas a melodic line that ends on an insecure pitch will sound relatively unresolved, a melodic line ending on an insecure beat (anything other than a primary or secondary metric stress point) will sound as if it has signed off and tried to sneak offstage without drawing attention to itself. A melody that sounds its last note on Beat 1 will sound confident, as if it’s staking its claim for the rapturous applause of the audience. Ending on a strong beat provides a much more definite and bold conclusion to a melodic phrase than finishing on a weaker beat. Similarly, starting on a strong beat results in a bold and confident entrance, but one that doesn’t carry as much character with it as it possibly could. Starting on a weaker beat or a subdivision of a beat will add interest and can provide some effective and very usable results.

It’s easy to test the bearing metric stress has on the confidence and perceived strength of a note. See Figure 6.11.

Figure 6.11

Metric stress test.

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Here we can see the same note (C) in a song in the key of C major (Note 1) contributing to a song’s melody. The three examples shown feature the same pitches in the same order, but with one notable difference. The C is always the first note in the second measure, but it starts in different places against the meter in each example. These different placements enable us to hear the effect that rhythmic placement alone has on the strength of a note. It doesn’t paint the whole picture, though. In addition to considering the placement of each note, we need to appreciate that in delaying the appearance of one note, we have actually extended the amount of time the memory of the previous note gets to hog the spotlight onstage.

The length of a note, therefore, needs some serious attention.

Time Values

Now we are going to spend some time getting acquainted with the significance of note duration.

NOTE DURATION

As we have already noted, if measurement of any kind is to take place, there needs to be a scale that acts as a reference point. When it comes to measuring note duration, the whole note is this reference point. Also known as a semibreve to Brits (the likes of which I am) and many Europeans, its length will typically equate to the sum total of four beats in 4/4 time. This means that if a song is set at 120 bpm, each beat lasts 0.5 seconds (60 seconds/120 beats), and a whole note in this case would therefore equate to being two seconds long (4×0.5 seconds).

From this value, we can go on to appreciate the lengths of other notes. The half note is so named for reasons that are hopefully very obvious! It’s half the length of a whole note and is sometimes referred to as a minim. The quarter note is known to many as the crotchet and lasts for—you guessed it—a quarter of a whole note.

If we divide the quarter note in half, we get the eighth note, also known as the quaver. If we halve the length of one of those, we get a sixteenth note, or semi-quaver, and so the pattern descends. As we can see, almost all the note lengths occur as neat subdivisions of a whole note. The only exception to this is known as a double whole note, or breve, as it is more commonly known. As I expect you have guessed, it lasts twice the length of a whole note, but it is rarely used in practice.

HOW WE WRITE DOWN THE NOTE LENGTHS

This book isn’t intended to be a music theory tutorial, so we won’t get too involved in notational systems here. However, it’s wise to include a brief and basic overview to ensure that we are all reading and understanding the same musical language. In Figure 6.12, we can see the way that we traditionally notate the different lengths of each note and rest. Although this graphic stops at sixteenth notes, it is possible to go as far as 128th notes!

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Figure 6.12

Note duration.

DOTTED AND TIED NOTES

If a lot of this is new to you, then you might be wondering what happens when we have a note that, for example, lasts three beats in 4/4. “A whole note would be too long, and a half note would be too short,” you might say, and you would be right.

Obviously, melodies will contain plenty of note durations other than those that we have seen in Figure 6.12, and where they do, we make use of dots and ties to notate them (see Figure 6.13). The basic premise is very simple: If a dot appears after any note on a stave, then that adds an additional half of the note duration on again, so a half note with a dot after it would actually last for three quarters of a whole note, or could be seen as a half note plus a quarter note in duration. Alternatively, and especially when a note duration crosses from one measure into another or a dotted note won’t give us the duration that we need, we can use tie lines. When two notes are tied, their cumulative duration is treated as one note. So, a quarter note tied to an eighth note would last for three eighth notes.

That’s enough of the notation for now. I said it would be brief! What’s important here is that we remember that we can and should use any note or rest duration we like in our songs.

Figure 6.13

Dotted and tied note duration.

We have already seen how a note’s placement in a meter will have a bearing on its perceived level of strength and confidence. Here we will acknowledge that its length is also of significance. If we regard notes as individual little players who are all prepared to throw themselves into a song and therefore into the limelight from time to time, it follows that the longer a note is prepared to hang around, the more confidence it will have in its own merit. Look at the following example in Figure 6.14.

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Figure 6.14

Different note durations.

Here we can see the same pitch (C) in the key of C (Note 1) contributing to the melody on Beat 1 of the measure. The length of this note increases through the examples and exerts more dominance on the melody as a result. However, there is more to this than immediately meets the eye. The ear is more of a reliable source in this situation and notices something very important. Although the C note lengths are very different, we perceive them to be similar because the location of the next note is always the same; it always starts on Beat 1 of the following measure. The lengths of the rests therefore contribute significantly to the rhythm of the melody. So, let’s just pause briefly to think about rests for a moment, shall we?

Rests and Pauses

The main thing to remember about rests is that we should consider using them just as carefully as the audible notes we use. We may not be able to hear them, but that’s not to say that they are second-rate melodic events that are there to be trampled over by notes that surround them. They are silent notes that have the strength to hold their own and will therefore contribute just as significantly to the rhythm of a melody as those notes we can hear.

When a relatively long rest is employed after a note, it can work as a reflective tool of sorts that gives us time to think about the note that just passed. Although we can’t hear it, it adds importance to the note that preceded it by saying, “Let’s just pause for a while as we reflect on that last note for a moment, shall we?”

It’s not difficult to find examples of this pause being employed in the speech patterns of human beings. For example, when a teacher says something particularly important, that something is very often followed by a pronounced pause of extended length while the enormity of what has just been revealed has time to infiltrate receptive minds. A rest adds emphasis to what has just gone before, and the greater the length of the rest, the greater the emphasis will be. This could be seen as one of the reasons why having the title at the end of a phrase or at the end of the section (the chorus, usually) makes it work so well. It’s what we’re left with and what we can dwell on for a few measures (where there are a few measures) until the next section or another song comes along.

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When a relatively long rest is employed before a note in a melody, it can enhance the element of expectation, too, in the same way that a brief wait can add excitement in the structure of songs. A pause can indicate that something’s coming, especially when it is placed where it wouldn’t normally come in speech or where the previous repetition of the phrase in question didn’t include a pause at that point.

Expectation associated with a rest will only be evident when something is actually expected, and the only way to generate expectation is for the listener to have a good idea of what should or might be coming next. With this in mind, it follows that expectation will be evident when the melody is embarking on a repetition of a previously heard phrase. Have a look at the example in Figure 6.15.

Theoretically, we could see the rest after the third note as setting up expectation of the fourth note that follows it. However, on the first listen, we don’t know what is coming after the pause, if anything at all, so our focus lingers on the memory of the preceding third note instead. On the second listen through, we’ll find ourselves expecting the quarter note at the start of the second measure because it was there last time.

Figure 6.15

Expectation or emphasis?

Having acknowledged that fact, we should also appreciate that repetition in a melodic phrase is not the only thing that can generate expectation. If lyrics are present, then they can play a big part here, too. If a melodic line has been married thus far to the words, “I want to tell you that I’m…,” we are left wondering, “You want to tell me that you’re what?” This illustrates that words can generate expectation, and knowing that the next word(s) in a line will be accompanied by some melody, we are left expecting more notes to follow.

Similarly, the tonal confidence of the note before a rest also has the power to dictate expectation, as we saw in the previous chapter. When we pause after a relatively weak tone, we are left expecting it to resolve to a more confident one. On occasions such as those outlined here, something important to appreciate is that it isn’t actually the rest that is creating the expectation; it’s the note or word before it.

The rests are actually just emphasizing what has gone before and are therefore accentuating the expectation rather than creating it.

In addition to the length of rests, we should also think about where they are placed.

Wherever we use them, they will have a territorial impact on the notes around them.

For example, even a relatively short rest will have a significant impact on a melodic line if it is placed on a significant metric stress point. If, for example, an eighth note rest is placed on Beat 1 in a 4/4 melody (such as the example we previously looked at in Figure 6.9), it will force the following note to land off beat, and this will have a very significant impact on the character of the melodic rhythm.

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Rests can achieve a lot in a melodic line. Focusing on the notes to leave out can often be a more productive use of time than thinking about which ones we should put in. How much thought do you put into employing rests in your melodic lines?

Have you ever tried using them to temporarily delay confident or obvious rhythmic notes, or to create reflection or to enhance expectation? It’s well worth experimenting with from time to time.

CHARACTER OF NOTE DURATION

When we speak, the relative pitch and speed of our words can change for various reasons, as we noted a couple of chapters ago. Whereas we looked at pitch with regard to range, we haven’t yet acknowledged that speed varies in relation to mood, too. When we get excited or animated, as well as talking higher, we also tend to speak faster. Similarly, when we are fed up and bored or very calm, our speech tends to become relatively slow. This speeding up and slowing down has a direct effect on the length of the notes we use. Typically, shorter notes make a melody sound more enthused and conversational, whereas longer ones sound more calm and calculated. Relative pace is very important here. One man’s Carl Lewis is another man’s tortoise.

Perceived Speed

If we flip the fact that speed will have an effect on the length of the notes we use, we’ll discover that the length of notes employed will have an effect on the perceived speed of a song. With this piece of information on board, we can start to use note lengths to determine the pace of our melodies and change the implied tempo without changing the bpm. One way to do this is to make more use of the subdivisions of each measure. Have you ever walked down the road with someone whose stride pattern is very different from yours, but you are walking at the same pace? Your bpm is the same in that you are covering the same amount of distance in the same time, but one (usually the one with the shorter legs) looks as if he is walking faster.

He isn’t; he is just working harder, and that hard work can be equated to including more subdivisions of the bar. If the short-legged soul is stepping in the equivalent of eighth notes next to your quarter notes, then he will have to take double the number of steps that you do to cover the same ground in the same time.

In Figure 6.16, we can see a graphical representation of the effect that note length will have on the perceived speed of a song. Person 1 and Person 2 are both covering the same amount of ground (one measure) in the same time (the bpm is the same), but Person 1 takes more steps to cover that distance and appears to be moving faster as a result.

Figure 6.16

Perceived speed defined by note length.

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To hear this principle in practice, have a listen to a couple of songs on the album Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Compare the vocal lines in the verses of “One Week”

and “It’s All Been Done.” “It’s All Been Done” is actually at a faster bpm, but its vocal line seems to be motoring at a more relaxed pace because the note lengths are relatively longer than those found in “One Week.” Another good example of varied pace in just one song can be found in “Girl” by the Beatles. The relatively long notes in the chorus play their part in slowing down the perceived pace of that section compared to the verses. There are countless other examples if we go looking for them, too. Next time you listen through an album or playlist, purposefully listen for how note duration implies pace.

The other way to vary the perceived tempo of a melody is to alter the length of the phrases. There is no rule that states that different phrases employed in a melody have to be the same length. If we take two phrases—one that lasts one measure and one that lasts two measures—it follows that we could hear the shorter phrase complete twice in the time it takes the longer one to complete once. A longer phrase will seem slower than a shorter one simply because it takes longer to complete.

That results in us perceiving the shorter phrase to be moving more quickly, although it isn’t really—it’s just shorter.

In Figure 6.17, we can see that the phrase in Example 1 is half the length of the phrase in Example 2 and is perceived as being quicker as a result. Obviously, the parameters that define the start and end of a phrase will need some close attention to be exact about this, and we will get to that issue in a few chapters’ time.

Figure 6.17

Perceived speed defined by phrase length.

This variety in pace can be a great tool for going from section to section in a song. Speeding up or slowing down the perceived velocity can work wonders in adding variety, and both of the techniques discussed can be very effective when employed carefully. We should always bear in mind that pace is relative, and that the first note lengths and phrase length will set the bar by which the others are measured. Because the listener has to get to the end of a phrase to know how long

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it is, adjusting note length will provide a more obvious and immediate variation in tempo than adjusting phrase length, but both have their place and value, especially when we consider that the bpm of a song will rarely vary during a song and that adjusting perceived tempo is generally the only option.

Playing with Stress Points

Not all meters have obvious metric stress points associated with them. For example, what about 5/4, where we have five quarter notes per measure? In Figure 6.18, we can see two metric stress options within 5/4. Example 1 could be referred to as

“2 and 3,” with the stress points marking out groupings of two beats followed by three beats (S–s– –). Example 2 could be classed as “3 and 2,” with the secondary stress placed on the fourth beat, thus creating a group of three beats followed by a group of two (S– –s–). Whichever of these patterns is used, the primary stress will be found on Beat 1, and the start point of the second group of notes will be marked by the secondary stress. There are other options available, where we could employ Ss––– or S–––s, but hopefully the point is already clear. We can shift the stresses around if we so choose. The same principle applies to different time signatures, too.

A 7/8 signature could be stressed as S–s––––, or S–––s––, or S––s–––, and so on.

Figure 6.18

Optional stress patterns in 5/4.

In addition to this, we don’t actually have to sound all the notes as defined by metric stress patterns at all. We’ve already acknowledged that rests are a valuable rhythmic tool, and they can be particularly effective when put in place of metric stress points. Intentionally leaving a stress point vacant can add a lot of interest to the rhythmic element of a melody. Writing a 4/4 melody that replaces S-s- with _-s- (where _ equals nothing) would be an example. Other possibilities include S-_-, S__-, and so on. See Figure 6.19 for an example of this, where the primary metric stress point on Beat 1 is absent. If you have never purposefully left a metric stress point vacant, try it. It can add a great deal of character to a melody and is a great advertisement for the “less is more” approach.

As well as experimenting with metric stress points, we can also experiment with what we will refer to as rhythmic stress.

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Figure 6.19

Missed beats.

PLAYING WITH RHYTHMIC STRESS

We can write any rhythm we like, and we can therefore form whatever stress patterns we like. Whether we construct them purposefully or they come through a moment of inspiration, melodic rhythms almost always employ a combination of notes that do and don’t fall on metric stress points. Those notes that don’t fall on the beat can all have stress placed upon them if we so choose. The meter doesn’t necessarily dictate the feel. It will restrict what is possible, but there are plenty of different feels available over just one time signature. As writers, we can intentionally manipulate the pulse to suit us.

Whereas the meter can dictate which notes will and won’t carry metric stress, a note can impose its own degree of stress regardless of where it lands on the meter.

It does this predominantly by being of a long length relative to those that surround it. The volume at which it is performed will obviously contribute too, but we will leave that out of this discussion. With this in mind, there’s nothing to say that we have to include rhythmic stress points in our melodies that tie in with the metric stress points. We can intentionally work off them, and this is where we can purposefully utilize the advantages brought by notes that have weak metric stress associations but lots of character as a result. In effect, their interest is found in how they pull against the beat and how they intentionally exploit the weak beats and subdivisions of measures. Take a look at Figure 6.20.

Figure 6.20

“Here is a tune.”

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The only difference between these two melodies is the placement of notes in relation to the meter. They both consist of the same notes of the same length and in the same order. Example 1 features notes entirely on the beat and therefore sounds relatively strong compared to Example 2, which consists of notes entirely off the beat. Whereas Example 2 sounds relatively insecure in comparison, it does sound considerably more interesting because its rhythm is working off the beaten path.

Walks in the forest are always more interesting when we walk off the path and explore a bit. Exploring the meter in this sense is what is happening here, and it’s where the interest is. If the path wasn’t there, then we wouldn’t know where the off-path opportunities were, so we need the meter to work against to identify what is and isn’t safe in this respect. This shows us that reference to meter and consideration of wandering off it are both important in writing interesting rhythmic phrases.

We can hear this effect in full force in the phrasing of some singers. Have you ever noticed how a lot of singers will sing around the rhythm of an actual melody rather than completely on it? Although it can get a bit annoying when it’s taken too far, the reason why they do this is to make it sound more interesting, and it usually is—

provided they are steering roughly around the straight and narrow and not deep into the jungle, never to return. Even performances of the same song by the same vocalist can sound different. A good example of this is evident in two of Paul Simon’s recorded renditions of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” If you listen to the original studio recording of this song on the album of the same name recorded in 1975, compared to the live recording of the same song recorded at the Simon and Garfunkel concert in New York’s Central Park in 1981, you can hear a marked difference in the timing of the melody throughout, but specifically on the second line:

“She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled.” If you have access to these versions, give them a quick listen. It’s also worth a listen to yet another rhythmic delivery of the same line in Simon’s MTV unplugged concert in 1992. Paul Simon is a great example of a vocalist who gives his melodic delivery a talkative feel. One of the ways he does this is by varying the timing of each note in relation to the metric divisions of the meter, and this technique is particularly obvious in these examples.

Syncopation

Wandering off the beaten path in this sense can be done in varying degrees of intensity. We can walk along the side of the path, or we can wade deep into the thicket.

When a melody purposefully wanders away from the meter and employs subdivisions of beats, the practice is known as syncopation, and generally speaking, the further off the beat the note wanders, the more character that note will achieve.

Feel and groove are directly affected by this distance. Many music software packages include some form of Groove Quantize feature, whereby the placement of each quantized (rhythmically adjusted) note is shifted a precise distance away from the metric stress points. If a note lands on a beat of a measure, it will not be moved, because doing so would adjust the rhythmic shape of the melody too much.

The notes that land on weaker subdivisions of the meter, however, can be shuffled around to add character without losing the melodic line’s identity. In Logic, for example, each level of groove quantization is named after a letter in the alphabet, and the further into the alphabet the letter appears, the further the note is shifted away from rigid rhythmic placement. In Figure 6.21, we can see what happens when the same melodic line is quantized to different extents.

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Figure 6.21

Here we can see the rhythmic placement of notes

being shifted further and further away from the

metric pulse as we progress further into the alphabet.

Very often, a syncopated melody will leave at least some metric stress points vacant in a phrase and plump for landing more favorably on weaker beats and subdivisions of them. In Example 2 in Figure 6.20, we can observe that all four of the tones are syncopated, but in reality, the majority of melodies will employ a combination of syncopated and straight tones in much the same way that they will incorporate confident and less secure tonal values. How effectively do you employ syncopation in your melodies? What about how you balance syncopated notes with those on the beat? Have you ever thought about it?

NOTE LENGTH COMBINED WITH PLACEMENT

So, having explored how note length and note placement are both contributing factors to the rhythmic strength and confidence of a note, we now need to question which of them has the final say in dictating that strength. For example, what can we say about notes that are relatively long but start on an off beat? By virtue of being relatively long, the longer notes will—even if they start on a relatively weak subdivision of the measure—end up sounding over a metric stress point, at which point they will be clocked. This clocking in can be seen as comparable to sampling, in which the note sounding at metric stress points will be sampled or clocked at that point, as if a snapshot of the melody had been taken. A note that passes over one of these metric stress points will assume the level of strength afforded to it by that point, at that point.

If we were to condense all of the information in a melody down into smaller chunks of information, the most sensible and manageable way to do it would be to chart the tonal course of the melody at set time intervals, and it would also make sense to let the meter define these moments in time. This is what happens in practice when we hear a relatively long note. Although it may start on a relatively weak subdivision of the meter and will gain a certain degree of character in doing so, it isn’t in no man’s land. Instead, assuming it is long enough to reach one, it will be clocked in at the next available metric stress point and will benefit from all the strength that point will afford it. So, we can see that a long syncopated note can get the best of both worlds. It will have both character and strength. See Figure 6.22 for some visual reinforcement.

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Figure 6.22

Clocking in.

Combining Tonal and Rhythmic Implications

With regard to just rhythmic considerations, the perceived strength of a note comes down to both the subdivision of the measure on which the note starts and the duration of the note in combination with the rest after it. When we combine this with tonal implications, we have to factor in the tonal confidence of each note employed, too. It’s a complicated business!

As in Figure 6.8 earlier, in Figure 6.23 we have the same rhythmic melody scored as 3/4 and 4/4. Unlike before, however, we have now removed implications of metric stress and added tonal values. When we hear it, this melody now sounds like it is in 4/4, even though it is exactly the same rhythm as that which was previously heard in 3/4. This is due entirely to the tonal confidence of the notes as dictated by their placement in the tonal hierarchy. The pitches in the melody imply that the tune is in C major, and the contour of the melody peaks on an F, which is Note 4

in that key. It is therefore a very insecure tone and will be heard as such in the sequence of notes.

Figure 6.23

Tonal confidence dictates the time signature

when all notes are stressed equally.

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If we were to keep interpreting this measure in 3/4, it would mean that the F

(Note 4) starts the second measure, and that means marrying a weak tone with a strong metric stress point. It sounds okay, but we will usually instinctively try to reconcile a strong tone to a strong beat if we have the chance. If we look at the aforementioned example as being in 4/4, we can see that the insecure F is now voiced on an equally insecure fourth beat of the measure. We can also observe that the first beat of the second measure is now reserved for an E (Note 3), which is a much more confident pitch and therefore feels more comfortable there. That’s why we hear it in 4/4—it’s because strong tones instinctively want to marry with strong beats and weaker tones with weaker beats.

So, a short melody has the power to influence time signature through the levels of strength implied in its tonal lineup. What about when we place metric stress points back into the equation so that they dictate a 3/4 feel? This will result in a carefully balanced and fair battle between the strength of metric stress versus the strength of tone. Take your seats while they do battle!

If we listen to the example scored in Figure 6.24, we discover that we hear it in 3/4 without any argument. This means that rhythmic stress comes out as the hands-down winner over tonal strength. Rhythm is therefore a dominant force in melody writing and should be considered and employed carefully and with full appreciation of its power. Honestly, do you give it that much attention? Really?

Figure 6.24

Metric versus tonal stress.

That battle was between rhythmic placement and tonal strength. What about note duration versus tonal confidence? We have already seen that the length of a note will have a bearing on how confident it appears to be, but will it stand up to tonal strength? The simple answer is that no, it won’t. On occasions when we want to hold a relatively insecure note for a long time, we need to appreciate that the note in question will always sound insecure, no matter how long we hold it for. It will just sound weak for a long time, and its insecurity will be accentuated as a result.

Solution: Assess and Understand the

Role and Effect of the Rhythms That We Employ

This exercise is very similar to the one found at the end of the previous chapter.

The obvious difference is that this time we are scrutinizing the rhythms that build the melody in addition to the pitches. In Figure 6.25, we can see the analysis applied to the same sections of the same song again, so that the comparison is obvious.

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Figure 6.25

Note that the three beats of rest are not factored into this analysis because they cover the end of the previous section. The rhythmic analysis of the chorus starts on the beat of its first note or at the beginning of the measure that starts the section.

Even if you don’t want to write out a chart like this one, it is very useful to at least make a mental note of the duration and rhythmic placement of each note and to assess how those factors tie in with tonal considerations. It’s not a quick process, but the results can be very interesting.

d Is there anything of interest with regard to the different note lengths employed? Are they notably different within each section? Do the rests (if any) contribute any emphasis?

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d What kind of tonal confidence is there on the relatively long or short notes?

Is note duration emphasizing the tonal character of any of them?

d Is there anything significant about the placement of notes in each section of the song or phrase? How effectively is syncopation being employed, if at all?

Does the melody always include notes on primary and secondary metric stress points?

d Is there anything of tonal significance about any notes that are placed on the strong metric beats? Do you find that the primary and secondary metric stresses are reserved for confident tones, or are they used to enhance the effect of more insecure notes?

So what can we say about the examples analyzed here? Both the verse and chorus make very limited use of the primary stress (Beat 1) in the meter. In fact, it’s notable just how much it is skipped, and this, in turn, makes the C# on the first beat of the first measure of the chorus stand out as giving the section a strong start.

This is especially significant when we note that the verse starts on a syncopated beat in comparison. It’s quite easy to see how this use of syncopation gives the melodic rhythm a lot of character. When we factor consideration of melodic motion into the equation here, too, we can observe that both the obvious leaps up to the C# in the chorus are further enhanced by an eighth-note rest before the C#

arrives. This is a good example of melodic motion and rhythmic forces working in tandem to give a confident note a standout position in the melody.

The use of the secondary level of metric stress is also significant in that the chorus reserves it entirely for an A (maximum tonal confidence in this key), whereas the verse uses it almost exclusively in conjunction with a B (considerably less secure in the tonal hierarchy). Although it may seem a minor observation, it makes a big difference to the perceived tonal confidence of each section, and this is important in giving the song variety. The fact that the most senior employed metric beat (Beat 3/secondary metric stress point) in the verse features a note from tonal confidence Tier 4 (the B) means that the strongest beat employed in each of the first three measures features the weakest note in the sequence. This fact does a lot to add character to the phrase, and the tonal insecurity of the note also acts as a springboard to push the song forward (in search of resolution).

With regard to note duration, the majority of the melody analyzed here is composed of notes and rests that last for less than a beat. Combined with the amount of syncopation involved, this helps the melody bounce along all the more effectively. It gives life and a sense of speed to the proceedings. The only exception to this observation about note length in the verse is in the fourth measure. Here, relatively long notes are used and are placed on the beat to further enhance how they are different to what has preceded them. The chorus employs quarter notes in a similar manner in that it, too, places them on the beat, and this makes them stand out from the rest of the phrase that is also largely syncopated.

The more we assess songs on this kind of level, the more we will learn from doing so. The odd lesson that we learn from our analysis will creep its way into our brains and start to have an effect on how we write when we embark on our next writing session.

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For example, just a few of the lessons I know that I personally can learn from this analysis are:

d Featuring an insecure pitch on a strong metric beat helps to add character and propel the melody forward.

d Juxtaposing relatively short and syncopated beats next to longer notes on the beat helps vary the perceived pace of a phrase.

d A melody doesn’t have to feature notes on the strongest metric stress points to sound strong.

I fully expect you not to have engaged with the analysis of this song as much as I have! You’re much better off scrutinizing your own material in the same way. It’s also worth putting some time and effort into lifting the lid on some of your favorite songs by other writers, too. You will probably be surprised by what you learn when you make the effort to have a good look.

We’re going to come back to melody writing in a few chapters. To do it justice, though, we need to have a good look at lyric writing first.

We’re Not Sure

Problem

What We’re Trying to Say

7

In this chapter, we are going to start looking at lyrics. That is, the words that we use in our songs and the way they fit together. Almost all the songwriting students I have taught are much happier to share their musical than their lyrical ideas. Without fail, melodic and harmonic ideas are happily discussed, but lyrics tend to remain much more in the shade and private. They are often personal, fashioned in the most private parts of our beings, and they expose what we feel and what we stand for to those who come into contact with them. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t always want to shout them from the rooftops.

Why, then, do we write them at all? Because unless they are written merely to fill a “layer,” they enable us to share what we think and feel, and they provide us with the platform to do this in a profound and measured way. They are built with the words that we use to communicate. They have the power to convey sentiments, beliefs, and feelings much more transparently than music can, and they provide a window into our heart, mind, and soul in no uncertain terms. They are a tool for expression, and even when our lyrics aren’t dealing with personal issues and are more observational and matter-of-fact in construction and delivery, they are still the layer of the song puzzle that is easiest and clearest for the listener to connect with.

Lyrics can be hard to share because they are deeply personal and make us vulnerable, or because we don’t consider them to be personal enough and therefore they are revealing of our inability to communicate in a poetic or profound way.

Either way, they are the most personal layer of a song and tend to be the most immediately revealing of the person who wrote them.

We won’t be looking at what is and isn’t suitable thematic material for lyrics in this book because that is entirely up to you. Let’s just assume that anything goes in that respect. We’re going to focus on how to develop the ideas that we have, how to fashion them into strong, purposeful groups of words, and how to deliver them to best effect. There is no one right way to go about building lyrics. What we have here is a possible model to work through, not the model. Feel free to pick and mix the ideas here to suit your approach the best.

Stanza

Before we go any further, we should acknowledge that the way we group words together will have a significant impact on how they are heard. More often than not, we tend to like to hear rhythmic groupings in lyrics. It’s one of the main things that separates lyrics from rambling speech. There is uniformity and order. Words are bundled together in phrases that work in tandem with melody and therefore in conformity with the meter that underpins them. Roughly translated as “stopping place,” the word stanza is used to refer to groups of lines that form a distinct unit 161

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with a larger lyric. In many songs, the word is used more commonly to refer to the lyrics that form the verses, but it can be used in a broader sense to refer to other sections too, such as the chorus and pre-chorus. As the translation suggests, stanzas are usually identified in a poem or lyric by the stops in between them on the page, and they tend to share a common metrical pattern and rhyme scheme, too.

We will deal with the more intricate detail associated with meter and rhyme more thoroughly in Problem 9, but in light of the role that order and structure play in making lyrical delivery effective, we will have an introductory look at how stanzas are built here.

Different-length stanzas have different names. The most common ones in songwriting are the couplet (two lines) and the quatrain (four lines), although the tercet (three lines) and cinquain (five lines), among others, are used, too. We can mark the metrical patterns in a stanza through the use of letters. It’s a very simple but very useful technique. A shared letter marks a shared rhythm. We should acknowledge here that this technique can also be used to notate rhyme schemes, but we are not looking at that just yet. Look at the lyrics in Figure 7.1 compared to those in Figure 7.2.

Figure 7.1

Rhythmic uniformity.

Figure 7.2

Lack of rhythmic uniformity.

The example in Figure 7.1 sounds like a lyric, and the one in Figure 7.2 doesn’t so much. It delivers the same information but not with rhythmic uniformity that so often accompanies lyrics. It all comes down to the fact that a lyric is musical and is designed to be heard rather than read. We don’t have to build our lyrics with a consistent and rigorously adhered to metrical structure, but it certainly helps marry the words to melody where we do. Some of Joni Mitchell’s songs are great examples of how a lyric can work (really well) without rhythmic unity. Listen to “A Case of You” as an example. It’s hard to pin down an immediate obvious repeating rhythmic

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pattern in the lyrics in that song. However, we should also acknowledge that part of the charm of these lyrics is in how they have a conversational quality and how they seem to fly in the face of rhythmic regulations. The way they defy standard practice is part of their appeal.

Phrasing is important, and although there are various ways of grouping lyrics, they will always remain bound by the anchor points of rhythmic meter, no matter how far they wander off it at times. A lyric will always work in conjunction with a melodic line and vice versa. It doesn’t matter which came first. Let’s have another look at the worldwide classic “Happy Birthday.” We know it as we see it in Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3

“Happy Birthday.”

There is order here. We can see that the third line jumps out a bit as being different, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there is clear structure. Now compare it to what we can see in Figure 7.4.

Figure 7.4

Alternative rhythmic phrasing of “Happy Birthday.”

In Figure 7.4, we have a new rhythmic structure in place. Instead of AABA, we now have ABAC. It still works rhythmically because the first and third lines repeat metrically, but it really doesn’t work lyrically. The pauses are all in the wrong places.

Rhythm alone isn’t enough. If the phrasing of the lyric doesn’t match the phrasing of the language, then we’ll have an odd flow of words that won’t sound right. A lyric generally needs to work communicatively and rhythmically, and it does this by adhering to natural points of breath or pauses (which will be there to facilitate breathing or for dramatic effect). The start and end points of a line in a stanza are marked by these pauses and by the natural cohesion and complete statement inherent in the words that form them. Throughout this chapter, we should remember that we shouldn’t just be concerned with what we are saying, but how we are saying it, and the way we phrase and group our words are integrally important parts of this process.

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What Is It Supposed to Say?

Sometimes they will be more figurative designs than soul-baring admissions and revelations, but lyrics usually exist to say something. It is true that there are plenty of people who don’t pay much attention to lyrics when they listen to songs, and that could be taken as a good reason to be satisfied with writing any old lyrics that will do. However, that’s not the best attitude to have when it comes to developing a craft, is it? Sure, there are some genres in which the lyrics are never going to be the focal point, but there’s still no harm in making sure that the lyrics are appropriate and fulfill their purpose as well as possible. We need to avoid just getting by with something substandard. Music alone can communicate, but not with the same clarity that words can. There are times when lyrics are written purely for their vowel sounds and the rhythm that they generate, but generally, they exist to inter-face between the singer and the listener.

An oddity of the delivery of lyrics is that the listener will often perceive them as coming from the heart and soul of the singer, even if the singer in question didn’t actually write them. Have you ever seen an actor in the street and seen him as the last character he played, rather than as himself? In the same way, it can be difficult to separate lyrics from the deliverer at times. If a lyric communicates well, and the singer relays it effectively, then it’s very easy to believe that the singer has experienced firsthand what he is singing about, even if he hasn’t. More often than not, a lyric needs to be believable, and we therefore need to consider who will be singing it. No matter how passionate we feel about irrigation techniques or whatever else as the writer, if the singer can’t sell it, it won’t work. Lyrics tend to communicate and create a bridge between the singer and listener, not so much between the writer and the listener. We should never forget this fact.

When we communicate in daily conversation, we generally hope that people will listen and engage with what we are saying. It’s the same with writing lyrics. We don’t want our listeners to engage with our carefully crafted words in the same way that they watch paint drying. We need it to be an event. There needs to be a click or a spark. We need them to get involved and take the words into their hearts, hopefully via their memory and imagination sparkplugs on the way.

Lyrics need to perform a balancing act between communication and expression.

Just saying something isn’t enough. Ideally, lyrics need to bundle communicative elements with a degree of finesse and class. If we want people to engage with our songs, then they need to be about something worth listening to, and they also need to be constructed in a manner that is worth listening to. There are therefore two things that we will spend our time looking at here. The first is what we shall refer to as the package. This refers to what is being communicated. The second is the delivery, which deals with the manner in which the package is conveyed. Take the following two examples:

1.

You’re pretty, and I like you a lot.

2.

Your magnetic face hugs me like a long-lost friend.

Both of these deliver the same package, but they deliver them very differently.

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The Package

If we’re having trouble writing lyrics, it’s very often due to the fact that we don’t have the first idea what the song in question is actually about or what we are trying to say. Does that ring any bells with you? Be honest about it. Sometimes a few lines appear to us, seemingly out of nowhere, and we are then driven slowly insane by the fact that we don’t know what to do with them.

THE NUCLEUS

I’d like to put it to you that every song we write should have what we will refer to as a nucleus—a central concept, event, or idea around which the rest of the song revolves. How many of your songs have one of those that you know of? If someone were to ask you what your latest song is about, how succinctly would you be able to answer? Having that answer is useful if we want to make purposeful strides toward finishing it. We can bravely struggle on, hoping for inspiration to hit if we want, but that’s making harder work of it than it needs to be. There will undoubtedly be moments when ideas develop along the way, and that’s fantastic when it happens, but we should generally know what we want to say by the time we have finished writing. We should have not just a rough idea of the theme, but a definite definable statement. That may sound a bit rigid and calculated, but asking ourselves, “What am I trying to say here?” can really help focus our efforts. Look at it this way. If you drop a full set of jigsaw pieces on the ground, it’s possible that a small percentage will land in the right place, but incredibly unlikely that more than one or two will. We need to purposefully put the other pieces (the remaining words) in place, and that’s why it’s good to have the overall picture before we set about finishing it off.

Having a picture to work toward makes the process easier and provides us with a measure of how we are progressing. If we hope the pieces will fall into place, that hope will regularly turn into frustration and what we tend to think of as writer’s block. It’s not block; it’s a complete lack of focus and goal. It’s true that we can and sometimes will write decent lyrics without this focus in place, but the whole process tends to be much more hit and miss. Ideas will fly out of our brains from time to time, but without clear direction, it will be hard to know which of those ideas we should take on and which we should ignore or file away for another occasion. We can start without a good idea of where we are going, but unless we know our destination before the journey finishes, we won’t know when we have arrived.

THE THEME

When it comes to the theme of our lyrics, we really can write about anything under the sun. We just need to make sure that we care about our subject matter. That’s the only useful advice that can be given in this department, really. We need to allow the idea to incubate in our lives for a while. Most actors find that they give a more convincing performance if they saturate themselves in their character’s life for a decent amount of time. Often they will study what makes the character tick and do whatever they can to get inside the character’s head. If we want our lyrics to really connect, then we need to do a similar thing with our themes. There’s nothing wrong with just writing from a distance, as it were, but integrity matters to the

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listener, and genuine insight and experience will do a lot to strengthen and relay a lyric with enhanced focus and solidity. Even if the lyric is intended for an immediately accessible and relatively predictable pop song, someone with a genuine connection with the subject matter is going to do a better job of writing them than someone who doesn’t have that connection.

FINDING THE IDEA

We’re going to spend the majority of our time in the coming chapters looking at how to develop the theme once we have it. The only restrictions on what we write about are those that we impose on ourselves. The main tip here is that we should engage with what is going on around us. If we wait for our lyrical prey to show up for supper, then we might have a long wait. It’s much better to go on the hunt.

What we believe and do is framed by what surrounds us, and we should pay it due attention. We should listen to conversations around us and try to get into the heads of the people we hear. Public transport is a plentiful resource for fascinating conversations, as are radio talk shows. It’s amazing what some people think. We should really engage in conversation with people who interest us. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions or to change our mind. We should read—stories, poems, screenplays, encyclopedias, and anything that someone else has written to communicate what is in his head. I know of people who are not beyond taking a notebook and pen with them to the cinema so that they can write down key lines that generate a reaction in them. If we purposefully look to develop our understanding of the world around us, we will learn, and in the act of processing new discoveries, ideas will spark. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to go looking. Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and company all knew the value of looking for inspiration and subject matter. How would they have developed as painters if they just sat in a room, waiting for the muse to hit? The same principle applies to lyricists. We need to live so that we can learn from our experiences, and then write them down.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

Once we have our nucleus, we need to think about whether it’s worth writing about. Bob Dylan once said, “For every man, woman, and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated.

There’s enough songs.”

He makes a good point! Do people care what we are writing about? The most common themes are as universal as the experiences that trigger them. It’s no coincidence that lots of songs are about falling in love or breaking up because there are lots of people who fall in love and have their hearts broken. There are few (if any) songs about pasta sauce because people don’t generally experience pasta sauce in a manner that affects their lives.

If we want people to care about our lyrics, then we need to give them something worth caring about. We have already acknowledged the relationship between breadth and depth in Problem 2. Intensity of detail and scope for personal interpretation are inversely proportional, as shown in Figure 7.5. This figure is not drawn to scale, but it does illustrate the overall principle.

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Figure 7.5

Detail versus interpretation.

A fairly nondescript song about falling in love will appeal to masses of people.

A song about falling in love during the Christmas holidays will appeal to fewer people, but will appeal on a deeper level to those remaining. A song about falling in love with Derek during the Christmas holidays will appeal to very few people, but will almost certainly capture the full attention of those for whom it is relevant.

The real skill is in being able to address something that many people care about, but doing it in such a way that makes it seems fresh, unique, and interesting. This way, there is breadth and depth, and everyone wins. The delivery of the nucleus is therefore as important as, if not more important than, the nucleus itself.

The Delivery

Have you ever had an idea for what you thought would make a great lyric, written it down, and then come back to it a few days later to discover that it was, in fact, a terrible idea? It’s a common ailment for which there is a possible remedy. Sadly, a common reason for this problem is inebriation, for which there is no immediate fix! However, another possibility is that you have failed to capture the context that made the lyric work in the first place.

CONTEXT

Context frames an experience. Shooting a “three-pointer” in your own backyard on a Saturday afternoon is one thing; shooting one to win in the dying seconds of a major game in front of thousands of people is something else entirely. Similarly, playing and singing a song on the guitar in the privacy of a bedroom is very different than singing the same song with the same guitar onstage. Surroundings, time, and place can make something into something it isn’t elsewhere.

Ideas are framed by experience, emotion, sentiment, and a vast array of other things. When we write down groups of assorted letters, we aren’t just recording words and sounds; we are endeavoring to capture thoughts, feelings, and snippets of daily life, and these fragments are multidimensional. They are defined by a massive array of things that come from all sorts of different angles, and the context that supports an idea is often as important as the idea itself. If we fail to capture all that holds it up, then it’s not surprising that it can lose the initial magic it once held when we first wrote it down.

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We don’t just hear words; we process them and then start to feel them. When we do this, they cease to be just sounds, and they become triggers of sounds and sights, as well as taste and touch. They act as the means by which we can transfer experience from one mind to another. When we are capturing the context of an idea, we should capture as much of it as possible. We should capture all the senses that are relevant and frame the experience with what preceded it and where we were, both physically and emotionally, at the time.

It’s important that we get the listeners on board so that they feel something, even if it’s not exactly what we expected or intended them to feel. We need our words to be living things that crawl into the darkened, hidden places of people’s heads so that they not only have an impact, but they hang around until something fires them up and into action again. It’s perfectly possible and acceptable to write lyrics that just sound good, but why stop there when they can be so much more?

THE FACT AND THE FEELING

Once we have our theme in place, we need to get down to the nitty-gritty of building a lyric around it. Fundamentally, there are two modes of approach to any given theme. There’s the fact that details what is going on, and there is the feeling that deals with how someone thinks or feels about that fact. In all that we write, we should always have these two approaches at hand. These fundamentally different approaches will provide us with the variety needed to make the lyric interesting and the ability to paint context and bring it to life.

The feeling will connect with the listener. It will stimulate emotion and trigger a response. The fact is a bit more standoffish with regard to emotive qualities, but will provide the context in which the feeling can flourish. Both are needed to balance the lyric and convey the whole story. Feelings only really mean something when we know what they are relating to, and facts only really come to life when we know what people make of them. We need to qualify fact with feeling and vice versa, and we should always be prepared to shift between them as we progress through a lyric.

Determining what is fact and what is feeling isn’t an exact science. The basic principle is that if a line provides detail and no kind of human reaction to it, then it’s just fact. If a line details any kind of response to the fact, then it includes feeling, too. It is perfectly possible for a line to include both. As an example, Figure 7.6 shows the lyrics for the verse, pre-chorus, and chorus of a song entitled “Close Enough.”

In these lyrics, we can see that feeling does not feature until the pre-chorus, where it appears just before the chorus. It helps the fact that has dominated up until that point come to life a little bit. It’s not possible to categorically state which sections in songs should include the fact and which should include the feeling. It’s perfectly possible to include both in each section and to swap them around a bit.

It tends to be a good idea, however, to ensure that both approaches are employed to offset each other regardless of where we choose to let them work their magic.

The variety that they bring can help create a sense of journey and involvement.

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Figure 7.6

Fact and feeling in

“Close Enough.”

THE FOUR W’S

Whereas the feeling deals with response, the fact deals with detail and is where we should make efforts to record the context of an experience. In addition to intentional employment of each of the senses, we can think about what we shall henceforth refer to as the four W’s. Some people will be involved to some extent, so who are they? The song is about something, so what is that something? That something has happened or is going to happen at some point, so when is it? And finally, the something in question happened somewhere, so where is it, was it, or will it be?

I have purposefully left the why out of the equation for the simple reason that its absence generally helps involve listeners. When they are left to interpret that element themselves, it can be beneficial in aiding association. Feel free to involve it if you so choose, but I personally find its absence to be more effective.

Purposefully working our way through these angles can help us focus the manner in which we record context and detail. Take the lyrics in Figure 7.7 as an example.

They paint a picture and give a fair bit of insight into what is going on. We know that the who is a pretty blonde 17-year-old girl. The what is vaguely referenced through the fact that she has done something. The when was seven long days ago, and the where was somewhere else because she came back.

Figure 7.7

Including the four W’s.

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Degrees of Clarity

Obviously, we can provide some degree of context without painting the whole picture. For example, “This is where I think” includes the word “where” but doesn’t do anything to reveal where it is. It puts the where in the picture, but very vaguely.

It may make us wonder where the where is, but it doesn’t help answer the question.

“This is where I lay my head” gives a stronger degree of clarity because it is likely to refer to a place of sleep or rest. It’s still vague, but not as vague as it could be.

We don’t have to give away the whole picture up front. We can purposefully hold a little (or a lot) back. We can set the scene without spelling it all out in graphic detail. For the purposes of this book, we shall henceforth convey the degree of clarity through the number of ticks employed in each column where appropriate. One tick means vague, and three ticks means clear (see Figure 7.8).

Figure 7.8

This is where….

There are benefits to leaving some of the W’s unanswered or only vaguely referenced. The first of these revolves around curiosity. Where a vague reference is included carefully, it can intrigue the listener regarding what on earth the song is about. The interest fuels the listener’s appreciation of the song and gets him involved through inquisition.

The second benefit involves personal interpretation. As I have already acknowledged through the absence of why, vague details will usually require listeners to fill in the gaps themselves. This is where we can provide opportunities to create the listener’s own depth of meaning. Have you ever read a book and then watched the film adaptation, only be disappointed that the film’s director didn’t quite get it right? Words can only describe so much. Our minds and imaginations fill in the blanks regarding the way people look and what they sound like for us. If we pin down every element of detail, then we rob the listener of the opportunity to get involved on that level. If we leave it a little vague and paint the rough image, then listeners can sharpen the picture in their own minds. Leaving room for personal interpretation also means leaving space for listeners to enter into the song.

They can wander around the context, and you let them have a share in the story or experience.

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Who

There are various approaches to referring to who is involved.

First Person (I, We, Me, Myself, My, Mine, Us, Ourselves, Our)

When we write a first-person narrative, we immediately provide the listener with very personal and direct access to the experience. By definition, this approach rules out an external perspective, and if we are successful in getting listeners on board, they can effectively become the character singing. Where it works, this can enforce a powerful connection between listeners and the song. The listeners cease to become onlookers, and the song starts to surround them.

Second Person (You, Yourself, Your)

If a song is written specifically to communicate to someone, then second-person narrative enables that connection to be fairly explicit. “You are amazing” and

“You smell” are fairly direct statements. Whereas the use of first person enables the listener to become the singer, second person offers the listener the option of becoming the singer (singing at someone else) or being on the receiving end. We can side with the singer and apply the song to our own life by using the song to communicate to someone else (such as is often the case with mix tapes/mix CDs/especially prepared playlists given to a loved one), or we can side with the receiver and listen to the song as if the singer were singing to us.

Second person provides a versatile approach to conveying an idea, but there is no guarantee how the receivers will use the song and apply it to their own lives. Its effectiveness depends considerably upon the theme of the song. If it’s about love, for example, then it can be very effective because that’s generally something we all relate to. If the song deals with a personal failing or something similar, however, it can be less suitable unless we want the listeners to feel as if they are being told off!

For example, let’s assume that a song is about learning to develop patience. In the first person, a very simple line such as, “I need to be more patient” will work fine.

It’s up to listeners to decide whether they want to become the I and apply it to themselves. They can keep at a distance from it if they want to and assume it deals with something that just applies to someone else. In second person, “You need to be more patient” leaves listeners in a different position. To engage with the lyrics, listeners will either need to accept the words being sung at them, or they will need to think of someone for whom the words are relevant. Using the second person is therefore an option worth considering where possible, but not always the best way forward.

Third Person (He, She, It, They)

Some subject matter naturally lends itself to being dealt with in third person. If we are writing about an inanimate object, for example, we would usually refer to it as it and not directly to it as you, nor would we claim to be it, as in the use of I. We can from time to time explore these sorts of ideas, but we shall get to the specifics of that in the next chapter.

When we are writing about a living, breathing thing such as a human being, a lyric written in third person provides the safety of remoteness and distance, and this can be a good or a bad thing depending on what we want to achieve. If a lyric

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is written in third person, then the singer and listener are both in the same position in that they are not at the hub of the action and neither one is the focal point of the line. It’s an observational approach and can be very useful in conveying a story from a vantage point. Whereas first and second person approaches to a line require the listener to be involved in some sense, third person enables the listener to eaves-drop from a distance. As an example of this, let’s take a line about someone going away. A first-person approach would be “I’ve gone” or “I’ve left.” Listeners can either assume the character of the singer and become the person who has left or assume that they are hearing someone else saying these words. Either way, the personal I’ve in the line draws listeners in because they are immediately at the hub of the action and are in the presence of the focal character of the line. A second-person approach would be something like “You’ve gone.” This approach places listeners at the hub of the action too, although this time they are either being sung at or in the presence of both the deliverer and receiver of the line. This is because the you to whom the line is directed is present to hear it. The third-person approach of

“She’s gone” makes it possible for the listener to be out of the company of the person who has left. The approach keeps its distance from the hub of the action and is an approach that is well worth considering if you have never tried it. How much thought have you put into varying first, second, and third person? Do you ever consider changing your first ideas when it comes to dealing with the who in your lyrics?

When and Where

In addition to thinking about how we deal with the who, we should pay some careful attention to how we deal with the when and where, too.

When

We don’t need to explore this W too much. Suffice it to say that the perspective from which we relay information doesn’t have to remain fixed. We can write from the present so that the listener can experience the song with the singer in real time.

We can write in the past tense, so the listener can remember and reflect with the singer, or we can write in future tense, so the listener can anticipate and join the singer in looking forward. Think about the way that you employ these different perspectives. How much variation is there in the way that you have used them up until now, from song to song and section to section?

Where

We need to consider whether we are writing about here (wherever that may be) or somewhere else. Here provides more of an immediate and direct connection with the listener, whereas somewhere else provides a buffer of distance. We can obviously intensify these factors with different combinations of the other W’s, too. Past tense will be further distanced by a “somewhere else” approach, and present tense will be even more closely experienced through the employment of a “here” approach, for example. Combine these approaches with a first-, second-, or third-person approach, and it becomes evident just how much we can change the manner in which the listener experiences the theme of the lyric.

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What

We have already considered the importance of writing about something worthwhile, but it’s also helpful to consider writing about something that has mileage.

Think of developing a lyric as drilling for oil. Just as it makes sense to drill where we know there is a lot of oil, it’s also sensible to dig around a lyrical theme that affords us plenty of material and angles. We shall refer to the technique as 3D writing, hopefully, for obvious reasons.

We should generally try to avoid working with themes that could be considered one- or two-dimensional, with very limited angles of approach. It can be very difficult to work with “seen it once, seen it all” themes such as these, and no one says we have to. If we can think of three-dimensional themes that afford us the opportunity to come at them from various angles of attack, then a lot of the hard work of developing the framework of a lyric can be completed very quickly. The beauty of a 3D theme is that when we have seen it once, we haven’t seen it all. It’s true that no theme is truly two-dimensional in this sense and that we can always find fresh angles of approach, but it is fair to acknowledge that some themes have much more mileage in them than others. The process of developing a 3D idea is like carrying out an angle-focused rather than a content-focused brainstorm.

It’s about identifying different perspectives on the same theme, and not yet about the information and ideas that will give the finer detail. That will come later in the process. If we look at Figure 7.9, we can see a graphic representation of the difference between an obvious 2D idea and a multidimensional 3D one. A practical example of this angle would be working with an initial idea, such as “Get out of the way.” “Get out of the way because you’re in it and you’re annoying someone”

would be the obvious 2D way to approach this line. However, a little dig around can lead to the other angles of attack, such as, “Change lanes so that you can follow a new path,” or “Get out of the way because I don’t want you to get flattened.” These are basic examples, but hopefully you get the picture. We shouldn’t settle for, and work with, just one angle of attack without at least exploring others first. An example later in this chapter will detail another example of fishing for angles like this.

Figure 7.9

2D and 3D themes.

A 3D theme is flexible and adaptable in that the surface area of each face of the idea can vary, where different-sized faces represent different values of importance.

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See Figure 7.10. A lyrical theme can literally be given new depth through the employment of a new face, and variation in the size of each face can therefore add interest in itself. We don’t have to give every angle of approach the same amount of time and prominence. With the example of “Get out of the way” in mind, this means that we could focus on the idea of changing lanes and just touch upon getting out of someone’s way every now and then, or vice versa. Sometimes, ignoring an obvious angle is a more powerful or interesting statement than acknowledging it. We can spin our theme and choose to completely ignore some angles if we want to. This results in us looking in detail at one of its faces that may not have been looked at in much depth before. There are times when we can get so caught up in how we are going to say what we want to say, that we don’t stop to think about what else we could actually be saying. How much thought do you put into exploring new angles of attack when you are working with your lyrical themes?

Figure 7.10

Flexible and adaptable.

Let’s start building a lyrical theme from here on in. I had an initial spark of an idea recently to work with the title “Easier Done Than Said,” which inverts the well-known saying. We’ll work with this and see what we get. Just a brief initial dig around this theme provides several angles of approach. We can focus on what has been said. We can focus on what hasn’t been said. We can look at what has been done. We can look at what hasn’t been done. We can look at the issue of putting off conversation, and so on. We can then go on to choose which of these angles we want to work with, and how and where we want to deliver them. We’ll use this example as a work in progress through the coming chapters and apply principles to its development as we move along.

COMBINING FACT AND FEELING

Once we have an awareness of all these different approaches to a theme, we can start to select which combinations of them we will use as we progress through the song. We don’t have to employ every combination under the sun. As long as we carefully apply variation and seek to include more than one obvious angle of attack, our lyrics will start to take on a purposeful and effective structure.

If we revisit the chorus to “Close Enough,” shown in Figure 7.11, as an example, we can see that the verse is entirely driven by the what. This makes it very straightforward and unemotional. When we get to the pre-chorus, some who, where, and feeling are introduced to open up the context a bit, and then we get to the chorus,

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where we have who, what, and where contributing much more significantly than before. There is variation in the employment of these elements from section to section, and the lyric progresses effectively as a result.

Figure 7.11

More detailed analysis of the combination of fact and feeling in “Close Enough.”

This is not the end-all and be-all of lyrical construction. There is a lot more to it (as we will discover over the coming pages), but it’s a good tool to assess the variety that we are employing in our delivery. Have you ever given much consideration to exactly how you vary the detail in the delivery of your lyrics? If we are stuck for a new approach or angle within a song, we can look to see which boxes are left unchecked or which angles of approach have been vaguely hinted at, and then work with that information. Obviously, we don’t have to write it all down like this, but it’s worth at least asking ourselves these kinds of questions. I mentioned earlier that there are times when it isn’t necessarily very clear whether feeling is implied along with fact. If you’re not sure, then don’t stress about it! The whole point of this process is that it enables us to identify the mechanics of how we are building variety into our context and perspective. The main thing to look for is variety. If that is there, then we’re well on the way to crafting an interesting lyric. If we start with this sort of technique, it’s also a good way to give our lyrics structure and a framework to build within. It can help focus our ideas and development.

Working Toward the Structure of the Song

Now that we have been through looking at the kind of variation we can include in the delivery of our lyrical package, we are going to look a little more closely at the specifics of using this information to build each section of our songs.

VERSE

When I was younger and I was studying art (because that’s what you used to do if you wanted to be a rock ’n roller), I created a portrait of Paul McCartney using small squares of paper to act as enlarged pixels. Close up, it just looked like squares of paper, but from a distance of more than 10 meters, it revealed his face.

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I liked it a lot. It was nice. The reason I am telling you about it here is because it’s a good analogy for the different sections of songs. Here in the verse section, we can concentrate on the close-up shot. It gives us a lot of detail but doesn’t reveal the grand scheme of what the detail is contributing to. See Figures 7.12 and 7.13.

Figure 7.12

There’s a lot of detail, but we can’t

quite make out what it’s all there for.

Figure 7.13

Detail, but no overall picture.

These lyrics in Figure 7.13 don’t point out any nucleus material. They create all sorts of images and ideas, but they don’t pin down anything because we can’t quite make out what it’s all about. It works effectively as verse material. We are left to wonder what it’s about because we are only focusing in on a few elements of something, and it’s not enough to paint the full picture.

The verse should say enough to keep the listener interested, but not so much that it steals the chorus’s thunder! We need it to include enough detail to be interesting, but not all the detail it possibly could. A good way to do this is to paint the context, to provide insight into the character(s), the moment, the theme, and so on. It doesn’t have to include everything, but it should set the focal point of the chorus on solid and referenced ground when it appears.

If our lyric has some holes in it, then the listener will often want to know what will fill them. So, leaving holes can generate expectation and help propel the lyric forward. The “and?” element comes into play. We then get to decide whether we want to fill in those holes and where we will fill them. This, in turn, helps build the listener’s interest and helps give the writer something to focus his attention on.

Everyone wins. Purposeful employment of the four W’s will help us generate this curiosity and expectation. For example, each line in the quatrain in Figure 7.14

deals with each W but doesn’t give it all away.

There is undeniably some curiosity generated here. Although the what is referred to, its identity is kept a mystery. We get an idea that “she” has put “us all” through something, but we are left to wonder what that might be and who “us” refers to.

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Figure 7.14

Leaving some holes.

The lyrics also give us very vague detail about the where. We don’t know anything other than the fact that she “came back.” Where from? Where is she now? There are holes that need filling. They can be filled either by the listener’s imagination or by the words in subsequent sections. The vague nature of these lyrics means that they leave us somewhere to go in developing the rest of the song. It’s all good verse material.

Obviously, not every one of the W’s has to be addressed immediately. Even though we can subtly hint at some of them, there’s nothing wrong with leaving them out completely. It maybe that the opening verse just deals with the where, and that the who, what, and when are saved for later. We may also choose to focus entirely on saying how we feel about something while purposefully giving as little information as possible with regard to what has generated those feelings. That approach would also leave the listener’s imagination some work to do.

Beyond this, we can also build with the opposite of one or more of the W’s, too, so instead of focusing on the what or where, we can focus on what isn’t or where it isn’t. For example, take a look at the verses of “All about Your Love,” shown in Figure 7.15.

Figure 7.15

The verse in “All about Your Love.”

This example steers well clear of the where, when, and who and just deals with the what, and it’s the what that really needs clarifying later. In this case, it’s followed by the chorus, as shown in Figure 7.16.

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Figure 7.16

The chorus in “All about Your Love.”

There is no obvious feeling spelled out in here at all. It’s all fact, but the difference between the four W’s (the introduction of the who) means that the fact and feeling distinctions aren’t particularly missed. The introduction of the who is enough to give the lyric variety and progression.

When we are working with a 3D theme, the verse is where we need to work the angles. We can come at the theme from a different viewpoint in each verse, and those viewpoints can be informed by varying the W or the angle within that W.

We’ll develop this idea a little further in the exercise at the end of this chapter.

CHORUS

Here in the chorus, shown in Figure 7.17, we see the pixelated image from a distance so that it ceases to become a collection of dots and becomes something intelligible.

Figure 7.17

It’s all there. There may not be much in the way of

fine detail, but it’s clear what it is and what it’s about.

Continuing from the mystery lyric example in Figure 7.13, we could now have a chorus something like what we see in Figure 7.18.

Figure 7.18

A self-sufficient (and fruity) chorus.

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This sounds like a chorus (albeit a fairly pointless one featuring a particularly dull and uninventive rhyme). It now qualifies the ramblings about jelly and not being smelly from earlier. It’s definite and stands on its own. It’s also completely in focus. There’s nothing left to figure out. It’s all there. Chorus material should generally work on its own. It will benefit from some additional context, but in itself, it will paint a complete picture. As always, there will be exceptions, but this is the general way of things.

The way we are working through these sections may make it sound like the chorus lyrics are crafted as an afterthought to fill gaps in the verse, but that isn’t what is happening at all. The chorus is the nucleus and summary of the song. It can come as an afterthought, but it should only stay if it doesn’t sound like one. Typically, the presence of every detail in the surrounding sections of the song should be justified and qualified by the chorus. Employment of different elements of fact and feeling should be carefully weighed. We want to give as much information as possible to give the song coherence and focus, but not too much if we want the song to be interpretable by the listener. In Figure 7.16, the chorus line “It’s all about your love” is open to interpretation largely because the where and when are left out, and the who is vague. If they were included, there would obviously be a lot more detail, and an increase of context generally results in a decrease in varied interpretation.

TITLE

A chorus will usually contain the title to sharpen the focus, and the placement of the title is very important. It’s perfectly possible and acceptable to leave the title out of the chorus, but doing so really doesn’t do the song any favors on the radio or in identifying itself to those who hear it. Generally speaking, it not only makes sense to include the title in the chorus, but also to make it really obvious. There are two places that stand out as being particularly effective—at the start and at the end. If we think of the progression of a lyric or melody as a journey from one place to the next, we can appreciate that the start and end points are those of most significance. The A and B in the A to B are what really matter. The nature of the journey between them is important, but not the reason for the journey itself.

Placing the title at the end of a phrase enables the words that precede it to be open to a degree of interpretation. Take the example in Figure 7.19.

Figure 7.19

Title placement 1.

The first three lines could be about many different things. The line at the end determines the meaning. Saving the title for the end encourages involvement from the listener, and that in turn encourages the imagination to get firing.

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Placing the title at the start of the phrase limits the scope for interpretation. It’s like giving the answer to a question first and then explaining the workings of how you got to that answer afterward. However, it can work really well, especially when the title is repeated at the end. The words that follow the title line act as a reflection of sorts. It’s the “Here’s the title line” and then the “and let me tell you why” approach. If we flip the placement of the title in the previous example, we get what we see in Figure 7.20. It loses some of its interest factor and becomes more factual communication. It provides us with a no-nonsense, up-front approach.

Figure 7.20

Title placement 2.

More often than not, if a song has a title line in the middle of the chorus, the line will also appear at the start or end, and its placement in the middle enforces its position elsewhere. A title can appear like this when a chorus is actually formed by two repeats of a stanza with different content other than the title line each time.

Take the example of “That’s the Way It Works” in Figure 7.21. The chorus is built with a repeated tercet that includes the title at the end each time, so it appears at the end of the third and sixth lines.

Figure 7.21

Title placement 3.

You should be prepared to shift the title line around the chorus to ensure that it gets the prominent position it deserves. It may be that once is enough, but there’s no harm in repeating it in various places and seeing what the result sounds like.

There are no rules, just things to try.

PRE-CHORUS

The function of the pre-chorus is to build up to the chorus, so the lyrics should ideally drive in that direction. Take a look at Figure 7.22.

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Figure 7.22

There’s a balance between detail and the full picture.

We’re not necessarily sure where we’re heading, but the

context is becoming clearer.

If we now insert the pre-chorus into the ongoing example of “All about Your Love,” we get what you see in Figure 7.23.

Figure 7.23

The added pre-chorus in “All about Your Love.”

Here we can see the shift in employment of W’s taking place in the pre-chorus in preparation for the chorus. The who is becoming clearer and employs first person before the second-person narrative of the chorus. The pre-chorus is a good midway stage between a zoomed-in pixel fest and a complete picture. A shift in employment of fact and feeling will move us toward a position with more clarity and purpose as it will start to check more boxes and therefore reveal more of the picture in doing so. It doesn’t have to include new W’s, though. It might just adjust the degree of clarity that is in there or employ a new angle within it. Whichever way we do it, we should generally start to fill in some holes when we get to our pre-chorus—assuming our song has one at all, that is!

If we continue with the development of the song about oranges from Figure 7.18, we could have something like what we see in Figure 7.24.

Here, the pre-chorus introduces some who and a little more what with reference to fruit. It’s still not entirely obvious, but the picture is becoming clearer. The first person is also introduced in the final line of the pre-chorus, indicating that the song is a personal account of something too, and the feeling comes subtly into play to enforce that it’s more than mere observation. It is, in fact, a personal ode to oranges.

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Figure 7.24

The pre-chorus starts to fill some holes.

MIDDLE SECTION

In its role as a section that provides variation, a middle section will benefit from an exploration of as-yet-uncharted fact and feeling. An entirely new perspective is generally a good thing to involve at this point. This is where we can really benefit from the 3D song title we mentioned earlier, because it should readily offer up some new angles. With regard to the who, for example, we could start to look at the event or characters from the vantage point of someone other than the protag-onist up until that point. We could also start to look back or forward to vary the when. We could start to look at it as something here instead of over there, and vice versa.

Figure 7.25 shows an example of another song that employs an obvious shift in the middle section in this respect. It’s called “I Need to Be with You.” (Note that only one of two verses is included here, but the second follows the same pattern as the first.)

Here we can see that the middle section includes a notable change in its employment of W’s, with a more generous employment of the who and the where than previously in the song. In addition, it should also be noted that the only line up until the middle section that includes anything other than fact and the what is the title line. The inclusion of the feeling at this point helps to enhance the title line’s presence further, too.

Continuing with the orange song, we could have a middle section like what we see in Figure 7.26.

This introduces a new when, in the future, and we start to talk to the orange rather than about it. The shift is quite obvious and purposefully utilizes the different W’s to have the effect.

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Figure 7.25

A middle section providing fresh use of W’s.

Figure 7.26

The middle section purposefully draws on as yet unused W’s.

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Conclusion

There are many different ways to go about developing the structure of a lyric.

Those included here are simply suggestions of one way to be quite calculated about it. It is entirely possible to write an entire lyric that works fantastically without ever intentionally thinking about any of these things. They are, however, very useful in getting us over little hurdles that can interrupt our flow. Personally, I don’t tend to purposefully investigate my employment of the fact and feeling until I’m about halfway through writing. Considering them at that point helps me acknowledge where my lyrics have taken me thus far and where I have left to explore. It can be a very revealing and immediately beneficial process to go through, and it only takes a minute or two to complete. Remember that you don’t have to draw all these diagrams out!

Solution: Lyric Mapping

Lyric mapping is a process much like essay planning. It can seem a little tedious up front, but it is incredibly beneficial, not only in helping us figure out what we want to include in the song, but also where we will include it. I have included an example in Figure 7.27 for the working title “Easier Done Than Said,” which appeared earlier in this chapter. Notice that it doesn’t include every section that it could at this stage (there is no pre-chorus, for example), and that the sections aren’t necessarily in the correct chronological order. None of that matters at this stage. This is a preliminary brainstorm of sorts that deals solely with identifying angles of attack and the sorting of initial ideas. It acts as a divisional sorting application for designating different ideas to different sections.

Figure 7.27

Lyric map for “Easier Done Than Said.”

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Notice how each section has space to designate the level of clarity within each approach (room for checks) and also enables us to define the angle of approach from within most of the Ws. The arrows in the When column represent past (left arrow), present (down arrow), and future (right arrow). The arrows in the Where column represent here (down arrow) and somewhere else (right arrow).

It may look incredibly involved and cumbersome, but it really doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to write all this out to be able to think about it, any more than we need to score out a melody to write a decent one. What it does do, however, is sharpen our understanding of the angle at which we come at our themes. We can ignore all the check boxes and just write the angle of approach in each box and leave it at that, if we want to. It doesn’t have to be this involved, but going through the process once or twice is helpful in getting these sorts of considerations to infiltrate into our daily process of developing ideas. Once we have a plan, we don’t have to stick to it, either, but it does provide us with a definite starting point.

We can intentionally mark out the plan of the lyric first (like in Figure 7.27) with a carefully structured approach to revealing different pieces of information in different places, or we can use it as a template to fill with ideas as they occur. In reality, a combination of both approaches at the same time tends to work most effectively and can serve as a really useful tool in growing an idea.

On the accompanying website (www.courseptr.com/downloads), there is a

downloadable template of this form waiting to be filled in. Have a go at digging around a title or theme of your choosing. Try to pick a 3D option that offers up plenty of ideas, and try to establish a plan of attack. You can then use it as a base camp for the journey that lies ahead. If you struggle to find a starting point, work with either “move over” or “in between” as themes.

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We Take Too Long

Problem

to Say Too Little

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In addition to the importance of knowing what we want to say, we also need to pay close attention to the manner in which we say it. In this chapter, we are going to explore various techniques that should help us deliver our lyrical package effectively and succinctly.

Denotations and Connotations

Words have meanings. That’s obvious, but there are also different types of meaning that are worth paying attention to. Most obviously, every word has a specific denotation. This is the meaning that it is given in a dictionary. For example, a one-way ticket can be defined as “a rite of passage for just the outward journey” or something similar. In addition to this, we also need to appreciate that some words also have connotations. These carry an additional sense associated with the word, separate from what the word explicitly names or describes. A one-way ticket has additional connotations above and beyond its denotation. It can imply getting away from it all, escaping, not coming back, getting a new start, and so on.

We should always consider the additional connotations and implications of words we use, because they enable us to condense information. Folks who write novels get hundreds of pages to work out the story. Lyricists have just hundreds of words, if we’re lucky! Factor into this the importance and need for repetition, and the word count drops even further. Words and phrases that mean more than they literally say due to their connotations are therefore immensely valuable.

Synonyms

How much time do you spend selecting the right words? We need to be sure that the words we pick out of a vast lineup of potential contenders are the most appropriate and that they pack as much of a punch as possible. A thesaurus is a fantastic tool for lyricists. However, if you don’t own one, don’t fret about it. Every word processing package I know has one built in.

Thesauri provide lists of words that all mean pretty much the same thing, otherwise known as synonyms. For lyricists, what makes one of these synonyms more appropriate than the others revolves around various things. Sometimes, one of them will provide a rhyme that we are after. Other times, one of the words will have specific connotations from which we can benefit, or it will have a certain number and pattern of syllables in it that fill a rhythmic gap in a line.

Let’s start with the connotations. Take the word small. We all know what that means. But let’s put it through a thesaurus and see what we get: little, minute, tiny, diminutive, miniature, undersized, trivial, slight, insignificant, lesser, and so on.

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These words all say “small,” and then a little bit more besides. “Diminutive” says not only that it’s small, but that it’s considerably smaller than one might expect.

“Slight” says that it’s small and that it’s a bit puny and feeble.

Synonyms can condense a few sentences into a few syllables and are immensely valuable tools as a result. Buy one word, get twenty free. Bargain. If we look at synonyms as a rhyming aid, it’s pretty obvious how they are helpful. For example, suppose we want to include the word “small” or something similar, but it has to rhyme with “brittle” from a previous line. Another sift through the thesaurus would provide us with “little.” Let’s now assume that we want a word for “small’

that has three syllables in it. It doesn’t take long to find “miniature” or “undersized” and so on. These are very basic demonstrations, and obviously an obliging synonym is not always forthcoming, but using a thesaurus is usually the best window into the world of words waiting for selection.

Other Useful Resources

While we’re on the topic, let’s just tip our hat to the other useful resources that should always be at our fingertips. Dictionaries should always be at the ready. That kind of goes without saying, but the sad reality of the fact is that lyricists are not always entirely sure what a word means when they include it, especially when it comes as the result of a hunt through a thesaurus. Sometimes, we can be so pleased we have found a word that seems to solve a problem that we use it regardless of the fact that it doesn’t actually mean what we want it to. Make sure you don’t let this happen. It’s the lyrical equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot! We should always know what words mean; it’s that simple.

We should also seek to incorporate new words when we can. We should be careful not to include words that no one uses when we want to be conversational, because they will draw attention to themselves and seem plain ridiculous.

However, we should strive to use a good breadth of language and actively seek to expand the walls of our vocabulary. If we are to be a master of words, we need to know what they are and what they mean! There are some great Word of the Day sites on the web. I highly recommend looking at them every now and then. They will stimulate your use of language and develop your rhetoric muscles nicely.

There are all sorts of specialized dictionaries available. To name just a few, there are rhyming dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations, dictionaries of antonyms (often combined with synonyms), dictionaries of idioms, dictionaries of homonyms, and so on. We will get to rhyming in the next chapter and will arrive at homonyms and antonyms even sooner in this chapter. For now, we’ll have a look at idioms and quotations.

IDIOMS

Idiom is one of those words we have all heard, but many of us find hard to pin down. It can be defined as “a phrase or grammatical construction that cannot be translated literally into another language because its meaning is not equivalent to that of its component words.” Put another way, it’s a commonly used phrase consisting of a group of words that mean something other than what they literally say,

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and we need to know its application to understand it. For example, a well-known idiom is, “He’s just a flash in the pan.” If someone just learning English came across this phrase, they would be completely lost. What has a flash in a pan got to do with anything? Nothing. What pan? What flash? The words work together to create a new meaning; the literal translation is not the right one.

If we stop and think about it, there are hundreds of idioms in everyday use, and they all say more than the sum of their parts. Examples are “a shot in the dark,”

“cry wolf,” “dry spell” (known unfortunately well to most lyricists!), “under the weather (equally so!),” “on my mind,” “tie the knot,” and so on. Idioms are fantastic resources for lyricists. Their colloquial nature helps real communication, and their poetic quality helps fuel ideas. They are a real aid in condensing more into less.

We can employ idioms in our lyrics just as we use them in speech, or we can play with them a bit and use a little poetic license. One such thing is to invert them—

that is, to change the order of the words around a bit. Using the previous examples, plain idioms could be inverted to become “the knot has been tied” and “it’s a bit dark for a shot.” They will still just about keep their identity as an idiom, but the new order of words will give them a new lease on life (which is also an idiom, by the way).

In addition to changing the order of the words around, we can change the actual words themselves. This is where the trusty thesaurus comes in handy. “Under the weather” can become something like “below the storm” or “beneath the climate.”

Neither of those particular examples has much mileage, but they are adapted idioms nonetheless.

Inverted and mildly manipulated idioms work because they strike a balance between familiarity and difference. If we adapt an idiom so much that it ceases to be something familiar, then the fact that we have changed it will cease to generate any interest because it won’t be recognizable at all. It will just seem like a random collection of words. We need to be careful that we don’t get carried away with these manipulations and end up too far from the original. They are worth experimenting with, but only if they end up being useful. In the previous chapter, we started to look at the line “Easier done than said,” and that is a good example of an idiom that has been tampered with to good effect (where it is usually “Easier said than done”).

Beyond the use of synonyms and inversion, we can also experiment a bit and look for other words associated with “under” and “weather.” In this case, “under the weather” could lead to something more like “crushed by the clouds” or

“drowned in the drizzle,” both of which alliterate and both of which are infinitely more usable. The idiom has fueled the idea, but we have dressed it up with the use of synonyms and a touch of poetic license. There will be more on the technique of using associated words in a moment, in the “Metaphor” section. Figure 8.1

shows an example in which I used the idiom “piece of cake” pretty much as it is known.

Figure 8.2 shows an example of words inverted on the second visit. This technique has an intelligent-sounding Greek name that we will discover in a few pages’

time.

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Figure 8.1

Straight use of the idiom “piece of cake.”

Figure 8.2

Inverted use of the idiom “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

In Figure 8.3, I have combined the idioms “run around in circles,” “vicious circle,”

and “chasing your tail” to create a new line. There is a lot of potential in adjusting common phrases. Have you ever put much thought into it?

Figure 8.3

Combined use of the idioms “run around in circles,” “vicious circles,” and “chasing your tail.”

QUOTATIONS

We should hunt down and enjoy quotations and seek to learn from them and borrow their wit and wisdom whenever possible. We can adapt them in much the same way that we can adapt idioms, and it’s a good idea to do so. If we use popular quotations, they will get spotted, and we will likely be classed as a thief, cheat, bandit, crook, rogue, and so on. (Sorry, got a bit carried away with the thesaurus there.) Take a famous quote, such as, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Heard it? It’s one of John Lennon’s little beauties. If we used that as is, we would be quoting John Lennon. If we put it through some subtle thesaurus and inversion action, we could end up with something like, “Ideas and systems don’t steer existence.” Granted, it’s not in the league of Lennon’s line, but it is no longer his quote, it says a similar thing, and it rhymes, too. His quote has fueled an idea.

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Being familiar with loads of quotations is undeniably useful, so it makes sense to actively seek them out and remember the good ones. We never know when they will come in handy. Being able to produce something witty at appropriate moments in daily conversation is an added bonus, too! We don’t have to get them out of dictionaries, speeches, screenplays, or books; we can simply listen to what people say.

For every quote that has been recorded, there must be the same number again (or more) from people who have strung together fabulous sequences of words in daily conversation, but with no one around to note their value and write them down. As I acknowledged in the last chapter, you should always have one ear open for potential material. People around you can unwittingly contribute verbal gold, and it’s regularly there for the appropriating.

WWW.ONELOOK.COM

I have chosen to avoid naming specific websites in this book wherever possible, but this one is so good and I use it so frequently that I have to give it a mention. When we are thinking about designing with words, which we will do a lot of in just a moment, a site such as this is invaluable in leading us to new phrases, definitions, associations, and so on. For example, if we want to find a phrase with the word face in it, we can simply search the site, and it will give us results. When I did it, it gave me about face, baby face, clock face, fly in the face of, and loads of others.

Similarly, we can look for words that start with face and find face, facet, and facetious. If we feel like it, we can also search for words that end with face, and a few clicks will provide us with coalface, deface, surface, and so on. If you don’t really see the point of this at the moment, bear with me for a couple of paragraphs, and I’m confident you will.

Figures of Speech

Have you ever wondered why figures of speech are so named? It’s simple, really.

When we appreciate that a figure is another word for a pattern or design, we can see that figures of speech are designs with words. They feature words in a function or an order that is unusual, and they draw attention to themselves by being different and interesting. There are loads of figures of speech, named mostly after the Greeks and Romans who first identified and used them, but we’ll focus just on the ones that are of particular use to lyricists. In daily utterance, the term figurative speaking has become pretty much synonymous with metaphorical language, but there is actually a fair bit more to it.

You need to spend a moment mentally preparing yourself for what lies ahead.

Repeat after me: “Being clever is all well and good, but only if it serves the purposes of the lyric.” We can be clever with our use of language. That’s undeniable, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Personally, I love figures of speech. I love designing with words and being inventive with their meanings and order, but we have to make sure we don’t get carried away. Anyone can string together a list of homonyms or oxymorons (we’ll get to those shortly, too), and although there will be some degree of interest in the words themselves, ultimately they will mean nothing and therefore the lyricist will not communicate with the listener on a personal level. The engagement will be intellectual and nothing more. We should remember this as we dive headfirst into tropes and schemes.

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A trope is a rhetorical device in which the literal meaning of a word or words is changed in function and context. The word comes from the Greek word tropos, which means turn. In a scheme, in contrast, the words don’t take on a different meaning, but they are reordered in a phrase or line so that the design element is more graphic than interpretive. A literal definition of scheme is “a systematic or organized configuration,” such as a color scheme, and for our purposes, a scheme is just that—it involves organizing the order of words so that they sound interesting.

Tropes

There are many tropes trooping around, and we don’t need to look at all of them.

We’ll just cover metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy and synecdoche, pun, and oxymoron.

METAPHORS

If you were an animal, what would you be and why? Heard that before? That’s an invitation to create a metaphor. Metaphors are commonly believed to be the most frequently used figure of speech and are an immensely valuable means of communication, especially when we are trying to say as much as we can in as short a space as possible. Metaphors not only do this for us, but they deliver the package with poetic flare, too. Literally translated as “transference,” a metaphor describes one thing by using words that describe another thing that is similar in some way. If you are asked to describe someone as an animal, you would tend to think of one of his prominent characteristics, and then think of an animal that shares that characteristic. The shared characteristic acts as the building block in all metaphors. Have a look at Figure 8.4. David is an elephant. That’s a metaphor. Not very nice for David, but it’s a metaphor, nonetheless, that is built on the shared characteristic of big ears.

Figure 8.4

Transference of the quality of big ears.

Let’s swim a little deeper and take the metaphor “she is an ocean” as an example. First, we need to acknowledge that a metaphor should never work literally.

If it describes or states something that is literally possible, then it is not a metaphor, and neither is it poetic. We’re not actually “swimming” a little deeper here, for example. I just thought I’d use language that tied in with the ocean metaphor.

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It’s not literally possible for someone to be an ocean. She can be like an ocean in some way, though, and this is where metaphors work their magic. The reader or listener is left to figure out what it is about the ocean that they both have in common. Could it be that she is wet? Possibly. What about the fact that she arrives and leaves like the tide? Maybe. How about the fact that she has hidden depths? That’s a strong possibility, too.

It’s this searching for similarities that makes metaphors so valuable. They spark the imagination, and in doing so, they invite the listener on board to take part in the lyric. In the four words “she is an ocean,” the listener actually takes on much more information. Metaphors condense information brilliantly.

Making Metaphors

One approach to creating metaphors is to throw two things together and see what happens with them. These things will most commonly be nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Let’s wave goodbye to the ocean for just a minute and work with something new. Let’s go with romance! Let’s rub it against another noun or two and see whether we get a spark. A romance can be a ticking clock or a furnace, for example.

Nice. Now let’s try using a verb instead of another noun. This could lead to something about how a romance can crash or flat-line, or it can shine or glide. They work as metaphors, too. How about the trusty old adjective? This would give us options about how a romance can be rusty or threadbare, or it can be polished or transparent.

Although these all work as metaphors and offer various approaches to giving romance a new lease on poetic life, they have all been built in much the same way.

That is, they are based on luck because we didn’t calculate the similarity between them before we started. Those included here work because I have only typed those that do. In practice, we don’t know whether a spark will fire, and this can therefore be quite a long process, even though the results can be fantastic. The good news is that there is another approach that revolves around the fact that metaphors are dependant on an undefined similarity that is often referred to in poetic studies as the ground. It’s the common ground between what rests on either side. In the case of the ocean, the ground is the characteristic of the ocean, whatever that may be. In attempting to be a bit more calculated in the building of metaphors, it can make sense to start with this ground to pivot off.

Folders

Our brains aren’t filing cabinets, but if they were, each word we know would probably be filed away along with others that are similar and that all share a common heading. This isn’t an exact science, but bear with me for a minute. Take the word ocean. If you were to look inside the ocean folder in your head, you would get words such as wet, deep, vast, huge, waves, boats, shore, tide, horizon, blue, freezing, and plenty more. What’s of particular interest here is that some of these words could also appear in other folders, too. The word “blue” could be in folders entitled cold, lonely, and sky. The word “deep” could be in folders named serious, involved, well, and so on. These words can therefore form the pivot point on which we can modulate between folders and different groups of words and ideas.

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Beyond this, we also need to appreciate that each of these folders has subfolders in it. For example, under ocean we could open the freezing folder. Immediately, my mind personally opens up all sorts of new folders. I felt my brain reach for the winter scenes folder and the frozen food folder right away. If I wait a minute, I may come across some more…and there it is! The keeping still folder, as in, “Freeze, you are surrounded!” So I can now open those folders and let the words spill out.

I’ve got a combo of ice cream, ice skates, statues, frozen burgers, snowmen, and handcuffs at hand all of a sudden, and combined with the words already discovered from the preliminary sift through the ocean folder, I suddenly have a mass of words that I can use to modulate with. I simply use one of these words to pivot on from one thing to the next.

Using this technique, we can now be more calculated in building metaphors. We start with something to which we want to compare something else—let’s stick with the girl who was previously an ocean. And then we think about what we want to say about her. Let’s say that she was honest. So, into the honest folder we go, and personally, I get things like plain-speaking, blunt, direct, straightforward, frank, sharp, and so on (see Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5

Pivoting on

folder content.

Now comes the interesting part. What other folders contain some of these words?

Let’s pivot off the word sharp. Scissors, sword, and knife are strong contenders here because they are nouns and will add a definite tangible quality to an abstract concept such as honesty. So, “Her words were scissors” would work here, as would, “She unsheathed her words.” This second example goes a bit further and implies the sword through where it would be found (in a sheath). “She was honest” says just that. In using the word sharp to pivot on, we are able to say considerably more and focus on an element of that honesty. “Her words were scissors”

says she was honest, and it also says that she was quite cutting with the words. It implies that she could hurt people with her honesty.

Instead of pivoting on sharp, let’s go with another one of the options. Let’s have a dig around direct. What other folders include direct? I’m immediately grabbing the one-way ticket, not round the houses, as the crow flies, and no stops folders.

My mind is concentrating on travel connotations in the first instance. This could lead to something like, “Her words didn’t touch the ground” (as in direct flight).

This technique leads to successful metaphors that intentionally pivot on a similarity, just like poor David and his elephant ears.

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Dead Metaphors

We tend to use and hear metaphors a lot more than we realize. We use them so much because we tend to spend a lot of our time equating what we already know with what we are currently discovering. Explaining something to someone using terminology found within the domain of something they already understand is often the best way to go about it. It starts in math, where we use three oranges and two apples to refer to three and two “units,” and then it gets more involved, where we equate the way something works with the way that something else we already understand works.

An example would be describing the elation of writing a cracking chorus in less than two minutes to a golf pro using the words, “It’s like I hit an eagle on the long par 4.” Comparison fuels metaphor, and it surrounds us everyday. Comparison helps us to understand stuff. That’s one of the key reasons why metaphor works so well. However, it also means that we have a lot of what are known as dead metaphors around. A dead metaphor is a metaphor that once had potency, but has now lost it through commonality. They’re not always easy to identify because we are so used to them, but here are a couple. Businesses are not trees, but we freely refer to branches within them. Similarly, a prison isn’t about to fly away, but it does have wings. Dead metaphors have lost their poetic quality and are therefore not much use to lyricists unless we play with them a bit and attempt to bring them back to life. We could refer to a prison in flight and play on the use of the word wing, for example.

Mixed Metaphors

We need to be careful that we don’t get carried away with our use of metaphors!

If we involve too many, we might end up veering into mixed-metaphor territory, which is where we combine metaphors to the point that we confuse the reader or listener. An example of a mixed metaphor could be, “I’m falling for you and you’re driving me crazy.” First of all, the falling isn’t literal. It’s with reference to losing control, balance, and poise. The driving isn’t literal, either. It’s in reference to moving, sending, and going somewhere. This means that we have two pivot points in one sentence—one associated with falling and one associated with driving.

You might not think this is so bad, but some metaphors are so delicately poised that throwing an additional pivot point in could knock the metaphor right off its haunches. It makes sense to stick with just one pivot point and to work out the metaphor under those terms. In this case, we could have a look in the falling folder to see what we get. Personally, my brain presents me with getting up, pain, awkwardness, embarrassing, and so on. This could lead to something like, “I’m falling in love and I’m not sure I’ll get up again.” This is now unmixed because it all pivots on falling.

How about going with the driving element? A look in the driving folder presents me personally with gears, wheels, road, movement, indicating, engine, and so on.

So how about, “Now that we’ve gotten going, you’re driving me crazy?” Not the best metaphor of all time, but you get the idea.

Building metaphors is all about employing a network of words. We have already seen that words have different connotations dependent on where they are found.

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They are all connected to each other through various channels, and one of the delights of being a lyricist is that we get to wander down these channels, explore the connections, and then draw attention to them. Don’t be afraid to dig deep into each “folder” that you stumble on. There are all sorts of similarities to be noticed and connections to be made. Identifying them and employing them can be great fun and can result in some fantastic lyrics.

SIMILES

Similes have a lot in common with their big brother, the metaphor. The main difference is that whereas a metaphor is very committal in its delivery, a simile is much more tentative and standoffish. Whereas a metaphor would say, “She is an ocean,” a simile would say, “She is like an ocean.” A simile knocks on the door of comparison and then runs away. A metaphor knocks on the door and bulldozes its way through. For this reason, it is usually taught that we should avoid using too many metaphors in a song. If I were to say, “She is an ocean and she is also a table,” then I seem to be contradicting myself. (I don’t know how she would be a table, by the way. It’s just the first thing I thought of. You’ll have to try to figure out the pivot point yourself!) If, however, I were to say, “She is like an ocean and like a table,” the contradiction isn’t as obvious anymore, and it’s a little safer.

We commonly hear of mixed metaphors, but I’ve yet to hear of a mixed simile.

They’re much more mix and match in application, and that’s part of their charm.

The key words to employ in keeping the distance in a simile are like, as, and than because they are all comparative in nature. “She is like an ocean” could be rephrased as “She is as deep as the ocean” or “She is deeper than the ocean.” They are all comparative, but they offer different approaches to the same idea.

Building Similes

A lot of the groundwork here was already covered in the “Metaphors” section. We just need to remember to keep our distance in highlighting the similarities and qualifying the pivot points. For example, let’s go with the concept of someone having a “hard” exterior, as if they are impenetrable. It’s simply a case of browsing through the hard folder and folders that contain the word hard and seeing what we get. Remember to dig deep and look for synonyms, quotations, and so on.

Personally, I have chosen to start with the idioms approach, and I have dug out the phrases hard luck, hard rain, hard lines, hard times, and hard boiled. Now I can try to marry these ideas together with like, as, or than. Possibilities here could be harder than boiled, hard as luck, hard like lines, and so on. Notice that we don’t need to connect these pivot points to any other folders. They work as similes in their own right.

We can go further and employ these pivot points of luck, rains, lines, and time to pivot into new folders too, though. Let’s try it. If we were to work with lines, and we looked at what other folders contained it, we could arrive at hidden meaning (as in between the lines), neat, and rules (see Figure 8.6). If we then try to use them on either side of the comparison, the results are something like hard like rules, hard as a hidden meaning, and harder than neatness.

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Figure 8.6

Simile building.

These aren’t great and suffer from being too far removed from what we are actually trying to say. The thing to remember is that we don’t necessarily have to dive in and out of all sorts of folders for something to work. We shouldn’t let the process rule the product. If a line works, it works regardless of how we got to it.

In these cases, the connection of lines between the hard folder and the other folders is so hidden that it is unlikely to ever be found and work as comparative glue.

What is actually happening is that the word hard is an adjective, and therefore it requires less folder-hopping. The same principle applies to verbs, too. In their role as describing or doing words, they are already halfway toward making a connection. Let’s test it. We’ll work with a verb this time: grow. Using the same technique of searching for idioms, this time including grow, we get grow old, grow out of, grow up, money doesn’t grow on trees, and home grown (see Figure 8.7). They can lead to similes such as grow like age and grow as fast as money on trees. In addition to looking for idioms, we can also look in the grow folder for things that do literally grow, such as seeds and kids. These could lead to similes such as growing like kids or grow faster than seeds. Neither of these is great, but they do illustrate the principle. Beyond this, we can also go on the hunt for synonyms of grow, such as raise, nurture, sprout, mature, develop, intensify, and so on. These can then lead to similes such as mature like cheese and develop like negatives.

Figure 8.7

Exploring the

grow folder

for idioms.

Beyond this and back to working with the word hard, we can look for other things that are hard, and this is where we discover that hard has considerably more than one definition. Some include not easily penetrated, strongly alcoholic, metallic ( as distinct from paper), physically fit, definite, difficult to bear, and money (as in

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hard cash). This reveals that other things that could be hard are substances (iron, metal, granite, stone), occasions (death, debut, mistakes), tasks (molecular physics, brain surgery, forgiving, admitting, forgetting), and so on. With this wealth of resources, it’s not hard to start batting around some ideas. Examples that I quickly arrived at include harder than forgiveness, hard as fact, and hard like a debut.

Again, this only requires a peek inside the one folder, this time entitled hard.

The list can go on and on, and the only reason to stop is when we have found something that sparks the imagination. You’ll know when you land one. It’s a good feeling!

PERSONIFICATION

Just a few paragraphs ago, I referred to a metaphor as if it were alive by talking about it being knocked off its haunches. Remember? That’s personification in action. It can be defined as “the presentation of inanimate things or abstractions as if they were living persons.” By stating that a metaphor had haunches it could be knocked off of, I brought it to life. I expect it didn’t jar much as a sentence because firstly, it’s a popular idiom, and secondly, personification is used quite commonly. I am sure we have all heard of the sky crying and the city sleeping at one time or another. These are both examples of personification as well.

Personification is often classed as a subtype of metaphor because it also necessitates a literal clash of words. Personification shouldn’t make literal sense. For example, “Barry tripped on his laces” is just a statement. Nothing poetic about it.

However, “The paper tripped on its laces” suddenly becomes much more interesting because the paper doesn’t have laces. It can’t. It’s not human, and it doesn’t wear shoes. The clash attracts our attention and gets us pondering about what could be the pivot point between paper and laces. I honestly don’t know as I’m writing this. Let’s think. How about taking the word paper to mean a newspaper that was so keen to get a story out that it didn’t prepare itself, and then got it wrong? I like that. It says a lot in a little and it requires the listener or reader to get involved. Nice!

Personification works in exactly the same way as a metaphor, but it is more focused in that it necessitates reference to a living, breathing thing. It’s a versatile technique because it can work in two ways. First, we can focus on the something that isn’t alive and refer to it as if it is. “The computer took its last gasp as it crashed into oblivion,” or “The train is out of breath and needs to rest for a while.” Second, we can focus on something that is alive and refer to it as being inanimate.

Employing computers and trains again, we could say, “She went into standby mode, ready for rebooting,” or “He was overcrowded and needed more cars.”

There are advantages to both of these approaches. Referring to something lifeless as being alive enables us to attribute new characteristics to that thing.

Inanimate objects are suddenly emotional beings with desires, motivations, feelings, and so on. They open up doors of opportunity. In this sense, walls really can have ears—or at least they can in a figurative sense. Flipping it the other way around so that we refer to something alive using terms associated with something lifeless can result is some really interesting effects, too. This time, the effect is reversed so that we can strip the emotion and sentiment and replace it with hard fact and concrete imagery.

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Using Personification

To bring life to an inanimate object, we simply have to think of characteristics exhibited by people or animals. We can think of what they do, where they go, what they look like, and so on, and then apply these attributes to the object(s) of choice.

Let’s try it for a book. Obviously, there are thousands of things we can say about humans, so it’s wise to focus and narrow down the search a bit. We can do this by thinking about what you want to say about the book.

In this case, let’s say that it’s old. Okay, what can we say about old people?

Remember that you are only as old as you feel, by the way, so please don’t take any of this personally if you consider yourself to be elderly! They have wrinkles.

They draw a pension. They have false teeth. They tend to be a bit bent over. See Figure 8.8.

Figure 8.8

The only usable

words are those

that have a

human quality.

Again, I apologize if these seem like sweeping observations. They’re just a starting point! So, any sparks flying here? I’ve seen one. Spine: A lot of older people I know have slightly arched spines from years of active service. See where I’m going with this? Books also have spines. So, we can say that the book has an arched spine.

However, there’s a problem here. This works as an interesting play on words, but it doesn’t actually cause a clash. Books do have spines. There’s nothing poetic about that, and it doesn’t actually make the book seem alive. Let’s try again. How about “The book drew its pension and sat in front of the fire?” That’s a bit more poetic. The brain has to engage to figure out the pivot point of old age. How about

“The book had long memories?” That works well, too. It gives the book history and the all-important character with it, too.

This approach places all the focus on the inanimate object. What about when we want to focus on living things instead, such as humans? The process is almost identical. It’s just that instead of searching for characteristics of people, we look for those of buildings, vehicles, places, household objects, and so on. Suppose we want to describe the character of a girl, and that she has a big personality. Let’s open the big folder. This time, we want to focus on big things as the potential pivot points, not big human characteristics. I get the Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon, giant redwoods, and the Pacific Ocean, for starters.

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If we try to employ these things, though, we hit a snare. These are all the names of big things rather than their characteristics. Therefore, it’s difficult to use them without reverting to simile or metaphor. For example, “She is a giant redwood” is a metaphor, and “Her character is like a giant redwood” is a simile. Naming the particular object is not a way forward; we have to describe it (see Figure 8.9). So how about, “Her branches spanned the canopy as she stood her ground?” That’s better. Or how about, “She’s deep rooted. They’ll never move her?” Using the defining characteristics of the object rather than naming the object itself yields the best results. “Her lapping waves didn’t begin to reveal the depths of her character”

would be an example playing on the Pacific Ocean.

Figure 8.9

Applying the

characteristics of

a giant redwood

to a personality.

The beautiful thing about employing personification is that it enables us to make the most of living, breathing characteristics and place them upon things that don’t usually have them, and vice versa.

METONYMY AND SYNECDOCHE

Don’t be scared of these names. They’re actually very straightforward concepts.

Metonymy can be literally translated as “change of name.” It refers to when we use a word in place of another, and we can do so because the two words in question share a close association. A commonly cited example of metonymy is the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword.” If two chaps were to actually have a fight, and one held a sword and the other held a pen, I’m pretty sure I know who would come off as victorious, and it isn’t the guy with the writing implement. This doesn’t mean what it actually says, though. Its literal translation is redesigned through the associations of the pen and sword. The pen is associated with words, and the sword is associated with physical power and violence. It actually means that the written word is more powerful than any physical weapon. Another example would be the use of the word tongue to refer to language, as in “What tongue do you speak?” The word tongue is used in place of language because of its association with language. Other examples are the use of Hollywood to refer to the filmmaking industry and Wall Street to refer to financial markets. Hollywood is actually a district of Los Angeles, and Wall Street is a street in Manhattan, but their associations with film and finance, respectively, make their names metonymic.

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Synecdoche is often classed as a subdivision of metonymy, and it is very similar but with one subtle difference. Whereas metonymy is based on association, synecdoche depends more on connection. The substituted word is actually a part of, and not merely associated with, whatever it is replacing. It works in two ways. First, there’s the substitution of the part for the whole. An example of this would be saying “Nice wheels” when we mean “Nice car.” A part of the car has been identified in place of what it is a part of. “Get those lazy feet over here” is another example.

It’s not just the feet that are being requested; there’s presumably a fair bit of body connected to them.

Second, we have the reverse, where the whole of something is used in place of part of it. An example of this would be “I just need to get in the trunk.” Not really.

This actually means “I need to get my hands and arms in the trunk.” The I implies the whole body in place of just the upper limbs.

Using Metonymy and Synecdoche

With regard to metonymy, the best technique is to brainstorm around the object in question and see whether an associated word can be used in its place. Suppose, for example, we want to say, “I miss her.” We can simply look for something associated with the “she” in question and use that in its place. For example, she might have a green car or an obsession with spotty hats. She might frequent certain buildings or places that we know, and so on. Instead of simply referring to her, we can refer to those as substitutions. “I miss that green car,” on one level means we miss that green car, but it means more than that beneath the surface. The green car becomes metonymic.

Synecdoche requires exactly the same technique but demands a focus on things that are connected and not merely associated. Running with the same example, we can add that we miss her blue eyes, her out-turned foot, the cute idiosyncrasy involving her raised left shoulder, and so on. We could say, “I miss that shoulder,”

and so on. An example of synecdoche is in the lyrics to “Sandcastles” (see Figure 8.10). Here, front door is used in place of house. It’s a substitution of a part in place of the whole.

Figure 8.10

Synecdoche in action where front door is used in place of house.

Metonymy and synecdoche provide a great way of dealing with popular subject matter without resorting to the same words and lines that are commonly used in thousands of other songs. They enable us to use figurative language to employ fresh perspectives, and they also provide us with a means to get the listener more involved with the song. By divulging some of the finer detail that metonymy requires, the listener gets a closer look at the bigger picture. Have you ever tried either of these approaches?

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PUN

I doubt it will be news to you that our language includes lots of similar-sounding words that have very different meanings. Take the word light, for example. It is just one word that doubles as the opposite of both dark and heavy. We have hundreds of such examples at our disposal, and they grant us some great opportunities to design with words. Many moons ago, the term antanaclasis, from the Greek for echo, was used to refer to the employment of sonically similar words for poetic effect. These days, we tend to refer to them as puns, and they are most frequently used for comic effect. They are also usually fairly cringe-worthy! For example, consider these two puns: “Two peanuts went for a stroll in a nasty part of town, and one was a-salted,” and “They said I was average, and that’s just plain mean.”

I rest my case!

Puns are often built with homonyms—words that sound and are spelled the same but have different meanings. Light is a good example; others include fret (guitar fret and emotional strain), rock (stone and swing), mine (belonging to me and an explosive device), and so on. In addition to these homonyms, we have what are known as homophones. As the name kind of suggests, these are words with multiple meanings that sound the same, although they have a different spelling.

Examples here would be queue/cue/Kew (Kew Gardens in the UK), dear/deer, feat/feet, patients/patience, and so on. There are various other devices at our disposal, but we will just concern ourselves with these two.

Using Homonyms and Homophones

We don’t have to use these devices for comic effect. We can be quite serious with them, too. The thing to remember is that ideally, they should enhance a lyric and not be the sole reason why a song exists. If a lyric is merely a list of words or similar-sounding words with more than one meaning, then it is unlikely to connect with the listener as effectively as it could. I have marked several songwriting assignments in my time that were basically just lists of homonyms that were clever but ultimately quite pointless. If they are to be employed, they should ideally be used in the context of actually saying something. Personally, I love them. They can add some spice to a line or two.

Figure 8.11 illustrates two homophones in the middle section of this song— sore and soar and great and grate.

Figure 8.11

Homophones in action.

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Homonyms and homophones are all over the place. There are probably a fair few surrounding you where you are right now. Just in that last sentence, you can find a few: there/their/they’re, fair/fare, where/wear/ware, right/write, and so on.

Have a look around the room and see what you can identify. Personally, I have ceiling/sealing, book (reading book and the verb to book), handle (door handle and the verb for to cope with), and air/heir in the immediate vicinity. It’s a good exercise to purposefully look for homonyms and homophones as we are out and about.

It develops our awareness of them. They are regularly used in advertisements and newspaper headlines because of the design element inherent in them, and they can work wonders in adding a touch of poetic interest to a lyric or three.

OXYMORONS

Oxymorons can be really useful devices to employ. Derived from the Greek words oxus, meaning sharp, and moros, meaning dull or stupid, oxymorons are literary devices that combine mutually contradictory words. Like homonyms, there are plenty in active service in most people’s vocabularies. An example is, “Now then….” Which is it? Now or then? The words contradict each other, yet they sit together like old pals. Other examples include act normal, pretty ugly, say nothing, anarchy rules, and recorded live. The conflict on which they are built provides an immediate point of interest, and they therefore tend to work as standout lines in lyrics. They make really good titles as a result. “The Sound of Silence” is a really good example.

Using Oxymorons

There are two simple ways to incorporate oxymorons in our writing. The first is to purposefully go looking for them and then grow a lyric out of them. Just as is the case with homonyms and idioms, there are plenty of websites that list loads of oxymorons, just waiting for us to pick them up and run with them. We can also find them by being attentive when we’re listening to conversations.

Oxymorons are regularly used without their apparent contradiction really being noticed. “Same difference” is something that I hear a lot, but it’s very rare that anyone ever stops to think about what he is really saying. A lot of oxymorons have effectively become idioms that have just worked their way into our vocabularies.

They’re just waiting for us to shine a light on them and turn them into interesting word designs.

Second, we can intentionally employ antonyms in the lines we write to create effective designs from scratch. In case you haven’t come across the word before, antonym is basically the academic word for opposite. When we are digging around the theme about which we have chosen to write, creating oxymorons is simply a case of looking for words that have relatively obvious antonyms. Plenty of words do. We then need to try to incorporate that opposite into the line so it makes sense.

Figure 8.12 shows an example of what I mean.

It’s not possible to be literally blown away and stay in the same place at the same time. It is figuratively speaking, though. This line actually employs the idiom of being blown away as meaning amazed or something similar, and then juxtaposes it with the contradictory statement of, “I’m staying here.” It illustrates that we can combine oxymorons with other devices to work their magic.

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Figure 8.12

Being blown away and staying here at the same time.

Figure 8.13 presents an example of an oxymoron working in cahoots with a homonym. Here, the homonymic left is used to refer to what’s left after something happens, and it is then contradicted with the antonym of its other meaning (the directional one), which is right. The application of right infers its use as correct, rather than directional, and therefore also exploits its role as a homonym.

Figure 8.13

A homonym and homophone working as an oxymoron.

Let’s create an oxymoron now. We’ll stick with the idea of describing a girl who has a big personality. I’m genuinely making this up as I write, by the way. The obvious place to start is to look for antonyms of big. Most thesauruses provide us with this sort of information. Small, tiny, petite, little, and slight are now in the picture.

As synonyms for big, we could also get the thesaurus to reveal large, huge, giant, enormous, and vast. Now we have both sides of the contradiction to work with, so we want to try to match them up in one phrase. Looking at idioms that feature these words can be a good trigger for fine-tuning a line. Small wonder and not in the slightest immediately present themselves on the small side. How about the contradictory side? Larger than life and big deal are first out of the hat here. See Figure 8.14.

You don’t have to draw the words and phrases out as I have here, but it can help make mixing and matching more of a graphic exercise. We are working with designs here, after all. After a few minutes of trying stuff out, I have arrived at “the slight problem of her large personality” as an example of straight comparison, and

“small wonder that she is larger than life” to employ the idioms. You may be able to find more in there if you have a good dig around.

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Figure 8.14

Unpacking and contradicting

big personality.

Schemes

Whereas tropes are concerned with designing the meaning of words, schemes look at their order and placement. In the following schemes, all the words retain their literal definitions—it’s how and where they are placed that is of significance. There are plenty of schemes, and they almost all have academic names that make them sound very grand. Don’t get bogged down with the names if you don’t want to.

Just consider using the techniques themselves. As was the case with tropes, we’ll just look at some of the more immediately useful ones.

INVERSION

As you might expect, the technique of inversion inverts the usual order of words.

It’s not necessarily a straight reversal, though. It can refer to changing just a couple or more words around if that achieves the desired effect, and the desired effect should always be the motive behind the employment of this technique.

One reason may be that we want to get something to rhyme. An example might be, “With words we can design, to get ourselves a rhyme.” We would usually say,

“We can design with words,” not “With words we can design.” We can get away with this, but we should be careful that we don’t render the lyric senseless in the process. You should also be wary of the fact that inverting the order can make the lyric sound archaic and that is unlikely to be a desired effect if we are intending our lyrics to sound conversational. For example, I could say, “I am going to work.”

That sounds natural. An inverted form of that statement could be, “I, to work, am going.” It immediately sounds less conversational, and actually quite like I am a foreigner who hasn’t quite mastered the syntax of the language. It’s how Yoda talks. It has character and a certain design to it, but it sacrifices natural tone as a result. Inversion does, however, serve as a useful technique for emphasis, because the inverted words will generally be fairly obvious and present themselves more forcefully than those around them.

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As already mentioned earlier in this chapter, inversion can also wonders work when we apply it to idioms. This is because it enables us to give new life to a common phrase. It almost works as a new perspective. If we pay another visit to “I Need to Be with You,” which we saw in the previous chapter, we can see from the extract in Figure 8.15 that the verse is built almost entirely on the inverted idioms make a stand, day break, find your feet, and bide your time. It also employs the synonym crack in the idiom crack on as it plays with the homonymic nature of break in reference to the day breaking.

Figure 8.15

Inverted idioms at work.

REPETITION

In addition to the order in which we place words, we can also think about whether you want to repeat any of them for effect. One such technique that can really assist in adding rhythm to our lyrics is known as anadiplosis.

Anadiplosis

Anadiplosis is when a word or phrase appears at the end of one line and then again at the beginning of the next (see Figure 8.16).

Figure 8.16

Anadiplosis demonstration.

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Get it? Each line emphasizes the repeated word and design with the lyric. In addition to generating emphasis, this technique can help motor a lyric forward by creating anticipation in the listener. The listener is likely to notice the pattern of repeated words and to start expecting things as a result. Figure 8.17 shows an example from a song entitled “My All.”

Figure 8.17

Anadiplosis in action.

Anaphora

Anaphora is a similar repetitive technique, but this time the repeating words are placed at the beginning of each line. An example of this technique in action is included in the song “All about Your Love,” shown in Figure 8.18.

Figure 8.18

Anaphora in action.

In this figure, we can see the words “It’s not all” starting each line. Anaphora is a technique that works much like alliteration (which will feature in the next chapter), but instead of bouncing off one letter or phoneme, we are bouncing off a word or phrase. This means that it is the words rather than the letters that get the emphasis through their placement in the design. Another advantage of this technique is that it condenses the amount of writing required! By continually following on from one or a group of words, each line is already partly complete. We just have to fill the gaps.

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Epiphora

Also known as epistrophe, epiphora is another similar technique with the simple variation that the repeated word is continually placed at the end of each line (see Figure 8.19).

Figure 8.19

Epiphora in action.

As it is almost identical to anaphora, epiphora shares the same advantages. It’s not as commonly used in lyric writing, though, because it denies us the opportunity to employ different end rhymes. Where it is used, it generally revolves around repeating the title, and its emphatic effect can be put to good use in this regard.

Chiasmus

The term chiasmus developed from the Greek word for cross, and it refers to the crossing over of grammatical constructions of sentences forming the pattern ABBA. Strictly speaking, chiasmus doesn’t refer to an inversion of actual words, but more an inversion of the elements that construct phrases. If we were to take the phrase, “Here are some words; at this point they’re a phrase,” this forms the pattern ABAB. Here are and at this point are similar, and so are some words and a phrase. To turn this into a chiastic structure, we reverse the pattern of the second half of the phrase so that it gives us ABBA: “Here are some words; they’re a phrase at this point.” See Figure 8.20. It gives the words a symmetric quality. Effective it is; it works like a charm.

Figure 8.20

Chiastic construction.

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Antimetabole

This technique is very similar to chiasmus, but it is a little more focused in that it’s the actual words that are inverted, not the grammatical construction. Developing the previous example with this technique would give us, “Here are some words; some words are here,” or “At this point they’re a phrase; they’re a phrase at this point.”

In repeating and inverting the words themselves rather than just the grammatical structure, antimetabole is a useful tool for emphasis. It commonly appears in the phrase, “You can take the boy out of the x, but you can’t take the x out of the boy”

(where x can be whatever we want, normally a location). It’s great for lyrics, and it makes lyrics great. (See what I did there?) See Figure 8.21 for another example.

Figure 8.21

Antimetabole at work.

Additional Things to Try

In addition to all of these techniques, there are other things worth more than a passing glance.

PLAYING ON A SAYING

We’ve already looked at how useful idioms can be. We haven’t yet looked at how we can use rhyme to dress idioms up a bit. And while we’re at it, we can include clichés in on the action, too. In case you are wondering what the difference is between an idiom and a cliché, the answer is very simple. An idiom is so called because the literal translation of the words that form it isn’t the correct one. A cliché, on the other hand, gets its status through overuse. An idiom will always need to be interpreted figuratively. A cliché can be interpreted literally or figuratively. So, there are two ways that we can use rhyme to adapt common phrases or sayings to good effect. First, we can use rhyme to break slightly out of an idiom and to give it a new meaning in the process. An example of this technique would be, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it sink.” Here, the usual and expected drink has been replaced with a rhyme.

The advantage of this technique is that it catches the listener by surprise and forces engagement. The listener thinks he knows the phrase and is jolted when he doesn’t quite get it. Another example would be, “Kill two birds with one phone.”

In the U.K., bird is slang for girlfriend, and this line replaces the expected stone with phone. It implies splitting up with two ladies with one phone call. Other examples would be “Don’t judge a cook by his lover,” replacing book and cover,

“out of the frying pan into desire” instead of the expected fire, and “close but no guitar” instead of the expected cigar.

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These are just the first I have arrived at with a rhyming dictionary and a list of idioms and clichés. There are hundreds more waiting to be discovered and used to good effect, and it’s a really easy thing to try. It just requires a moment or two of trying out rhymes until one sparks. Of course, we can always wait for someone to utter a malapropism for us and simply run with the idea that he or she gives us, too. If you’re wondering what a malapropism is, it can be defined as “the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase; especially: the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in

the context” (www.m-w.com). In other words, a malapropism is when someone

uses the wrong word in place of the one that they meant. I have a good friend who comes out with these all the time. I won’t name her because that would be plain mean, but here are some of the beauts she has come out with recently. When discussing whether to hide a tumble dryer from view, she stated that it was simply a matter of prosthetics (meaning aesthetics). When discussing flea bites while on vacation, she said that she needed to use some anti-hysterectomy cream (meaning antihistamine cream), and when discussing a job interview, she said that many people had to sit for altitude tests (meaning aptitude tests). Hearing things like this can generate some great ideas. The story goes that the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night”

title came from Ringo saying, “It’s been a hard day’s night” when he actually meant “It’s been a hard night’s work,” for example.

The second approach to combining rhyme with idioms and clichés is to break our way into them rather than to work our way out of them. The subtle difference here is that we don’t start with the idiom or cliché. We think of what we want to say, and then see whether anything in that phrase rhymes with anything in a common phrase. Just yesterday, for example, I told a friend that I had booked a holiday in Devon in Southern England. He immediately responded, “Oh, I’ve heard that Devon is a place on Earth.” He bought his way into the line “Heaven is a place on Earth” through the rhyme, and I had a good laugh.

WORDS WITHIN WORDS

Another interesting technique is to listen for words within words. We can look for them too, but listening is more useful because it’s what we hear that counts. Just looking means that we will likely miss homophones. An example of what we are looking at here is the line, “I’ll be the div in the divide” from a song of mine called

“Roundabout.” Another example is the line, “There is no good in this goodbye.”

It’s a play on words that we can use as an additional design effect.

With all of these techniques, we must always remember that they should support and enhance the purpose of the song. If they don’t actually contribute to saying something of some interest, then they will just be mere examples of rhetorical experimentation. If they play a part in conveying something interesting, however, they can be fantastically effective and add that little something extra.

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Solution: Say More in Less and Figure Out Figures of Speech

PART 1: TROPES

Work with the following starting points and try to design some tropes with them.

d She is lost.

d He’s got a good, long memory.

d Yesterday was difficult.

d Tomorrow will be better.

d Time takes too long.

As an example of what to do, I’ll work through some possibilities for the first one on the list.

Metaphor

A quick dig around “She is lost” leads me to open the lost folder in my brain.

Immediate thoughts that spring to mind are lost property bags, mail lost in the post, and lost in translation. These immediately provide me with the possibilities of the metaphors she’s a bag in the airport that’s lost its way, she’s a picture post-card that never arrived, and she’s the words translation left behind—all of which I like and which will do nicely.

I won’t stop there, though. To build a better bank of words to play with, I’ll first go on the hunt for synonyms for lost. A thesaurus provides me with mislaid, vanished, and gone in the first instance, but then also reveals that lost has more than just one meaning. It can mean unable to be found, unable to find a way to a place, wasted, misunderstood, unable to cope, completely absorbed by something, destroyed, and so on. If the thesaurus is brought into action with all of these definitions, the potential list of words to play with is huge! Just some are forlorn, abandoned, alone, aimless, adrift, astray, off course, at sea, stumped, puzzled, baffled, and spellbound. In addition to this, I’ll have a good look around some idioms and see what I can dig up there. This provides me with lost for words, lost in you, lost cause, here today gone tomorrow, and vanished into thin air. That’s all useful stuff.

Simile

I initially find the word aimless intriguing, so I’m going to try to build a simile with it. Into the aimless folder I go. Aiming makes me think of targets, arrows, bull’s-eye, line of sight, and so on, but I have to be careful that I pick something usable and to remember that I’m looking for aim less. I need to focus on things that need direction. Words like bull’s-eye and targets aren’t as immediately useful as the things that will aim toward them. Things that are designed to get somewhere are going to be more fruitful, so arrow has potential. In the same way, so do plane and lots of other things that there isn’t room for here. Armed with these ideas, a brief experimentation leads me to, “She’s lost as an arrow without a bow,” and “She’s like a plane with no runway in sight.” Beyond this, I can also work with some of those idioms and get, “She’s lost like words” or “She’s lost like a cause.”

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Oxymoron

I need to go on the hunt for antonyms here, so the obvious place to start is with found or find. “Now she’s found that she’s lost” is a good one that employs the sense of discovery to the word lost. Beyond this, I’ll explore synonyms that could be applicable on either side of the opposite. On the lost side, I have already dug out mislaid, vanished, gone, forlorn, abandoned, alone, aimless, adrift, astray, off course, at sea, stumped, puzzled, baffled, and spellbound. On the found side, however, and via the past tense of find, I can now add discovered, located, hit upon, unearthed, recovered, uncovered, realized, turned up, encountered, identified, and caught, too. See Figure 8.22. “Now she’s unearthed that she’s at sea (or adrift)”

has an obvious clash of land and water, and “When she’s located just how off course she is” also has an interesting clash of clarity. It could do with some sharpening up, but the idea works.

Figure 8.22

Unpacking and contradicting lost.

Although they have antonymic value, none of these particular ideas is very usable in my mind, and this fact makes a good point. Not every kind of trope will always be pursuable. There’s not always an immediate route into a pun, for example, and that’s perfectly normal. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t always be on the lookout for them, though. A little hard work and a dig around can lead to some buried treasure if we have the patience to dig in the right places. If they were always easy to come by, there would be no fun in it, and everyone would be able to do it!

PART 2: SCHEMES AND OTHER IDEAS

Once you have a few metaphors, similes, oxymorons, and so on from the last exercise, attempt to expand on them using different schemes as a template. Here are some examples from my previous exploration of the words “She is lost.”

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Inversion

Without an ongoing body of lyrics to work with at this point, I can’t explore the use of inversion to set up rhymes, but I can look at adapting some idioms. Twisting

“Here today, gone tomorrow” into “Here tomorrow, gone today” is really effective, I think, and it’s going in my notebook for future use! “Air vanished into the thin” also intrigues me a bit, but I’ll have to spend some time figuring out what the

“thin” is to make it workable.

Repetition

These are all first attempts and just serve as initial scraps of ideas. Anadiplosis can provide you with something like “She’s a bag in the airport that’s lost its way; it’s way out of reach like an oncoming day.” (I couldn’t help including another simile at the end there.) It’s a fairly ambiguous line, but it is open to all sorts of interpretation, and that is no bad thing. “She’s the words translation left behind, behind her thoughts, behind her mind” provides a subtle combination of anadiplosis and anaphora, where the second half of the line could be interpreted as divisible by two with both halves starting on behind.

A more specific play with anaphora can lead to something like, “She’s lost like words, she’s lost like a cause, she’s lost like transparency behind closed doors.”

That employs a run of similes, two of which we already had in the vault from a paragraph or two beforehand. Time spent with antimetabole can lead to ideas like,

“She’s the words that translation left behind, behind the translation that’s left in her mind.” I’m not entirely sure what I make of this one! It’s trying a bit too hard to be clever, I think, so it won’t be getting used anywhere. It was worth a try, though!

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We Don’t Take Meter and

Problem

Rhyme Seriously Enough

9

Language is musical. Instead of quarter notes, half notes, measures, major thirds, perfect fifths, and so on, we have syllables, feet, meter, intonation, and the like. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the finer points of the words we use and the musical manner in which we use them to communicate.

Meter

In the same way that we have meter to frame the rhythmic endeavors of our melodies, we also have meter by which we can measure and assess the rhythmic elements of the words we use.

SYLLABLES

One has one, double has two, triplicate has three, and floccinaucinihilipilification has twelve. Syllables are the smallest metrical unit in the English language, and they are what give each of the words we use its own unique rhythmic qualities.

Every word has what we shall refer to as a stress pattern with regard to the amount of emphasis placed on each of the syllables in it, and ignoring these patterns can render words unintelligible in speech. Some require extra weight and drive in delivery, and some are lighter in comparison. Just in that last sentence, for example, I’d wager that you read LIGHTer rather than lightER, and deLIVery as opposed to DElivery, deliVERy, or deliverY. In our language, we are able to vary the character and expression of our words by differentiating the accentuation we place on different syllables within words, and this variation is actually very musical in nature, as we will see shortly. Don’t confuse these accentuations with exaggerated stresses that we use for special emphasis from time to time, though. We can go to town in overstressing syllables for added effect, but even when we don’t, every word we use with more than one syllable in it will have a syllable or two that is more stressed than the others.

Although the majority of the words we use have an inherent and universally understood stress pattern, some of these patterns can vary from accent to accent and region to region. Obvious examples would be differences in the pronunciation of certain words on either side of the Atlantic. For example, I say DEBris whereas others may say deBRIS. Some will say EVidently as opposed to eviDENTly, harASS as opposed to HARass, and kilOMeter as opposed to KILometer or kiloMETer. Although this issue is not necessarily that important and applies to a considerable minority of words, we should appreciate its implication with regard to songs that are intended to have mass worldwide appeal.

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Similarly, we should also appreciate that a variation in stress pattern can actually go one step further than sounding slightly odd; it can change the denotation of a word completely. Sometimes the difference can be between a noun and a verb, as is the case with the words record, import, convict, progress, rebel, and research. In fact, you may have found yourself not entirely sure how to read those words with regard to the correct stress pattern for the context. Try reading them out. For example, a RECord is a thing; reCORD is a verb that relates to creating that thing.

Stress patterns are important and contribute more to communication than we might appreciate. What’s particularly interesting about all this is that our language has a natural rhythm to it. Just like music consists of organized rhythm, so do lyrics. This is particularly evident in rap, where the melody often steps out of the picture completely, leaving the lyrics to work their rhythmic magic all on their own. There can be enough interest generated through rhythm alone to warrant at least a brief investigation into the mechanics of the rhythm of language. So, how are the rhythms organized, and how does this information relate to the musical meter? Read on….

SCANSION

Have you ever heard someone state that some lyrics don’t scan well? Scansion (alternatively known as scanning) is the name given to the practice of identifying different metrical patterns in poetry. It’s a process that requires us to mark where syllables are and aren’t stressed so that we can observe patterns in their order, and there are various ways to do it. Common techniques are to use an S and a U or a

/ (for stressed) and a - (for unstressed). We’ll work with the symbols / and - here.

See Figure 9.1 for clarity.

Figure 9.1

Marking stressed and unstressed syllables.

In this figure, we can observe and hear an alternating pattern of / - / - and so on.

It’s important to appreciate at this point how stresses can be organized and form a pattern across an entire line, and not just from word to word. For example, FEEL

the and RHYthm share a stress pattern even though FEEL the is two words and RHYthm is one.

FEET

Another brief look at the words LIGHTer and deLIVery reveals that the order of stress patterns can vary from word to word, and this is common across our vocabulary. As you might expect, these variations have different names, and they are known as different feet. A designated foot is composed of two or three syllables in

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a designated order of stress pattern. Identifying them in this way is a technique that the good old Greeks came up with, and there are therefore some more archaic terms on the way! Don’t worry about remembering the names, though. Very few people will care if you don’t know them, but people will care if your lyrics sound a little ropey because they don’t scan well. People want to hear good lyrics, not hear you talk about them! However, we’ll use the names here to aid in effective communication on the topic.

Binary Feet

Binary feet are those that consist of two syllables. First up is the iamb. It’s a foot that is sometimes referred to as having a rising rhythm because it rises from a nonstressed to a stressed syllable. Examples are trombone, bassoon, and cajon. We also have the trochee that can be referred to as a falling rhythm because it does the opposite of an iamb, with a fall from a stressed to a non-stressed syllable.

Examples are drum kit, cello, and bagpipes. There are a couple of other binary feet, but we’ll involve them later, when their usefulness is more obvious.

Ternary Feet

Ternary feet consist of three syllables. The anapaest or anapest (depending on your geographical location) has a rising rhythm similar to that of the iamb, only longer.

Examples are tambourine, violin, and tenor horn. The dactyl has a falling rhythm much like an extended trochee, and examples are xylophone and saxophone. The amphibrach has an up-down quality to it, with examples being piano and acoustic.

The amphimacer (also known as the cretic) is the opposite of the amphibrach, with a down-up rhythm. Examples of this foot are bass guitar and double bass. See Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.2

Different types of feet.

METER

Once the type of foot or feet has been established, it is common practice in scansion to identify the number of those feet that appear in each line. Just as with feet, don’t worry too much about remembering the names beyond these few pages if you don’t want to. They just help speed up clarification.

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Ever heard the words iambic pentameter? We’ll start with pentameter because it’s the meter that most people have heard of. It’s the most famous one largely because it’s the classic poetic meter of choice. If you didn’t know already, you should now know what the iambic bit is about from a few paragraphs ago. The pentameter indicates that there are five iambs to the line. Tetrameter features four feet per line and is very common in English poetry. Trimeter includes three and commonly alternates between tetrameter in stanzas. Hexameter includes six, heptameter includes seven, octameter includes eight, and so on. Figure 9.3 shows trochees in different quantities per line.

Figure 9.3

A selection of different meters built with trochees.

METRIC VARIATION

In a lot of poetry, continual uninterrupted repetition of the same metric foot (which I and some others call hopping, by the way) is a noble pursuit. When it comes to lyric writing, however, it isn’t really that much of a big deal. The real consideration here for us is how we can go about maximizing the benefits of repetition and variation in the songs we write, and it’s useful to remember that repetition doesn’t have to be generated through just one thing repeating. Sequential repetition can play its part, too. For example, there is just as obvious a repeating pattern in iamb, trochee, iamb, trochee as there is in iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb. As long as a pattern of some sort repeats, whether it be a couple of syllables or an extended pattern of 10 or more, then that repetition will help make something memorable.

In addition to this, the type of song that we are trying to write is significant. If we want to write easily accessible melodies that are as instantly memorable and singable as humanly possible (such as a lot of pop songs), then repeating rhythmic patterns in the lyrics are going to play a big part in how we achieve that. If, like the example of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” that we looked at in Problem 7, we’re not particularly fussy about our lyrics being easy to sing along to, then we don’t have to worry about our lyrics being tied down to rhythmic conformity.

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Even if we do want our songs to be instantly memorable and singable, we also need to remember that different sections in songs serve different purposes. Verses exist to contain detail, to set the context, and so on. They aren’t necessarily supposed to be particularly memorable, and it’s for this reason that a lack of metric regularity in the lyrics found in lots of verses isn’t too much of an issue. Choruses, on the other hand, are generally the key focus and the most memorable parts of songs. For this reason, choruses tend to feature lyrics that adhere more strictly to a repeating rhythmic pattern than other sections. Have a listen to various songs, and you will probably hear how the regulation in the meter of lyrics tends to tight-en up in chorus sections.

While we’re on the topic of making lyrics memorable and singable through repetition, we should also remember that if the lyrical phrase is short, it may be that it neither needs nor has time for repetition to take place to make it memorable.

Amidst all this consideration of the pros and cons of repetition, we should appreciate that, even with the best will in the world, it won’t always be possible to create exact repetitions of rhythmic phrases, no matter what the length. The occasional additional and nonconforming syllable or two is always going to creep into the lyrics we write, but this, too, can also be a good thing, even when we are striving for the most memorable and singable lyric of all time. Rhythm without some variation gets dull quickly. We looked at that in Problem 4. If we avoid looking at the employment of the occasional rogue foot as doing it wrong, and look at it as providing variation and rhythmic character instead, its effect becomes more super than superfluous. Changing the ebb and flow can add interest, and it’s therefore not always a good idea to “hop” on just one foot in continual succession. Look at the patterns in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.4

Establishing metrical patterns.

The variation in how easy these patterns are to identify highlights two important things. First, variation only works well when it is set against something that has been established. Without something clear to vary from, its distinction isn’t obvious, much like we observed in Problem 3 with regard to middle sections in songs.

Second, variation draws attention to itself, and this is where we can use it to good effect. We will generally want to avoid so much variation that it makes the rhythm of our lyrics an undeterminable mess, but we should consider including it to highlight key moments.

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SUBSTITUTION

Substitution is the name given to the technique of purposefully substituting one foot for another. If we use our earlier example of “Feel the rhythm flowing though this sentence” and change it to what we see in Figure 9.5, we get what is called an iambic substitution on the third foot (because a trochee is substituted with an iamb at that point). It draws attention to itself in that it disrupts the meter and prevents a metric pattern from being firmly established. It’s the equivalent of a drummer who changes the pattern he is playing halfway through a section. It disrupts the groove in a place in the line so that the line doesn’t ever have the chance to bed down into a metric groove. When the line tries to get back on track from the words through this onward, there’s not long enough left to establish the rhythmic flow, and it becomes a mess. Obviously, a repeat of this whole rhythmic pattern again would balance it out and make it sound more rhythmically stable, but as it is, the iamb that has been thrust into the line creates disruption.

Figure 9.5

A substitution causing metric confusion.

If we are going to include substitutions effectively, we therefore need to weigh the benefits of attracting attention against the detriment of disrupting the flow. If we went with something more like the example in Figure 9.6, we still hear the meter being messed with through the arrival of an iambic substitution on the fifth foot, but with the significant difference that it comes later, when the meter of the line is more established. In this case, the variation acts as more of an interesting addition than a distraction. Similarly, we could get away with something like

“toDAY FEEL the RHYthm FLOWing THROUGH here. ” The meter in this rhythm features an iamb before the four trochees that follow it. In this case, the meter still has time to establish itself, but after the variation as opposed to before it. The point is that the whole line doesn’t need to repeat again for it to make rhythmic sense. The repetition in it has had a chance to make its mark, and the variation acts as a complementary touch of spice rather than as a disruption.

Figure 9.6

A substitution adding interest.

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Incidentally, this employment of variation in rhythm doesn’t have to be limited to consideration of the placement of metric feet. It works on a grander scale, where we consider substituting lines within varying sections, too. As already noted, not every kind of song will be as dependent on the role of repetition as others, so some won’t feature any obvious one-off lines of rhythmic variation because variation is constantly taking place anyway. However, in those songs that do, it’s interesting to note where it appears and why. For example, the variation will often come in the last line of a quatrain where the previous lines have conformed to a repeated pattern forming the pattern AAAB, or AAB (where B is twice the length of A). Equally common in quatrains is the pattern AABA. Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” (written by Lavigne and the Matrix) is a good example of a song that uses both of these patterns to good effect. The verse and pre-chorus are both built with the metrical pattern of AAAB, where the rhythmic variation of each line in the lyrics is saved for the fourth and final line of the quatrain. The chorus employs the pattern AABA, where the variation adds interest slightly earlier on the third line, but only after the rhythm of the previous line (A) has had the chance to repeat, and the chorus ends with a repeat of that same pattern (A) again. Have a listen if you have the means to do so. You will hear these patterns really obviously.

It’s not just these patterns that employ a cunning balance of repetition and variation to good effect. ABAC and AABC, for example, are examples of commonly found patterns that work for the same reason. The (at least roughly) repeated metric structures of line A are counterbalanced and complemented by the variation that the other lines set against them.

These patterns are common in many pop songs and work well because they employ the one-off line (B) or lines (B and C) in a place where they complement the rhythmic flow generated through the repetition of A. They don’t prevent the repetition, but they actually do more to highlight how the repetition works. That’s the key thing to think about when we substitute different metric feet or employ variation in larger rhythmic patterns. Is it obvious that they are different so they are complementing the repetition around them by adding a touch of spice to the occasion, or are they generating confusion by denying any kind of pattern the chance to be established at all?

So, to summarize this, a repeating foot or rhythmic pattern will definitely set a metric groove, but it will also get a little tedious if the repetition isn’t complemented with a touch of variation. A substitution thrown into the mix will attract attention and can therefore be very useful in highlighting an important lyrical moment, but only if it is obvious as a substitution by being placed in relation to an obvious repeating pattern.

A few paragraphs back, I mentioned a couple of binary feet that we would come to, and that moment has now arrived. Figure 9.7 includes a binary foot called a pyrrhic foot that is formed by two unstressed syllables. On its own, it doesn’t make much sense, which is why we haven’t looked at it yet. In the midst of a line like this one, though, it comes into its own. It does the two things here that it usually does. First, it avoids putting a forced stress on a syllable that wouldn’t usually have it in common language. Second, it helps set up the impact of the next foot by delaying it. The sen of sentence now has more relative weight than it otherwise would have. Interestingly, so does the flo of flowing. It has added emphasis because it’s the last stress for a while (albeit a very short while), and the sen gets emphasis because it’s where the line lands back on track. Read it out loud to hear it.

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Figure 9.7

The inclusion of a pyrrhic foot.

In addition to having a foot formed by two unstressed syllables, we also have the spondee, which is a foot formed by two stressed syllables. Whereas the pyrrhic foot emphasizes the following stressed syllable, the spondee robs it slightly. The effect this has is that the next unstressed syllable starts to take on more significance purely through the variation that it provides. It’s useful for emphasis, and it’s the poetic equivalent of purposefully overstating a point in speech. “SIT DOWN,” as I often tell my children at the table. Not “SIT down,” or “sit DOWN,” but “SIT DOWN”

for dramatic emphasis. See Figure 9.8.

Figure 9.8

The inclusion of a spondaic foot.

Substitutions are commonly used for highlighting key moments and their surroundings, and for tidying up messy metrical moments. We shall see how they work as we progress through this chapter.

The Musical Elements of Speech

This is where we’ll start to get a handle on how we can best apply the musical information inherent in our language to the rhythm of our melodic lines. Although dynamic considerations of loudness of stressed syllables can be considered part of the composition process, we’ll leave them out of our exploration here and focus on the other two factors involved in defining stress points—syllable length and relative pitch.

SYLLABLE LENGTH

Known in musical terms as the quantitative accent or agogic accent, a longer note will generally be perceived as more stressed than a shorter one. The tonal confidence of the note landed on will obviously have a bearing on the musical strength of a sung syllable, but if we relate this fact to language, we can observe that we rarely hold unstressed syllables for a long time in natural speech. Although it’s true to say that our language is based more on the timing of stresses than on their length (I’ll elaborate on this point shortly), it is accurate to say that a syllable held for relatively longer than those around it will be perceived as relatively stressed. If we’re going to hold a note for a long time, it therefore makes sense to try to ensure that it is accompanied by a naturally stressed syllable in the lyrics.

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RELATIVE PITCH

Have you ever sent an SMS or email and then discovered that it wasn’t received in quite the way you intended? I’ve fallen foul of that kind of thing many times. It has usually happened when I’ve tried to be funny, and the irony or sarcasm in what I wrote didn’t come across loud and clear—the reason being that the intonation in my voice couldn’t be heard. It was just read. The rise and fall in the pitch that accompanies the syllables we utter can be just as important as the sounds of the vowels and consonants themselves.

Has it ever occurred to you that the word monotony actually stems from monotone (as in one note) ? Pitch variation is so important that its absence leads to boredom. Expression is dependant on pitch variation, and a change in relative pitch can lead to a word or two taking on a whole new meaning. If you pay another visit to the words REcord and reCORD and read them out loud, you should be able to hear that the pitch of the stressed syllables is higher than that of the unstressed ones. This will always be the case unless we are purposefully changing the function of a word from everyday use. Test it. Look around wherever you are and speak out loud the names of the objects that surround you. Ignore the expressions that bystanders may give you. They won’t appreciate the importance of this moment. Even if you are already aware of this fact, do it anyway. It never hurts to be reminded. I’ll do it too, while I’m writing. You can’t hear me, obviously, but trust me. Table, paper, computer, fish tank, elephant (just kidding), guitar….

Pitch variation doesn’t just avoid tedium. It’s also a vital part of communication, and the study of intonation is actually very complex! We’ll happily leave here having gleaned musical information that will serve us well. Stressed syllables tend to be relatively higher than others.

There are those who think that applying an understanding of meter and scansion to lyric writing is pointless and a waste of time because the rhythmic emphasis within a lyric will be informed by the tonality and rhythm of the music rather than the feet and meter of the lyrics themselves. That’s true in a sense, but it doesn’t appreciate the whole picture. If we start with lyrics, we can purposefully incorporate patterns of stressed syllables so that they inform the music that will accompany them. We have just seen how words themselves provide rhythmic and tonal information. Essentially, the employment of different feet is all with a mind to generate patterns of rhythm with stressed syllables offsetting non-stressed ones. In principle, this is no different than the implications of primary, secondary, and tertiary stress levels we have seen at work in melodic rhythm.

STRESS-TIMED LANGUAGE

English is a stress-timed language. This means that stressed syllables are voiced at a roughly constant rate, and the unstressed syllables have to fit themselves in between them. Musically speaking, it’s like the stressed syllables provide the beat and the non-stressed syllables bounce between. Not all languages are stress timed.

Some, including Spanish, are what is known as syllable timed, where every syllable shares roughly the same amount of time, and the stressed syllables have no notable rhythmic governance. There’s obviously a lot involved in the manner in which stress-timed and syllable-timed languages vary, but that’s the general gist of it, and it’s good enough for our purposes. Read this:

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Here are some words that hopefully show

How lyrics have a rhythmic flow

If we look metrically at these two lines, we can see that they don’t share the same number of syllables. The first has nine, and the second has eight. If we place them on a beat of 4/4, we instinctively marry the stressed syllables with the beats of the bar so that we speak and can hear it as graphically represented in Figure 9.9.

Figure 9.9

Stressed syllables landing on the beat.

Whereas the division of syllables was as equal as possible before (nine and eight), we can now see that the first measure contains ten syllables, and the second has been reduced to seven. However, we still manage to read them so that they marry up to the same rhythm, and so that show and flow both end up on Beat 4 of their respective measures. How so? What happens to the extra syllables in the first line?

Our stressed-time language enables us to cram them in between the stressed syllables. Beats 1 and 3 in the first measure are filled with the words Here are some and hopefully, respectively. They each fit three syllables into one beat. If we then look at the first and third beats of the second measure, there are two syllables provided by lyrics and rhythmic filling that same distance of a beat. In matching the stressed syllables in the words with the metrical beat of the rhythm of 4/4, we instinctively rush through unstressed syllables so that the stressed ones have prominence in the measure.

As we can hear, this lyric doesn’t sound odd so we can get away with this, but what about when we can’t? What do we do when we want a strong repeating rhythm but we have a lyric that is such a metric mess that we can’t comfortably sit it down on any kind of beat? On such occasions as these, there are three options that I would like to suggest.

d Remove or add words. Would simply adding or removing a word from the line tidy things up a bit? Do they all really need to be there? For example, a quick improvement to the metrical flow in the example shown in Figure 9.9

would be to remove the word some from the first measure (see Figure 9.10).

That would solve one of the busy beats (Beat 1), but it would still leave us with a third beat that doesn’t marry from measure to measure. Hopefully is now the offending article (with an additional unwanted syllable in it), and we can’t fix it by removing a word because it’s just one word in the first place.

How about the next option?

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Figure 9.10

“Some” removed to tidy up the meter a bit.

d Find a suitable synonym. Do the offending syllables really need to be there?

Is the word in question really the right word for the slot, or could we find another word that means that same thing? Cue the thesaurus. We’ve already explored the advantages of the synonym for saying a lot in a little. Here we can see how it can help fix a muddled meter. What we want in this example is a two-syllable word or combination of words that can replace the currently out-of-place three-syllable hopefully. An option here might be with luck. It means a similar sort of thing and will fix the number-of-syllables issue, at any rate. This would leave us with what we can see in Figure 9.11.

Figure 9.11

Substituting “hopefully” for “with luck.”

Now we have a neat run of binary feet and can scan the lyric with some accuracy as two lines of trochaic tetrameter. However, we’re still having an issue with that third beat. With luck would naturally be more iambic, so in fixing one issue, we have actually created another one. The meter of the line is tidier with regard to the number of syllables, but the natural stress pattern associated with with luck disrupts the rhythmic flow of the line considerably.

d Change the function of the line. If we change the meaning of with luck to something that is similar but more trochaic in nature, then we’ll have this thing wrapped up. How about going with should help instead? It fits the bill and will leave us with what is revealed in Figure 9.12—a neat and tidy example of trochaic tetrameter.

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Figure 9.12

“With luck” substituted with “should help.”

Of course, we could have gone about this a different way and concentrated more on adding syllables to the second measure to match the first. Going through the process again could have led us to something like, “Here are some words that hopefully show, how language does have a rhythmic al flow” if we were to add the odd word or syllable here and there, or “Here are some words that hopefully show, how words that we use have metrical flow” if we were to go with a subtle combo of synonyms and function change. These would both provide us with an equal distribution of feet in both measures.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

We don’t have to go through this process of tidying up the meter with every lyric we write, but being able to do so is a useful skill to have. Sometimes a word will remain the right and proper word to use even if it does fly in the face of the meter a bit. As we’ve already seen, it may actually benefit the lyric in doing so. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to change a lyric when the melody is forcing the vocalist to stress a syllable that wouldn’t normally be stressed in speech. There are times when you’ll hear lyrics that haven’t been adjusted like this, and although some people don’t seem to mind, I know that there are plenty of us who do (myself included).

If our lyrics are intended to communicate, then we shouldn’t hinder that communication by stressing the wrong syllables and risk making the words unintelligible or stand out for the wrong reasons. This means that in building melodies, it’s the stressed syllables that we should reference when we are tying the lyrics to the musical measures. The non-stressed syllables can bounce about between them, but the stressed syllables will need to tie in with the musical beat. We’ll see how this works in practice when we build a melody in Problem 11.

ALTERING THE PERCEIVED SPEED

Because stressed syllables are tied to rhythmic beats, more or fewer unstressed syllables crammed between them are going to make a noticeable different to the perceived speed. This is the same principle we saw at work in Problem 6, but this time, applied more specifically to lyrical construction. As an example, take the line

“Checking out the rhythm in these lyrics that we’re given to analyze and scrutinize and pick apart with beady eyes.” There’s a natural inherent rhythm of / – repeated for the majority of these lyrics. It should be really easy to hear and sounds like,

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“CHECKing out the RHYthm in these LYRics that we’re GIVen to ANalyze and SCRUtinize and PICK apart with BEADy eyes.”

Now, listen for where the lyric sounds like it is adjusting pace. You should hear that the rhythmic flow is disrupted and seems to slow down a bit when the word to appears in the middle. The reason why this happens is because every stressed syllable except the GIV in given is followed by three unstressed syllables before the next beat comes along, forming the pattern (/ –). The outcome of this is that each of these beats is divided in four, resulting in each syllable lasting for a sixteenth note. GIV, however, is followed by just two unstressed syllables, and this means that for this beat, there are fewer syllables to fill the same space. This fact in turn means that the to at the end of that beat lasts for an eighth rather than a sixteenth note. The outcome of this is that the perceived speed of the lyrics seems to slow down slightly at this point. Refer back to the section on perceived speed in Problem 6 for more clarity if this seems a bit hazy. Have you ever given much thought to purposefully varying the syllabic density in your lyrics? Changing the number of unstressed syllables between those that are stressed enables us to accelerate or decelerate our lyrics at will and should be something that we are always aware of as we are crafting and manipulating the words we put together.

As well as varying perceived pace, a change in syllabic and overall word density, whether it takes place from line to line or section to section, can also provide interest simply by virtue of the variation that it brings. It’s easy to write a complete song without ever paying any attention to how lyrically busy each section is compared to the others. Have you ever given this much attention? If you haven’t thought about it before, have a look through some of your previous efforts and ask yourself whether your songs are benefiting from variation in word or syllabic density. Are you using the number of words to create both space and intensity, for example? It’s an easy thing to look for and can make a big difference to the songs that we write.

Rhyme

In my experience of teaching lyric writing, I have come across various different attitudes to rhyming. For some, rhymes are predictable, corny, and symbolic of someone who doesn’t have any depth to what he or she is writing. For others, rhyme is a valuable tool for making lyrics work more effectively and something that shouldn’t be buried in a bid for credibility. We’re going to spend a bit of time here investigating what rhyme is and what it can do for us. When you get to the end, make up your own mind, or read it again if that helps you decide (couldn’t resist it—I apologize!—and if you missed it, then never mind).

HOW WE MARK THEM

Before we get into looking at rhyme, it’s a good idea to establish how we notate it on paper. As with all of these things, it can be helpful to employ shorthand, and the generally accepted practice with rhyme is to use letters in much the same way we have looked at for stanzas and song sections. The repeat of a letter marks the repeat of a structurally significant rhyme. So, cat, mat, dog, log would be AABB.

The A marks the at sound, and the B marks the og sound. Cat, dog, mat, log would be ABAB. Cat, dog, mat, log, spinach would in all probability be ABABC, with the

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C marking the newcomer to the proceedings. I say in all probability because where a word or line doesn’t serve any kind of rhyming function, it is generally marked as an X, so cat, dog, mat, log, spinach would be ABABX without another stanza coming along and offering a rhyming partner for spinach. Cat, dog, wolf, log would be marked as XAXA. The cat and wolf serve no rhyming function and are therefore X’s. It works on a first come, first served basis, where the first rhyming partner gets to lay claim to the A, and so on. See Figure 9.13.

Figure 9.13

Notating rhymes.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF RHYMES

There are various different types of rhymes, and each type can be referred to with more than one name because people don’t seem to be able to agree on them. This will become ever more apparent as we weave our way through this section. I’m going to stick with the names that I consider to be the most useful over the following few pages. It’s not a problem if you know what is covered under different names. As with all of these things, it’s the principle that matters, not the lingo.

Full Rhyme/Perfect Rhyme/End Rhyme

This is what most people think of when they think of rhyme. It’s where two words share the same vowel sounds (not spellings) and consonant sounds after the vowel—assuming there is a consonant there at all, that is. The consonant sound before the vowel will be different. If it isn’t, then it is likely the same word. For example, let’s work with the word rhyme. No particular reason, I just felt like it!

So a full rhyme with rhyme would be something that ends with the sound yme or ime. Remember, it’s what it sounds like that is important; the spelling is completely insignificant in full rhyme. There is a form of rhyme known as eye rhyme that is based entirely on words that look like they should rhyme but don’t. Examples are love with prove and phone with done and gone. Those are no use to us as lyricists, so we shan’t cast an eye on eye rhyme from here on in.

Full rhymes with rhyme could therefore be…what? Have a go yourself before you look any further. Be honest now, what did you get? Possibilities are prime, climb, chime, crime, and so on. However, what about the likes of mealtime, enzyme, and sublime? The number of syllables in each word doesn’t have to be the same for them to be able to rhyme. They can creep into multiple syllables as long as the basic requirements are met.

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If you look closely here and think through some of the meter magic from a few pages previous, you should be able to note something of significance in the way that these two-syllable words rhyme with rhyme. Mealtime and enzyme are both trochaic, and sublime is iambic. “So what?” you may think. Well, it’s worth acknowledging that rhymes tend to be most effective when they marry up on naturally stressed syllables. The fact that MEALtime and ENzyme are both trochaic means that the stressed syllable in those words is not actually the syllable that is providing the rhyme. The iambic subLIME sounds like a stronger rhyme, because its rhyming syllable lime is stressed, and this stress hits home the rhyming syllable all the more effectively.

Masculine and Feminine Rhymes

When a rhyme occurs on a single stressed syllable at the end of a line, then it is known as masculine. When a rhyme involves more than one syllable in each word, and the last syllable is unstressed, it is known as feminine. ForGET regRET forms a masculine rhyme because the stress that carries the rhyme is the last in each word.

Figure 9.14

Feminine and masculine rhymes.

ReMEMber SepTEMber is a feminine rhyme because the rhyming stressed syllables aren’t at the end (mem and tem), but they are followed by a feminine unstressed syllable (ber). There are those who believe that the employment of feminine rhyme (sometimes known as a double or triple rhyme for obvious reasons) is the sign of accomplished lyrics. It’s obviously a little harder to find consistent feminine rhymes than masculine ones, but we should remember that it’s not how hard or difficult a lyric is to write that make it worthwhile. Ultimately, it’s what it says that’s important. Figure 9.14 is an example from some of my own humble efforts—the first verse of “The Way It Works.”

This verse is clearly divided into two, with the halfway juncture marked by the definite stop provided by the masculine clue. The second half then follows exactly the same pattern, employing two feminine endings followed and finished by a definite masculine end that forms a rhyme with the previous one. Remember what we said about rhythms ending on insecure as opposed to confident metric beats?

An unstressed ending is a bit like mumbling under the breath, as opposed to the stressed ending’s bold proclamation. A feminine end will generally leave a lyric

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sounding more open than a masculine one will, and therefore it tends to be a good type of rhyme to use before the end of a stanza, although that’s not to say that it can’t work at the end, too.

Slant Rhyme/Imperfect Rhyme/Near Rhyme/

Para-Rhyme/Off Rhyme/Partial Rhyme

Although there are six rhyme types listed in this heading, fear not—they are actually all pretty much the same thing. I’ll use the name near rhyme for our purposes, because it does the best job of spelling out what it means. It refers to a word that nearly rhymes perfectly, but not quite. Like full rhymes, near rhymes share the same vowel sound, but they don’t share the same consonant sound after that vowel. Instead, they employ a consonant sound that is similar.

If we revisit the previous list of rhymes for rhyme, we can now add words such as line, spine, fine, resign, and confine. They end with ine sound in place of ime and tick the near-rhyme box in doing so. It has always been frowned upon to use rhymes like this on Broadway, but in the context of the majority of modern lyric writing, it’s all hunky dory and perfectly acceptable. Other similar-sounding consonants that we can play with are evident in rhymes such as gone with wrong, lap with rack, and rush with much. Figure 9.15 shows an example of near rhyme at work. This time, it’s the first verse of “Colour Me In.”

Figure 9.15

Near rhyme at work.

Assonance

We can get away with these sorts of rhymes to a certain extent because rhyme is primarily a vowel association. It’s the vowel that carries expression when a word is sung, and that’s therefore the part of the word that tends to get the most attention. Matching the consonants that frame it helps focus the rhyme, but just the same vowel sound is often enough. Where rhyme is built primarily on shared vowel sounds, it is referred to as assonance, and as you can probably imagine, rhyming with just the vowel sounds as a guide can open up the rhyming possibilities considerably further than full rhyme or even near rhyme can. Rhyme can now be joined by the likes of file, swipe, I, and life. They all have the same i sound in the middle, but the consonant sounds at the end aren’t even pretending to sound similar. On the page, these may seem like they will never work in practice, but if you sift through some lyrics, it won’t be long before you stumble across some assonance rhyme doing its stuff. It’s used all over the place!

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Internal, Additive, and Subtractive Rhyme

The example in Figure 9.15 brings another couple of considerations into the picture. First, rhymes don’t have to occur at the ends of lines. Where they appear midway through a line, they are known as internal rhymes. We’ll look at the benefits of employing this trick in a paragraph or two.

Second, two of the rhymes here could also be classed as additive rhyme, which is a subdivision of near rhyme. Hopefully, the reason for this is obvious. Take the third line. A full rhyme with mess would be dress, but this lyric includes the ed on the end. It has been added. It’s not a full rhyme, and it is therefore a near rhyme that is additive in nature. Without the added element, the first line would rhyme chrome with tone, which is near rather than full anyway because of the different consonant sounds at the end. The added d on the end of tone classes the first line as an additive internal rhyme, too.

There is such a thing as subtractive rhyme, and that is where this process happens in reverse. So if toned came before chrome in this example, chrome would be a subtractive rhyme.

Consonance and Alliteration

Assonance’s opposite is known as consonance, and this refers to an association between words built on similarities in the use of consonants rather than vowels. It can happen anywhere in a word. It can happen at the end ( beat and goat) or in the middle ( bigger and haggle), but when it is used at the start, its most useful purpose for lyricists becomes evident. It’s the principle that builds tongue twisters, and it’s called alliteration. It’s a technique that is used commonly in advertising and tabloid headlines, and although some highbrow poets frown upon it slightly, it can lead to lovely little lines in lyrics. It can provide an energetic quality, especially at pace, where the words keep returning to the same point to bounce off in another direction. An example of mine from a song entitled “The Mean Time” is “tried and tripped by troubling truth,” and this includes the sound tr being alliterated, rather than just the t. If you haven’t explored alliteration much in your own writing, you really should. Some seriously snazzy sounds can start to work wonders with words when we do.

THE RHYTHMIC QUALITIES OF RHYME

It’s easy to look at rhyme as just being clever and filling a sonic role of comparison between similar sounds. If we look at it musically, though, we discover that it is much more than that. Rhyme and rhythm work very closely together. If we look back to Figure 9.9, we can see that in addition to the considerations of stress-timed syllables, the rhyme of show and flow was driving the rhythmic dance. The syllables worked themselves into place to accommodate that rhyme. As another example, read this:

Here is a simple seven word line

/ - - / - / - - A

And here is a simple perfect rhyme - / - - / - / - A

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Notice that the letters indicating rhyming function have been inserted in place of the / or - that would normally mark the syllable. This form of notation makes the associations and variations in rhythm and rhyme immediately apparent and is a quick and useful exercise to perform on the lyrics we write. Although both of these lines consist of nine syllables, we can now see as well as hear that we phrase them very differently.

One observation is that we skip past the And at the start of the second line to ensure that the here gets its rightful place on a stressed beat, for example, and this means that the remainder of the line has just eight syllables to fit in, as opposed to the previous line’s nine. In addition to this, we can also note that the near rhyme of line with rhyme occurs on the fourth beat of each line. It’s easy to think that rhyming partners always need to marry up on the same relative beat from line to line like this, but what happens if we bring the word rhyme forward? Would it still work as a rhyme? You tell me:

Here is a simple seven word line

/ - - / - / - - A

And here is a rhyme - / - - A

What do you think? It still rhymes doesn’t it? A rhyme doesn’t have to appear on the same relative beat in a measure as its partner for it to lock into the meter.

That’s important. It does generate an interesting effect, but we will get to that later in this chapter. What happens if we immediately follow that rhyming partner with something else in the same line, such as:

Here is a simple seven word line

/ - - / - / - - A

And here is a rhyme that doesn’t work

- / - - A - / - ?

I have included a question mark at the end of the second line in the notation because I’m not sure at this point whether it will be a rhyme. It could be an X or a B. What can we say about this example? The rhyming function of the word rhyme in the second line is still evident, but it is overshadowed by the that doesn’t work. The phrase currently seems like a bit of a rhythmic mess as far as rhyme is concerned. When it is followed by this, however:

Here is a simple seven word line

/ - - / - / - - A

And here is a rhyme that doesn’t work

- / - - A - / - B

And here is another seven word phrase

- / - - / - / - - C

That saves the day and proves its worth

- / - C - / - B

It all comes together much more neatly, and we can see the rhyming function working. We can identify the assonance rhymes of work with worth and phrase with day, and we can appreciate that the whole phrase has symmetry and balance.

Rhymes don’t just sound pleasant; they have the power to manipulate rhythm.

They nail themselves into the meter and make a stand there. They enhance the significance of rhythmic beats through their presence, and they are therefore a fantastic and valuable compositional tool. In case you haven’t ever noticed, let me draw your attention to the fact that rhyme and rhythm have a fair bit in common

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in how they are spelled. Although their respective spellings have varied throughout the years, they can both be traced back to the same word— rhythmos, which is Greek for “measured flow of movement.” When we look at it like this, it isn’t surprising that rhyme and rhythm work so closely together.

USING THE RHYTHMIC QUALITIES OF RHYME TO OUR ADVANTAGE

So, now that we have had a look at the different types of rhyme at our disposal, let’s have a look at how we can use them to suit our purposes.

Speed and Finality

Take the card game Snap. You know the game, right? Players take turns placing their cards face up on top of the ever-increasing pile growing between them. When a matching pair is placed on top of another, the first person to notice and shout

“Snap!” wins. It’s called Snap in my part of the world, anyway. You may know it under a different name, but you get the idea. Rhyming is a lot like this game. When a word’s rhyming pair comes along, it has the power to end the phrase just like a card ends a hand. A rhyme can dictate finality.

Read another example, this time taken from a song entitled “All Fall Down” (see Figure 9.16). I’ve purposefully left the metrical analysis out of the picture for the time being.

“I tear my life up with divides, and different parts of me camp out on different sides. Any way I look at it I hide, and though I’ve tried to let my guard down, it’s hard now.”

Figure 9.16

Rhyme dictating structure and balance.

Whereas we have previously looked at how syllabic density can vary perceived pace, here we can also observe that through their timing, a completing rhyming pair can alter how quickly a line seems to move. In this case, the first rhyming pair of divides and sides go “snap!” after an 11-syllable gap between them. The next

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rhyming duo of hide and tried pair off much more quickly, with just three syllables dividing them. Regardless of the number of stressed syllables between each pair, the fact that there are only three syllables between tried and hide means that they pair off considerably more quickly than the previous rhyme. In dictating finality, the rhyme has the power to alter the perceived speed of the lyric.

Structure and Balance

We can also learn that the structure and balance of the lyric is directly affected by the rhyme. There are obviously different ways that we could stress various syllables among these words. However, in attempting to identify a repeating pattern of sorts, we can observe that we need to employ two to capture everything that needs to be on a stressed beat on a stressed beat. For example, the line “and different parts of me camp out on different sides” naturally suits a binary rhythm: “and DIFFerent PARTs of ME camp OUT on DIFFerent SIDES.” A more ternary approach to this line would lead to something like, “and DIFFerent parts OF me camp OUT on diffeRENT sides,” and that doesn’t sit anywhere near as naturally.

So, binary feet works well for this line, but not so well for the “let my guard down, it’s hard now” that follows later.

If we analyze the lyric a bit, we can see that the meter progresses nicely in binary feet up until the tried that concludes the second rhyme. At this point, however, it seems to turn much more ternary in nature, and the rhymes do a lot to dictate the fact. We now have a feminine rhyme of guard down with hard now, and if we were to keep in binary feet, we would end up with either “LET my GUARD down IT’S hard NOW,” or “let MY guard DOWN it’s HARD now.” Either way, this would be a problem for two reasons. First, it would mean stressing words that aren’t naturally stressed in speech. Second and more importantly, it would mean that guard and hard would be denied the opportunity to serve their rhyming duty.

Binary feet wouldn’t capture both of them on a stressed beat. It would result in guard being on a beat and hard being off one or vice versa. The result and important thing to draw from all this is that by demanding two different metric feels to capture them on stressed beats, the rhymes inherent in these lyrics naturally divide the lyrics into two independently balanced sections.

It follows that if a rhyme has the power to dictate the finality of a phrase of lyrics, then an absent expected rhyme has the ability to dictate that a rhyme is not yet finished, and this in turn has the power to have the final say on whether a phrase is balanced. For example, look at the following rhyme:

Here’s the first line

A

Here’s line number two

B

And here’s another one

C

Here’s the first rhyme

A

And rhymes carry through

B

Do you feel the expectation of the third rhyming line to match with one at the end? We are left anticipating the third rhyme C because we have had it before.

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The expectation of that rhyme does a lot to dictate the balance of this structure.

Without it, this phrase sounds unfinished and left hanging in the air. The lack of completion that this brings doubles as an open ending. When we get it, and the line

“Until the last one has come” is placed on the end, providing another C, it sounds complete and rounded off.

This is useful information to know when we are trying to manipulate listeners’

expectations. We can use rhyme to dictate when something is and isn’t complete.

We don’t have to follow its suggestions, though. In the previous example, we could have moved straight on from the line “And rhymes carry through” into a new section, but that would work as an intentional shift of balance. The final completing line doesn’t have to be there, but its absence will not go unnoticed, and it will jar the comfort of the predicted nature of the phrase. Alternatively, replacing an expected rhyme with something that blatantly disregards its role in rhyming function can be really effective and often amusing. For example, take the following lyrics: here are some words, that illustrate rhyme, the important one comes, at the end of this phrase. Here, the expected line at the end is replaced with phrase. The lyric has effectively sold a dummy and purposefully disrupts the balance and flow in the process.

All of these considerations ultimately rest on the fact that we tend to want to ensure that rhyming syllables marry up on the same beats. Where we do, the rhyme sounds solid. Where the rhyming word arrives on an earlier beat in the line than its partner, the perceived speed of the line increases. Where it arrives late, we are left anticipating it, and where it doesn’t arrive at all, we can be left a little thrown and uneasy.

TRACKING DOWN RHYMES IN RHYMING DICTIONARIES

There seems to be some snobbery among “real” and “deep” lyricists when it comes to rhyming dictionaries, but frankly, what’s the problem with them? They may seem like cheating on one hand, but in reality, all they do is provide us with words that we would eventually come to after we had spent hours trying to think of them ourselves—and probably some more on top of those. It’s fair to say that a lot of the words found in them will be of no use to most anyone, let alone a lyricist, but we can just ignore those ones. For example, ignore rhymes with Kohr (which, in case you didn’t know it, is a very rare surname), Loehr (which is another surname, obviously), Louis d’or (a former French gold coin), schnorr (a verb meaning to obtain or seek to obtain by cadging or wheedling), and a whole host of wars. There are loads more offerings too, some of which are actually of some use! All of these definitions come courtesy of rhymezone.com, by the way.

Rhyming dictionaries can be very handy, though. We just have to filter through what we consider to be usable. We don’t have to use real paper dictionaries, either.

They can be useful for packing in a pocket when we are on the move, but there are a fair few extremely useful (and free) rhyming dictionary sites on the web. They are incredibly easy to find and just as easy to use. They are a very valuable resource and should be used at will and without fear of being labeled a cheat. Use them when no one is looking if you have to.

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LETTING RHYME DICTATE THE WORDS?

Further to our previous consideration of whether we should feel free to use rhymes, I would like to add that it’s perfectly acceptable to not only use them, but also to let them lead the way. Let’s face it; there are times when we are writing that we get a bit stuck and short on places and angles to explore. On occasions such as these, it can be a great idea to open up, or click to, a rhyming dictionary, put a few thematically appropriate words in, and then let the rhyming possibilities speak to us.

I do this a lot, and it’s a technique that has saved my bacon on numerous occasions. For example, suppose we’re writing about missing someone, and we get as far as:

These rooms seem smaller now you’re not here

They’ve lost the echo of fun

The smile you brought with you has got up and left….

Stuck. This is genuine, by the way. I’m making this up as I write. Okay, let’s get some rhymes on the go for fun so that we can balance this phrase into an XAXA phrase. Possibilities from my trusted rhyming dictionary are run, done, sun, begun, and so on. Beyond these, we can try rhyming with a near rhyme, such as hung, which gives us flung, ladder- rung, slip of the tongue, and so on, and hum, which leads to words such as chum, slum, numb, and thousands of others!

We only need to pick out the ones that show potential. We’re looking for words that will spark the imagination or suggest new avenues worthy of exploration.

Farmer’s lung is not going to help very much, unless I’m missing something….

Now that we have these words, we should jot them all down and see what sparks. Personally, I’m liking the slip of the tongue angle, and done and begun both share a start and end quality that could be suitable. Then it’s a case of slotting in the odd line and seeing how it goes. I’m going to run with the slip of the tongue approach.

These rooms seem smaller now you’re not here

They’ve lost the echo of fun

The smile you brought with you has got up and left…

When it tripped with my slip of the tongue.

I’m not sure what I make of this at the moment, but it does give me a new angle.

Suddenly, it turns out that I said something that made the person leave. Now I could go to town on what that might have been. Why might I have said it? I can go through the fact and feeling from chapters past and have a good dig around the idea, and now the creative juices are flowing, all thanks to the rhyming dictionary.

Lovely stuff! We’ll look at how to get further into growing a lyric like this in the next chapter. Before we get there, though, there are a couple of exercises that need some attention.

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Solution: Manipulate Meter and Rework Rhyme

So our solution to this problem is to manipulate meter and rework rhyme, then.

PART 1: MANIPULATING METER

Write freely about anything you fancy as long as you keep hopping on either an iambic or a trochaic tread. Make it five feet per line too, which will result in iambic or trochaic pentameter. Come up with at least three lines (preferably more). Then, to develop your understanding and control of these elements of scansion, try to find places to substitute feet and to employ masculine or feminine endings. I have done a couple here so you can see the sort of thing you want to shoot for: 1.

[WRIting] [LYrics] [REALly] [DRIVES me] [BONkers]

2.

[ToDAY] [I’ll TRY] [to MAKE] [some I] – [ambs WORK]

Workings

Here is how I went about making changes to these examples. With the first example, which was initially in trochaic pentameter, I added an additional stressed syllable at the end, giving it a masculine ending:

[WRIting] [LYrics] [REALly] [DRIVES me] [BONkers][NOW]

Then I substituted the fifth foot for an iamb:

[WRIting] [LYrics] [REALly] [DRIVES me] [inSANE]

The second example was initially in iambic pentameter (five iambs). Here it is with an additional non-stressed syllable on the end, giving it a feminine ending:

[ToDAY] [I’ll TRY] [to GET] [some I] – [ambs WORK] [ing]

And here it is with a substituted spondee in place of the first iambic foot:

[HERE I] [will TRY] [to MAKE] [some I] – [ambs WORK]

In case you’re wondering, this exercise isn’t pointless. Being able to adapt the meter of a lyric so that it locks in with the meter of choice is a very valuable tool. It’s the lyrical equivalent of practicing scales, chord voicings, or rudiments. You should be able to find ways to get the lyric to scan however you choose, regardless of the foot that happens to be tripping you up. You need to be able to marry the lyric with the metric and rhythmic stress points inherent in the melody, and sometimes the only way to do this is to fiddle with the lyrics so that they conform. However, meter shouldn’t be adhered to just for meter’s sake; substitutions and changes should enhance the meaning and character of the lyrics they are applied to.

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PART 2: REWORKING RHYME

Having an appreciation of how rhyme will help inform finality, perceived speed, and structure in a lyric is one thing. Being able to purposefully capitalize on these facts is something else entirely. Take the following lyrics (or create your own) and try to achieve the following tasks:

Here are a batch of words and lines

Carefully placed to give us rhymes

We can look at the speed that they move along

And check out the structure in this little song

d Decrease the perceived speed of a line of your choosing.

d Increase the perceived speed of a line of your choosing.

d Delay the finality of the phrase.

I have completed these tasks too, and my results are in the following subsections.

They are just one attempt at each and are not necessarily the best solutions. There will almost always be more than one way to successfully complete these sorts of tasks, and you should never be satisfied until you are completely happy with your results. The fact that something rhymes doesn’t mean that it makes any sense, let alone that it says appropriately what you want and need it to say!

Decreasing the Perceived Speed

Here are a batch of words and lines

/ - - / - / - A

Carefully placed to give us rhymes

/ - - / - / - A

We can look at the speed that they move along

- - / - - / - / - - B

And slow down this song

- / / / B

I went for the last line and slowed it down by removing all the unstressed syllables between the stressed beats. It’s worth noting that the this in the last line could be deemed unstressed and could therefore be a contributor to a stress pattern of

- / / - /. However, I have opted to class the line as four stressed syllables so that the word song can land on the fourth beat in the measure in the same way that long in along does in the previous line.

Increasing the Perceived Speed

Here are a batch of words and lines

/ - - / - / - A

Carefully timed to give us rhymes

/ - - / - / - A

We can look at the speed that they move along

- - / - - / - / - - B

And slow down this song

- / / / B

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Did you find that the new internal rhyme ( timed and rhymes) in the second line helped move it temporarily into another gear? It’s subtle, and although the meter of the line remains unchanged, it does make a difference. How about: Here are a batch of words and lines

/ - - / - / - A

All trying and vying to give us some rhymes

- / - - / - - / - - A

We can look at the speed that they move along

- - / - - / - / - - B

And slow down this song

- / / / B

The pace has just stepped up a little more on that second line—partly because it includes two internal rhymes, and partly because it includes three additional unstressed syllables crammed in between the stressed ones.

Delaying the Finality of the Phrase

Here are a batch of words and lines

/ - - / - / - A

Carefully placed to give us rhymes

/ - - / - / - A

We can look at the speed that they move along

- - / - - / - / - - B

And check out the amazing structure and phrasing in this little song

- - / - - / - / - - / - - / - - B

Do you feel the tempo pulling and pushing you as you read out this phrase? I have raised the number of stressed syllables and therefore beats in the last line from three to six to delay the conclusion. The song still rhymes at the end, but we now have an additional internal rhyme playing with our heads a bit. The amazing and phrasing provide an internal feminine rhyme that has its say on the phrasing, and the rhythm is unquestionably pushed and pulled as a result, especially on the second read-through.

There’s a lot that a rhyme will do for you if you let it. It’s not just a case of being neat and tidy.

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We Don’t Think about

Problem

How to Grow a Lyric

10

Alyric can start with an adapted idiom and grow from there, or it can start with an emotional response to a real situation. It can start from a quite calculated viewpoint of a nucleus that readily provides various angles of attack, or it can start with a couple of rhyming words that spark an idea. It can start pretty much anywhere, and there isn’t just one way to do it. Having said that, though, we should always try to ensure that we place our initial seed of an idea into some kind of framework that gives it the best opportunity to grow. In addition to the nurturing and mulling over that we looked at some chapters ago, we can be proactive in helping this seed go about its business by purposefully incorporating the techniques that we have looked at in the previous chapters. Regardless of where we start and the inspiration or process that led us there, the words that we use and where we place them will always benefit from being put through their paces.

Figure 10.1

Growing an idea.

The best way to convey how these techniques can be harnessed to best effect is to work through the development of a song, so that is what we’ll do now. Although we can start in all sorts of different places, this example should hopefully show the benefits of exploring the different options and techniques available before we final-ize our ideas.

Brainstorming

Regardless of what we do afterward, the best way to start the lyric-writing process is almost always to take the step of getting ideas out of our heads. Whether they end up in a notebook; on the back of a receipt, ticket, or scrap of paper; or as binary code embedded in a word-processed document of some kind, we need to make a point of tangibly capturing our ideas, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem. They may seem good floating around our brains, but it’s only when we write them down and take a good look at them that we can really see and hear what they are worth.

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The term brainstorming is commonly used for this process, but other terms are mind mapping and my personal favorite, idea diarrhea. We should feel free to jot absolutely anything down that comes to mind when we are mulling over our initial ideas, but with all of the words that will inevitably start flying around, it is usually helpful to acknowledge that there are two key approaches we should consider.

There is the literal approach and the figurative approach. The literal approach is where we focus on the who, when, where, and what previously discussed in Problem 7. It’s where we can write down ideas of fact and feeling—where we can jot down angles of approach, potential ideas for a story, characters, viewpoints, events, context, and so on.

In addition to this, we should also consider the figurative approach, where we can (and should) jot down relative idioms, quotations, metaphors, similes, puns, oxymorons, and the like. Essentially, the literal approach to brainstorming helps provide information with which to build a lyric, and the figurative approach helps provide tools to convey it. You may find that you are more inclined to work predominantly in just one area. I personally find the figurative approach more fun, but even if we do find one angle of attack more enjoyable than another, we must work with both to give ourselves the best chance of getting somewhere worthwhile. If we don’t have a good dig around, then we may miss something really useful. Don’t be afraid to dig. Being prepared to invest some quality time in the hunt for the elusive idea, line, or word is one of the main things that puts the “great” in front of

“lyricist.”

Case Study: Easier Done Than Said

Back in Problem 7, we started to look at the idea of building a song entitled “Easier Done Than Said” and created a lyric map (refer to Figure 7.27). We are now going to dive headfirst into the process of batting that idea around until we arrive at a finished lyric. We can use the lyric map as a pre-brainstorm of sorts to help us focus our initial literal brainstorm. We already know roughly what we want to say, but now we can start to fill in the gaps a little more.

STAGE 1: SPILL THE BEANS

We need to start with an honest outpouring of how we feel and what we think about our subject. This can be a bit awkward and embarrassing in a co-writing situation, but it is cheaper than therapy! Figure 10.2 shows my initial thoughts based on each of the headings that I have given myself for each section in the preformed lyric map.

In reality, a literal brainstorm like this should flood all over a page and will probably never again find its way into a painstakingly crafted chart like this one. I have just done it like this in an attempt to make it clear how it ties in with the lyric map.

Hopefully you can see how useful the process is in padding out initial ideas. Once all the soul searching and baring has ceased, we have what effectively works as a bad lyric with no style or meter. It says what I want to say, but not how I want to say it. What I need is a figurative brainstorm to move things forward.

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Figure 10.2

A literal brainstorm around “Easier Done Than Said.”

STAGE 2: SYNONYMARAMA

You won’t find “synonymarama” in a dictionary. It’s a personal word of mine for digging around a word or two and coming up with as many interesting synonyms as possible. Because this song is about finding it hard to talk and communicate, a synonymarama around the word “talk” is a good place to start. Usually, it’s a good idea to work through more than one key word like this, but it just so happens that the word “talk” has a lot to say in the figurative department, so I won’t investigate any other words for now. Figure 10.3 doesn’t present an exhaustive list, by the way, but it does enough to demonstrate how we can use one word to lead to all sorts of material. We don’t have to stick with just the first-generation synonyms of talk. Once we have some other words on the table, we can start to investigate their synonyms and so on. We can just carry on as long as we find that the words we are coming up with are useful and relevant to the subject matter at hand. They can include antonyms, too, and it also doesn’t hurt to throw in other related words that we think might be useful.

STAGE 3: FIND THE FIGURE

Once we have this bank of words to play with, we can start to search for figures of speech that contain them. The most obvious are the idioms and quotations, because we can use reference books and Internet sites to help us track them down.

We aren’t making anything up at this stage. Hunting down some of the words from my synonymarama has led me to the collection of idioms, phrases, and words shown in Figure 10.4.

Combined with the ideas I have from the literal brainstorm, these additional figurative bits and pieces provide me with a good bank of material on which to draw.

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Figure 10.3

A synonymarama around “talk.”

Figure 10.4

A thematic figurative brainstorm.

STAGE 4: RHYME TIME

Once we have these words and phrases to play with, it’s useful to spend some time in the company of a rhyming dictionary to grow the potential of each of them. If we jot down some usable rhymes with each of the words that seem most important, they will add to our collection of words to draw from and may help steer some of the lines that end up being used. We can use all sorts of rhymes, including near, subtractive, additive, assonance, and so on. Take a look at Figure 10.5 to see a neat and concise list of rhymes I have chosen to work with.

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Figure 10.5

Usable rhymes.

Now we need to start combining all these words, phrases, and rhymes to start getting some real shape and form to the lyric.

STAGE 5: WHERE STORMS COLLIDE

This is where we need to start using material from the figurative brainstorm and rhyme time to give poetic verve to the literal ideas. Figure 10.6 reveals the figurative material that I considered using in the construction of my first verse. At this stage, I am looking for figurative material that will help me get across what I want to communicate with some style.

Figure 10.6

Verse 1: Marriage of literal and figurative ideas.

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Verse 1 Ideas

For the first verse, I know that I want to include my ideas about not wanting to talk, how it’s difficult to communicate, and how it’s hard being vulnerable and saying what I mean. If I look to the figurative material I already have (which I don’t have to draw on, by the way), I can discover some very usable words and lines. For example, a way with words serves an interesting homophonic function when the words a way are sung close together as one word. As an opening line, a way with words could mean an ability with words and put away the words, which serves me well. I can follow it with reference to words being swept under the carpet and not being heard.

In the process of combining literal and figurative ideas, we mustn’t forget rhyme.

As I marry these ideas, I’m always on the hunt for rhymes that will make them tie together all the more strongly, and it just so happens that heard is a very handy and appropriate subtractive rhyme with words. Great! After these two ideas, I want to employ the utter mess idea simply because I think it is interesting and I like it. This generates a rhyme scheme of AAB ( words, heard, mess), and I decide that I want to repeat that structure to give my verse balance.

Away with words

Swept beneath, not heard

It’s an utter mess

I now decide to include a reference to cheap talk from my figurative brainstorm, and after some time looking through the rhymes I have on hand, I decide that I will invert it and state that talk ain’t cheap. This enables me to use the near rhyme speak, which is obviously appropriate. It gives me the opportunity to state that it costs a lot to speak, which fits exactly what I want to say.

That just leaves the last line that needs to rhyme with mess. In thinking about talking being expensive, I think of expense as an assonance rhyme that fits the bill, and then wonder how I can get it to fit nicely. I want to try to get in another reference to speaking at this point, and I decide to go with the word pronounced from my list because as well as being the past participle of pronounce (as in say or speak), it can also be interpreted as distinct and obvious. Lovely—a homonym in the last line. All of this effort leads me to a first verse of:

Away with words

Swept beneath, not heard

It’s an utter mess

Talk ain’t cheap

Not when it costs this much to speak

It’s a pronounced expense

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Chorus Ideas

Figure 10.7 reveals the figurative material that I consider useful for the completion of the chorus.

Figure 10.7

Chorus: Marriage of literal and figurative ideas.

I like the idea of employing the scheme anaphora in my chorus and using the words don’t let the from my literal brainstorm to start each line. It should make the chorus more memorable by being repetitive, and it gives me clear structural guidelines to work with. In addition to this, I also want to create a rhyme scheme to make it all the more memorable. After mulling over my lyric material so far and doing a fair bit of chopping and changing, I have come up with the following idea for the chorus:

Don’t let my words get lost (as in lost in translation)

Don’t let my view get blocked (view—opinion and prospect)

Don’t let a sentence lock me up (sentence—as in prison or group of words) Don’t let my lines get cut (line of words, or telephone line)

Don’t let my tongue trip up (idiom—trip of the tongue)

Don’t let a phrase catch in my head (inversion—catch phrase)

When it’s easier done than said (inversion—easier said that done) The phrases in parentheses are not part of the lyric, in case you were wondering!

They just highlight how I arrived at those ideas. We don’t have to use idioms exactly as they are, but we can refer to or imply them through what we say. Don’t let my words get lost is a reference to lost in translation but doesn’t actually say it. If the listener misses it, then that’s okay. It just means that it is lying in wait until the day it is discovered, and it will add a new dimension when it is.

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I’m particularly pleased with the use of the homonym sentence here. I have followed it with lock me up to mean freeze or hesitate with obvious reference to being locked in prison. It was a good moment discovering that one, and it wouldn’t have happened without the figurative brainstorm at the start.

In addition to the inverted idiom easier said than done that forms the title of this song, I have included another one just before it. I wanted to use the word phrase somehow, and by inverting catchphrase, I have managed to refer to words getting caught on their way out of someone’s mouth—this suits what I want to say perfectly. The tricky part in writing this chorus was finding rhymes that paired off.

The rest of it was pretty much waiting for me in my figurative brainstorm.

Middle Section Ideas

From my literal brainstorm (as revealed in Figure 10.8), I know that I want the middle section to be about how doing rather than saying misses the point and how I actually say more to someone through not saying anything at all. I also want to convey some personal emotion in it and refer to someone directly. I haven’t referred to anyone other than myself so far in the lyric, so here I know I want to refer to

“you” directly. If I look to my figurative brainstorm for help, I can dig out a few niceties waiting to be called into active service. I particularly like the idea of using the idiom actions speak louder than words because that is the antithesis of what the song is about. Directly contradicting it would be an interesting thing to do.

Figure 10.8

Middle section: Marriage of literal and figurative ideas.

Another spirited session with a pen and paper lead to the opening line Actions may speak louder, but I can do with them. This employs the feminine assonance rhyme of louder with out them and sets up the section well. I like the idea of creating a new rhyme scheme in this section, too, and with the help of a few lines that fall into place quite naturally, I decide to go with the AABBB pattern formed by the following lines: When all they do / Is shout the wrong thing at you / And steer well clear of the truth. I explored the word louder from the opening line, and that led to the following material. I like the idea of action shouting the wrong thing because that is essentially what the song is all about, just put poetically. Steering well clear of the truth refers to our actions taking us away from what actually matters at the moment, and that is talking about it.

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Actions may speak louder

But I can do without them

When all they do

Is shout the wrong thing at you

And steer well clear of the truth

So that’s a brief walk through how combining the different brainstorm material led me to most of my lyrics. I haven’t dealt with the second verse yet, though.

STAGE 6: INCLUDE OTHER FIGURES OF SPEECH

Idioms and quotations are readily available, but it’s very difficult to create metaphors and similes without knowing exactly what we want to say. Now that we have a clear framework in place, and some of the lyrics are starting to take shape, we can think about creating some figures of speech that say what we want them to with a degree of poetic class. I already have the first verse and chorus in good shape, but I like the idea of getting some metaphors in the second verse. I already have the ideas I have a lot to say but don’t say it for some reason, It’s like I can’t get it out, The words are blocked, and It’s like a barrier is in the way from my literal brainstorm to work with, and now I fancy the idea of building a metaphor or two around the concept of something powerful being held back. So, into the Powerful Movement folder I go, and I get things like waves, wind, and herds of animals.

With these on the table, I like the idea of working with herds the most because it is almost a homophone with heard, which has a direct relevance to the theme of the song. Possibly a slightly tenuous link, but I’ll take whatever I can get! To develop this metaphor a little more, I can conduct a brief hunt through the Herd folder, and I discover yet another tenuous homonym: pen! Not only does it hold herds of animals, but it also enables me to write about them. A brief session with said pen and paper led me to the lines:

Herds of words

Penned like flocks of birds

Are free to fly but won’t

They do the job nicely. They refer to words being caged like animals that are free to fly out of them but don’t. In addition to this metaphoric moment, I also wanted to include the line turn of phrase because I like its literal quality and I wanted to play with the word turn a bit. I resisted the temptation to make the most of the fact that a tern is also a bird that could be doing the flying. That would just be beyond ridiculous! A little more quality time with a pen and paper led me to the lines: When turns of phrase

That turn and churn for days

Are good to go but don’t

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This was driven by the rhyme of churn with turn. Churn seemed to fit the bill with regard to how words always seem to rotate around my head until they eventually escape, and I was happy to let that rhyme lead the direction of this half of the verse. Now that these lines are in place and have put a smile on my face, I think it’s best to put them the other way around so that they form the verse: When turns of phrase

That turn and churn for days

Are good to go but don’t

And herds of words

Penned liked flocks of birds

Are free to fly but won’t

I have sneaked an and at the start of the fourth line here to tie the two halves of the verse together. Good to go and free to fly alliterate on purpose, by the way.

They didn’t initially, but I thought that it helped the rhythm of the verse to get the alliteration in there, so I did.

STAGE 7: TIDY UP THE METER

Most of the lyric has some kind of rhythmic conformity already because consideration of meter has been subconsciously at play as I have shaped the rhymes and lines on the way through this process. However, I will be thorough and professional and check it over. We’ll look at the first verse and chorus as examples (see Figure 10.9).

Figure 10.9

Metric analysis of Verse 1.

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Here in the first verse, we can see and hear that there is a regular / - / pattern at play in every line, but that there are also a fair few additional syllables added on the front and end in places. I have the choice here of whether to tidy this up or to leave it alone. I have to decide whether I want to sacrifice some of the language for some metric conformity, and I decide that I am happy with it as it is. The main reason why is because it is the verse, and it isn’t supposed to be the most memorable part of the song. If it were the chorus, I would probably dive in with the syllable axe, but because I like the way it sounds and what is says, I shall leave it alone.

The words are almost all pronounced as they would be in natural speech, so nothing sounds particularly wrong. It’s just that it isn’t as rhythmically repetitive as it could be. The only sticky point for me personally is the fact that in adhering to the established / - / pattern, the a in the last line is stressed but wouldn’t usually be in speech. After some experimentation with changing the line, I decide that I like it as it is because the mispronunciation of sorts actually enhances the word pronounced that follows it and seems to tie in effectively as a result. It was worth looking at, but I’m happy to leave it be and move on to the chorus (see Figure 10.10).

Figure 10.10

Metric analysis of the chorus.

Compared to the verse, this section has a much stronger repetitive rhythmic feel with no additional syllables that stray outside of a strict pattern. With the exception of the last line, which we will return to shortly, the chorus divides symmetri-cally into two rhythmically identical halves. Every line consists of the same pattern (/ - - / - /), with the third line of each half set apart with the rising addition of another iambic foot (- /). It’s very lean with regard to its use of syllables and is very strong rhythmically as a result. The only potential issue with regard to unnaturally stressed words is the in in the penultimate line. Ideally, I would like the catch to be stressed and the in not to be, but after some concerted effort, I haven’t been able to come up with anything better than I have in place already. I really like the inverted catchphrase and would rather not lose it, so I won’t. I don’t think the lyric suffers

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as a result anyway. Again, it was something worth looking at, but it’s okay to stay, in my humble opinion.

Now then, that last line. Although it provides a rhyme with the previous line, it introduces a complete change to the rhythmic flow that has gone before it. Is that a problem? No, it’s not. In fact, it’s a good thing because it sets the line apart, and I want it to do that because it’s the title line. I want it to stick out, and the change in meter helps it do just that. It works perfectly.

I appreciate that I haven’t had to do any metric tampering here, and that may seem a bit of a copout! It really isn’t. I would have changed things if I felt the need and could provide something better, but we shouldn’t ever change the meter just for the sake of it. If we can make an improvement, that’s great and we should go for it, but we should also know when we’re done, and I am now. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I went through a similar process with the other sections and have now arrived at the final lyric as follows.

Away with words

Swept beneath, not heard

It’s an utter mess

Talk ain’t cheap

Not when it costs this much to speak

It’s a pronounced expense

Don’t let a word get lost

Don’t let a view get blocked

Don’t let a sentence lock me up

Don’t let a line get cut

Don’t let my tongue trip up

Don’t let a phrase catch in my head

When it’s easier done than said

When turns of phrase

That turn and churn for days

Are good to go but don’t

And herds of words

Penned liked flocks of birds

Are free to fly but won’t

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Actions may speak louder

But I can do without them

When all they do

Is shout the wrong thing at you

And steer well clear of the truth

Conclusion

Although I have presented this process in a way that makes it seem like it all happened in a very logical and systematic way, I have to come clean and admit that it didn’t. I did start with the literal and figurative brainstorms, and then I did have a rhyme time, but each section didn’t appear in chronological sequence as I have relayed it. In reality, I had the odd line fall into place in no particular sequence, as I expect you usually will. One minute, an idea for the verse would reveal itself to me, and then I’d get the fourth line of the chorus begging for my attention.

We can’t always be 100-percent planned and systematic in the way we go about these sorts of things. We can and should, however, make sure that these are the sorts of things we think about. Sometimes a rhyme will push an idea forward, and sometimes it will be a figure of speech. Sometimes a literal explanation or confes-sion of sorts will pave the way ahead, and occasionally requirements of meter, pace, and rhythm will dictate what should come next. We just need to be open to take the lead from what jumps out at us and be informed enough to be able to deal with those ideas in a productive and educated way.

We don’t have to use every good idea, either. It’s unlikely that they will all fit anyway. We should take the time to put every idea through its paces, but equally happy to drop them if they don’t work for us, regardless of the amount of time we spent in their company. If every lyric-writing exercise was a purely methodical and academic exercise, it wouldn’t be any fun, and it certainly wouldn’t be anything like the rewarding and stimulating exercise that it is. Finding the line that fits just right is a great feeling, and we should do all we can to make that happen as often as possible.

Solution: Try and Work within Some Sort of System

The only exercise of any use here is to put all of the hard work from the last four chapters to good use and to write a full lyric. Either work on an idea of your own or work with “Easier Done Than Said,” like I have, and see whether you can do a better job. Work through each of the following stages as I have in this chapter.

STAGE 1: SPILL THE BEANS

You may find it helpful to lock yourself in a dark room and light some candles for this bit! Not really. Be honest and get out on paper what you want to say. It doesn’t matter how rough around the edges it is. No one ever needs to see it, unless you can auction it off for millions when it turns into a million-seller, of course! We can dress it all up nicely later. Think about what is happening or what has happened.

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Write about how you or someone else feels about your subject matter. Include what everyone concerned thinks and try to capture as much of the context as possible.

The more involved this process is, the more favors you will be doing yourself in the long run.

STAGE 2: SYNONYMARAMA

Spend some time digging around a few key words to increase the material you have to play with later. Use the prominent word or words in your song’s nucleus to start with and then include others as you see fit. Include as many words as you like, but remember not to overdo it. This list is supposed to be helpful, not a mountain of words that we can’t see past. Most word processors will include a thesaurus in the writing tools section, or you can go old school and use a book.

STAGE 3: FIND THE FIGURE

Go on the hunt for some figures of speech. Use the Internet or reference books for help, and start with idioms, clichés, and quotations. Then move on to look for possible oxymorons and puns. Make the list as comprehensive as possible. You are bound to find some useful material on your quest.

STAGE 4: RHYME TIME

Spend some time selecting only the finest and most useful rhymes with words from your figurative and literal brainstorm. It will take a while but will stand you in good stead before the fun bit starts next. Remember to include near rhymes, assonance rhymes, and any other kind of rhyme that you can think of.

STAGE 5: WHERE STORMS COLLIDE

Marry up the material from your literal and figurative brainstorms with your rhyme time. This is the lyrical equivalent of playing the game Snap and tends to be the most rewarding stage of the process because it’s where all the hard work from the first few stages starts to pay off. Match the figurative and literal elements that complement each other with the most clarity. Look for where a figure of speech can be used to say what you want to say, and don’t be afraid to invert or adapt them to suit. They won’t all pair off neatly, but there are bound to be a few sparks that fly in there somewhere. Jump on them and make the most of them as you start to form the lyrics. Remember that it’s fine to let rhymes lead the way if they are suggesting something.

STAGE 6: INCLUDE OTHER FIGURES OF SPEECH

We don’t have to include metaphors, similes, and the like in our lyrics, but it’s well worth trying some out to add some lyrical color and class. Think about what you want to say and dive into some relevant folders to see what you can find. Try to create at least three metaphors or similes before you move on. You will probably find that at least one of them is well worth using. Feel free to let one replace a line you already have in place, too. A good metaphor can be the crowning glory in a lyric, so it has the right to replace other mere words if it needs to.

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STAGE 7: TIDY UP THE METER

Spend some time assessing the meter of your song and actively looking for words that are mispronounced by being stressed in the wrong place. If you find any, do what you can to clean them up. Use the techniques that we covered in Problem 9

to fix problems as you find them, but only if you think you really need to. When you have done that, look at whether there is rhythmic repetition within each section of your song. If there is a bit of a mess with regard to the number of syllables from line to line, be honest with yourself and think about whether you need to lose a syllable here and there, especially if it is the chorus or another important section.

Once you have done all of this, you should have a strong lyric that has a clear focus and includes some interesting and colorful phrasing and language.

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We Don’t Think about How We

Problem

Grow Our Melodic Ideas

11

Having spent some considerable time up until now working through the mechanics of how notes and rhythms fit together, we now need to think about how we can apply all that we have discovered to writing our melodic lines. Have you ever thought of writing a melody as growing an idea, or do groups of notes just tend to come out of your mouth or instrument without you stopping to identify anything that they may have in common? In this chapter, we will look at how just a few very small ideas can grow into something much bigger.

Melody as a Means of Communication

Oral communication is regulated by the necessity to speak and to breathe. When we talk, we cluster words together in relatively small groups so that they come in a manageable and understandable form, and these groups are separated through the use of punctuation. With this in mind in this chapter, we are going to take an understanding of how we use words and pauses literally and apply the same concepts to the way we communicate through melodies.

KEYWORDS

When we speak or write, the words that build our sentences don’t all share the same degree of significance. Some are keywords that give the sentence meaning and consequence. Others are simply there to join these words together. In that last sentence, for example, the words others, simply, join, words, and together play a more significant role in giving the sentence meaning than are, there, to, and these. Some are what we can call keywords, and some are just words.

If we apply this understanding of language to the construction of melodies, we can observe that some melodic lines consist of groups of notes that are more significant than others. More often than not, this significance is generated by the fact that the groups of notes are repeated as a unit, or by the fact that they accompany important lyrical moments (usually the group of notes that carries the title of the song). When these note groups have this level of significance, we can call them keywords because they are key melodic components. If you have come across the word motif in melody writing before, that it essentially the same thing as what are referring to as a keyword. However, we are going to stick with keyword throughout this chapter because I personally believe that it helps us focus on the significance of the group of notes it represents. Where groups of notes fill gaps in time between keywords and have little significance in and of themselves, we can call them just words. Where there is just one note, we can refer to it as a letter.

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IDENTIFYING A KEYWORD THROUGH REPETITION

A good way to start is to recognize the ways that keywords identify themselves.

If we look at the first example here in Figure 11.1, we can see that we have a sequence of eight notes, but not whether any of them group together in any kind of significant way. It is not obvious whether any keywords are included at this point. The only musical way to identify them would be if they reveal themselves through repetition. It may well be that the melody in question would include another exact repeat of what we can see in Figure 11.1, and in this case, any keyword or keywords present would naturally reveal themselves. If we now look at the second example, however, it becomes immediately clear that the first measure holds a keyword because its sequence of melodic letters is repeated again in the second measure.

Figure 11.1

Identifying keywords through repetition.

If these notes had lyrics tied to them, then we would usually be able to identify the keyword through its association with the title line. This is because the title line in a song will almost always repeat again later, even if not currently in the same section, and repetition will always be the primary governing factor in identifying a keyword.

It’s important to remember what we already acknowledged in Problem 4 about repetition in melody being tonal, rhythmic, or both. In the example scored in Figure 11.2, we can see rhythmic repetition forming the repeat of an eight-letter keyword. The fact that the pitches are different in the repeat doesn’t change the fact that repetition is taking place. In this case, it’s the rhythm that provides the shared identity, and we will look more closely at how repetition can vary like this in a few pages’ time.

Figures 11.3 through 11.5 are included here to add some visual clarity to the various ways in which keywords can work. In Figure 11.3, the repetition of keyword A is obvious on paper, but to just the ear, and possibly over different chords, we may not spot it as being the same thing. It’s surprising how many songs harbor repetitive keywords that are lying undetected by the uninquisitive ear. You may even have written a song built like this yourself without realizing it. It’s not uncommon. This stresses the importance of occasionally taking time to stand back from a melody and to look at as well as listen to it. It takes a bit more effort, but the lessons learned can make it worth every minute.

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Figure 11.2

A rhythmically repeating keyword in the verse melody from “Right Here with You.”

© 2008 D. Cope.

Figure 11.3

Keyword example 1. This is the verse melody to “The Way It Works.” © 2008 D. Cope.

In Figure 11.4, we can see a very different example in which the melodic line is built around a pivot off Keyword A at the start of each measure. We have three separate one-measure melodic phrases contributing to one melodic line, all of which start with the same keyword but finish with a different melodic word.

Finally, in Figure 11.5, we can see how a rhythmically repetitive but tonally varied keyword is joined by various melodic letters to create a number of different phrases. This particular example clearly shows how melodies can be purposefully built around keywords that contribute to larger melodic lines. It demonstrates how melodies can be divided into smaller subsections for closer analysis and how small units can combine to act as solid structural components in building something bigger than themselves.

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Figure 11.4

Keyword example 2.

Figure 11.5

Keyword example 3. This is the verse melody to “Colour Me In.” © 2008 D. Cope.

It’s important that we don’t confuse melodic keywords with literal ones found in the lyrics that they convey. They are not the same thing. As we’ll discover together shortly, a literal keyword is likely to include at least one rhythmically stressed note, but it doesn’t need to feature as a contributor to a melodic keyword. This is because a literal keyword won’t always feature as part of a repeating rhythmic pattern. If that seems to make very little sense at this point, it will all become clear shortly. Take my keyword for it!

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Building Melodies

So that we can be creative rather than purely analytical, we need to look at how we can put our understanding of keywords to good use.

KEYWORD LENGTH AND CONTENT

There will be times when we will write a repetitive pattern that is relatively long, and on these occasions we will have the option of classing that pattern as just one keyword or dividing it up into two or more. For example, the stress pattern /—/—/

—/— could be classed as one keyword, as two (/—/—) where we divide it in half, or as four (/—) where we divide it into even smaller sections. We could also divide it into two different keywords where one forms the pattern /—/— and the other is a repeated shorter pattern of /—. On these occasions, we have the choice of length that we want to work with.

If we use keywords in an attempt to maximize repetition, it makes sense to try to keep them of a modest length. If, for example, a 16-measure verse melody can be identified as two repeating 8-measure lines or four 4-measure lines, it is likely that the 8-measure option is not going to be as easy to remember as the shorter alternative. In addition to this, the shorter a keyword is, the more time it will leave unoccupied to accommodate its repetition.

Ultimately, where we have the choice of length, we should just go with what sounds right. Shorter isn’t necessarily right, and the type of song we are writing should always help guide our decision. It’s good to test the different lengths to see what works best, and our ears will almost always be more reliable than theory in this respect.

In addition to consideration of their overall length, though, we should also remember that note duration and pauses have the ability to draw attention. When we are thinking about how we use keywords in the context of a melodic line, it is a good idea to think about the balance they strike with pauses. Say, for example, we want to write a melodic line over a chord progression that lasts for four measures, and that we are going to build that line with repeating keywords. Where in that space of time do the notes stop and does a pause take over? Is there going to be a rest at all? The pauses themselves will contribute as much character to the melodic line as the notes do, and we need to think carefully about how we divide the labor of melodic events and rest. Figure 11.6 includes some of the most common approaches to division that we can employ. Obviously, our melodic lines don’t all have to start with events and finish with a rest, as those in the graphic do. We can rest in the middle or at the start, too, but these are patterns that are commonly found in lots of songs.

Rather than getting hung up on identifying the different possible weightings of balance here, a much more useful thing is to consider how we can include these sorts of proportional variations in the different melodic lines that we write. First, we need to ask ourselves whether we explore all the possibilities available to us or whether we tend to stick with the same sort of pattern in all of our melodies. Do we find that we ram our measures full of notes and leave little room for rest or vice versa, for example? Looking into this will improve our knowledge and understanding of what we do best and worst!

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Figure 11.6

Proportions of melodic

events and rest.

Second, we can use different proportions in this respect to vary the character of our melodic lines from section to section. If we do, this will help our choruses, verses, and whatever-elses to be identifiable as separate structural components. We can have verses that are full of melodic events and a chorus that features a lot of rest, for example. It’s a simple but very important consideration.

COMBINING REPETITION AND VARIATION

We have already seen the advantages of employing repetition and variation, and here we need to think carefully about how we can repeat keywords as much as possible without them getting tedious. Purposefully looking for ways to vary and disguise repetition of keywords is very worthwhile. Hopefully, in addition to what we discovered back in Problem 6 about repetition being really important and not necessarily requiring an exact repeat of rhythmic and tonal values, you will also remember how we learned that repeated rhythms are generally more readily identifiable than repeated tones. This means we can effectively include an element of variation within our repetition of keywords by varying their tonal patterns while keeping their rhythmic patterns the same. There’s no point in having keywords if we don’t repeat them, but similarly, there is no point in having loads of keywords that repeat identically, because that will just get dull after a while, if not immediately.

Of course, it is perfectly possible and appropriate to include some exact repetitions of keywords in our melodic lines, but that will be largely dependent on the harmonic context provided by the chord sequence beneath them. We will tackle that issue in Problem 13. Similarly, there is nothing stopping us from maintaining tonal patterns and varying rhythmic ones, but we should be aware that this technique renders repetitions less obviously identifiable and is therefore not particularly useful when it comes to purposefully making a melody more memorable and catchy.

Let’s just spend a moment coming to grips with the different ways that we can repeat the rhythmic elements of keywords. First, there is the obvious exact repetition where the keyword repeats verbatim, note for note. Beyond this, the tone of each note will change, and we can therefore refer to the different options available to us as methods of tonal displacement.

Tonal Displacement

At a basic level, there are two types of tonal displacement we can try. They are what we’ll refer to as shape displacement and individual tonal displacement. Shape displacement occurs when we repeat the general shape of the keyword but start it

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on a higher or lower note than it started on previously. Obviously, the exact intervals between each note may need to change by a semitone here or there to remain within the key in question, but the general shape will still be obvious and identifiable. Individual tonal displacement occurs when we tonally displace each of the notes on an individual basis so that together they form a new shape.

So that we can discuss the way that we can identify and use these types of repetition, it is useful to have a shorthand system in place for notating them, and it just so happens that we have one here. First, we can identify a keyword with the use of a letter, where a new letter notates a new keyword. So, A is a different keyword than B and so on (just like rhyme scheme notation). One exact repeat of keyword A would be notated AA, a shape displacement would be notated as Aa, and an individual tonal displacement would notated as Aa. Figure 11.7 has made its way onto the page here in a noble attempt at making this clearer.

Figure 11.7

Keyword repetition and displacement.

Now that we have the terminology and shorthand in place, we can start to think about how we can build our melodic lines with different patterns of repeated keywords. If we now introduce Keyword B to the party, for example, we can start to build our phrases and sentences with the development of more than one keyword and get patterns like ABAb, ABbb, and so on.

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There are loads of variants to explore in creating our melodic sentences, and they will all include a degree of repetition that stands them in good stead for being strong and memorable. “What’s the point of all of this?” you may be thinking.

Well, this means we can start to write the structural basis of a melody purely with a series of letters. We can start by deciding that we are going to write a verse that goes Aaa Aaa and a chorus that goes BbCb, for example. This sort of system helps speed up the process considerably and gives our melody-writing exploits direction and a structural framework. We can think about how we will balance these repetitions with rests, too. It helps us set boundaries to focus our efforts, and this in turn helps us really come to grips with what our melodies are doing.

We need to avoid overdoing it to the point where there is too much going on, but we can incorporate as many or as few keywords per line or section as we fancy and that work. For example, ABaC could provide the structure for an entire quatrain where each keyword lasts for a line, or it could be the structure for just one line in a quatrain where the keywords are all relatively short. If you have never given much thought to the patterns you employ with regard to repeating groups of notes, give it some thought now. Do you find that you regularly repeat the same structural patterns from song to song, for example? Do you even know what you do? Plenty of my students have discovered that they have inadvertently gotten into a rut by continually using the same framework time after time without realizing it.

If you find this too, then purposefully varying the structures you employ a bit will help you explore some new ideas.

The system of using letters to notate melodies like this isn’t completely comprehensive. It doesn’t apply perfectly to every melody that we could analyze because it doesn’t account for additional melodic letters and words that we are bound to encounter frequently. However, we are primarily on the hunt for ways to improve our writing rather than analytical techniques, and starting with letters like this can only serve us well in ensuring that repetition is included and relatively disguised in the lines that we write. Beyond this, the additional words and letters that the system temporarily ignores can be used as tools for decorating the structure afterwards. We’ll get into how this can be beneficial in “The Remaining Melodic Letters and Words” section later in this chapter.

Plotting the Route

There are obviously various different ways of going about crafting our keywords.

We have already seen how melody, lyrics, and harmony are intrinsically linked, and it would be plain daft to pretend that it’s likely we will be creating entire melodies without chords or lyrics revealing themselves and shaping the process along the way. With that in mind, and so that we can move forward with purpose in this chapter, we are going to start from one of many possible places and work from the position of already having lyrics in place. It just so happens that we have some from the previous chapter, so we will work with the lyrics to “Easier Done Than Said” as a case study for the next few-thousand words.

STARTING WITH LYRICS AND GUIDANCE

You should be warned that we are going to look at the process of letting lyrics shape our melody in considerably more depth than we ordinarily would. We’re

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going to look at things that normally happen without us thinking about them so that we can scrutinize exactly what is going on when we throw our melodic notes together. Hopefully, the reason for this will become clear by the end of the chapter.

MELODIC FRAMEWORK

We need to set out with purpose when we are crafting melodies, and we shouldn’t write them so that they aimlessly wander around, achieving nothing. One way to avoid this nomadic quality is to purposefully plot a melodic route that provides a clear direction and ensures that there is a sense of completion when our melody arrives at its destination. Some of this route may appear very quickly through the emergence of a pleasant string of notes, but without a clear goal, those initial notes may spend some time in the melodic wilderness and drive their composer slowly mad in the process. What follows is a possible system we can employ to create a framework that will help shape our melodic endeavors. It works, but it is not the only way forward. It is true that melodies occasionally pour out of our mouths or instruments almost fully formed, and that a tidying up is occasionally more appropriate than a complete rebuild, for example. That’s all well and good, but the techniques employed here can all be useful at various stages along the road to melodic completion, so it should all be helpful. So, let’s get on to looking at the specific issues involved in plotting a melodic framework.

Start and End Points

If we listen carefully to loads of different melodies, we will discover that the tonal and rhythmic qualities of the end of musical lines tend to vary notably from what has gone before. This variation can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, including a notable drop or climb in pitch, a change in note length, inclusion of a hitherto unheard word or keyword, and so on. Therefore, it makes sense to purposefully make room for these sorts of changes when we start to plot our melodic framework.

Because the melody is a separate layer from the harmony, it can (and often does) work within different time boundaries. If we are working with a four-measure harmonic phrase, for example, we don’t have to have a melodic line that starts and finishes neatly within the time boundaries it sets. A melody can start before its supporting chord progression commences, and it can finish after it if it wants to.

Where it starts early, it generates what is known as anacrusis. In starting before the measure that holds it, an anacrusic melody will generate a kick-start, especially if it includes a note on a metrically stressed beat before the start of the measure that it’s anticipating. It’s as if it’s so keen to get cracking that it can’t wait for the offi-cial start of the measure and gets going early. Conversely, a melody that starts after the first beat of the measure that holds it can give the impression of indifference.

It won’t necessarily sound lazy or uninterested, but it won’t have the drive and assertiveness of an anacrusic start. We’ll see these considerations in play as we progress through this case study.

Stressed Foot Forward

If we arrive at melody writing with some or all of the lyrics in place, we can use the stress patterns already nestled within them as a useful rhythmic guide. We have already discovered how stressed syllables tend to map out a natural beat at which

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the lyrics can cruise along, and now we can look at how to convert that into the rhythmic basis of a melody. If there are patterns that repeat, we can jump on them and use them as rhythmic templates for repeating keywords.

In Figure 11.8, each rhythmic pattern that repeats in a couple of sections of

“Easier Done Than Said” has been identified. To ensure clarity and focus, we will just work with the melodic development of the verse and chorus here. This means that the middle section will be left out of the proceedings in this book, but that’s fine because the techniques we’ll go through can apply to any section, and we aren’t missing out on anything by narrowing down our focus.

Figure 11.8

Metric analysis of the lyrics to “Easier Done Than Said.”

Smaller repetitive patterns that contribute to larger repetitive patterns have also been identified and marked with the larger boxes that surround them. For example, the first and second halves of each verse are roughly the same with regard to the rhythmic pattern they share. Even the syllables that fall outside the noted repeated patterns on a line-to-line basis are repeated on a grander scale when the verse is viewed in two halves. In fact, each half of Verse 2 is rhythmically identical. Verse 1 isn’t quite as compliant, but this is an issue we have already dealt with back in Problem 10. I know that there is some metrical untidiness here, but I have decided to stick with it because I want to keep the words as they are. It should be fine because each repeating rhythmic pattern can act as a keyword that can then act as a basic common rhythmic denominator around which the remaining extra untidy syllables can arrange themselves.

The keyword length has naturally assigned itself in my example. There’s only really one obvious way of observing the repetition, and that is what I have gone with in plotting my keyword length. Because each verse divides fairly accurately in half, I could have written one keyword that lasts for half a verse and just repeated it once, but that would have equated to a keyword lasting eight measures, and I decided that would be too long.

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It’s important to acknowledge here that repeating keywords don’t have to feature exactly the same number of unstressed syllables between stressed ones to qualify as being the same. For example, the metric patterns /—/ and /–/ could class as the same keyword if we want. It will mean cramming one more syllable in on the repeat in this example, but as long as the stressed syllables remain placed on the same relative beats, and the notes generate the appropriate contour (more on this in a few paragraphs’ time), it will still sound like the same keyword repeating.

Now that I have these in place, I can use them to help map out a melodic framework like the one in Figure 11.9. It may look a bit overly involved at first glance, but it’s actually very simple in principle. Believe me when I tell you that this took considerably longer to draw than it did to think about!

Figure 11.9

Melodic framework for “Easier Done Than Said.”

The majority of popular songs feature melodic lines that last for four or eight measures, and the number of stressed syllables in my lyrics indicates that eight-measure phrases are about right. The best way to test this is to simply read the lyrics to a metronome. The natural rhythms tend to reveal themselves quite happily to us when we do this. My metric analysis has revealed the repeating rhythmic patterns in my lyrics. All I have done is assign a keyword to each of them and plot them against measures where I think they will work in the first instance, and where they are surrounded by enough room to hold the necessary additional melodic words and letters. It’s not a rigid formula, but it does start to nail down a few rough ideas on the melody’s road to completion.

The lyrics in brackets are those that don’t fit into each keyword as defined in Figure 11.8. I could have notated them on here as words and letters if I wanted to, but it really isn’t that important at this stage. It’s the placement of the keywords

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within each measure that we’re concerned with here. As previously acknowledged in the metrical analysis of the lyrics in Problem 10, the repetition in the chorus is much tidier than in the verse (which is obvious through the lack of brackets included around its lyrics), and I am happy with this situation. The additional melodic letters and words in the verse are acceptable because they are there to convey important lyrical information, and they don’t interfere with the melody where it is intended to be particularly repetitive and catchy.

There are a few important things that we should appreciate in this melodic framework. The first is with regard to the length of each keyword. The repeated rhythmic pattern in the verse of /-/, which I have translated into Keyword A, naturally has two stressed beats in it. The pattern /—/-/ in Keyword B has three.

This naturally defines it as a longer keyword, and I have intentionally embraced this fact in plotting provisional keyword length because it will help differentiate melodic character from section to section. I could have chosen to ignore it and to hold some of the stressed syllables in the verse for a long time to make KA last relatively longer than KB, but I have chosen not to on this occasion.

Second, notice where each keyword starts in relation to the measure in each section. It’s worth acknowledging that the same keyword always starts on the same relative beat per measure. Keyword A always starts just after Beat 2, for example.

Making sure that the placement remains the same helps nail down the repetitive quality. Repeating them in different places would likely make them each sound different, and that’s the complete opposite of what I am trying to achieve! The repeating KA starts after Beat 1 in the verse, and KB starts before Beat 1 (of Measure 16) in the chorus, where it has an anacrusic quality. I have done this intentionally to further enhance the difference in melodic character between sections.

Third, notice the proportional balance of melodic events and rest in each sentence.

The verse consists of two eight-measure lines that both feature six measures of melodic activity followed by two measures of rest. The chorus follows pretty much the same pattern, with the main significant difference being how KC fills that last measure of the second phrase at the end of the line and section. This addition and variation at the end sets the title line that KC holds out as different. Combine this difference with the line’s new rhythmic phrasing and melodic shape (that I intend to include shortly), and it’s clear that there is a lot going on here that will make the title line unique and distinctive. The fact that it is at the end of the section should also give the listener some time to ponder it before the next section starts (if there is one). I haven’t even written it yet, and it’s already mapped out as unique and important. The melodic framework is starting to take shape.

CONTOUR

Now that we have a basic framework in place, we can start to think about plotting the notes that will create the shape of our melody, and this is where we can start to think about the different contours we can initially assign to each of our keywords. Although we have already acknowledged that we can adapt the shape of a keyword through the process of individual tonal displacement, we need to start somewhere so we can have something to displace. There are several different basic shapes that we can think about, and they are graphically represented in Figure 11.10. Although ideally we want our melodies to include elements of repetition to

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make them memorable and so on, we also want to ensure that they include a degree of variation to maintain interest. A way to make sure this happens is to apply different contours to each of our keywords and words. Too many contours with similar shapes leads to monotonous melodies, and we want to steer clear of that—certainly in this example, anyway.

Figure 11.10

Contours.

With the exception of the horizontal line, we can get extra mileage out of each of these shapes by inverting and stretching them. For example, a melody built entirely with slopes in each section can include variety if the direction, length, and height of those slopes vary. This introduces an important consideration when it comes to working with contour. Length, height, and direction are all key players in giving contours their character. When we first see or hear a melody, we get an impression of it, and general shape alone isn’t enough information to paint that impression. These other factors need to be bundled together with it. If we look at the two examples of the wave, for example, we can see that a shorter wavelength will result in a steeper climb and descent than a longer one will, as long as the tonal range (height) covered is the same for both.

When we are plotting our keywords, their length will usually be the first thing we need to think about, especially where the lyrics are a governing factor. After this comes the height. As we have already looked at, the tonal range of a contour can be dictated by the vocal cords of the singer or writer, but we can also use it to make a stylistic statement in our melodic endeavors. Say, for example, that we want to make our verse and chorus melodies very different. One way to do this would be to give them different ranges, where one dares to venture relatively higher, lower, or both. Height alone can make different parts of our melodies distinctive and plays a big part in defining them.

We also need to think about changes in direction. If we hear a melody that includes a sudden shift in the bearing it seemed to be heading in, that change is likely to be something that we remember through it being an element of the contour that provides it with specific character.

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Beyond these basic considerations of contour-defining parameters, there are a few more specific things that are worth more than a passing glance. For example, take the wave line shape. We can vary how many notes are included en route in the wave. For example, we can create a gradual movement between the peak and trough of the wave through placing numerous notes between them, or we can create a sudden ping-pong effect where the notes at the peak and trough alternate directly. Beyond this, the notes at the peak and trough don’t have to remain the same, either. The shapes we choose and apply will be subject to the odd dent here and there anyway, as they adjust to accommodate the occasional rogue syllable in the lyrics and unaccommodating chord in the harmony. We may purposefully choose to bounce a wave line off different notes, or we may be forced into it by the governance of the underlying chords. That’s fine because it’s the general aural impression of melodic shape that we’re after, not a geometrically perfect scale drawing.

There are a couple of interesting things to note about the skip and jump shape, too. The first of these is that the skip doesn’t have to stay on one note. As graphically represented in Figure 11.10, it can start with step motion forming a wave of limited height before it leaps up or down. Second, the length of the notes that tend to accompany this contour is interesting. If we regard the shape as mirroring the endeavors of a long jumper, with the step motion being analogous to sprinting down the runway and the leap representing flying through the air, it follows that the run-up, or skip, consists of relatively shorter length notes followed by a longer one to accompany the temporary flight at the end. This mirroring of real-life leaps tends to be the best rhythmic approach to the skip and jump. Obviously, it’s possible to purposefully do the opposite with long strides in the run-up and a measly excuse for a jump at the end (a short note), but the result will sound unnatural and a little at odds with convention.

Why Is Contour Important?

In addition to helping us get started plotting the route of our melodies, an appreciation of contour should also lead to more memorable material. Allow me to rattle off a little anecdote. I used to play in a band for which I wrote the songs. These were bad songs, and it was a fairly bad band. I was also a fairly bad guitarist at the time. No wonder we didn’t get anywhere! During one rehearsal, the singer turned to me and said something like, “I’m having difficulty learning the tune.” I responded, “Why’s that?” And she said, “Because there isn’t one!” After sulking for a bit, I realized that she had a point, and I have never forgotten that moment.

I was so focused on the cleverness of the guitar part I was trying to play right that I forgot to craft a shape into the melody. There was nothing that made it interesting. It was so plain that there wasn’t anything to hold onto—no edges or character that made it unique.

When we shape our melodies, we should think what it would be like singing our melody in the shower, in the car, or wherever. Is there any enjoyment to be had in singing it out loud? A good contour will make for a pleasurable singing experience because there are ups and downs and there’s a sense of journey involved. A flat melody, which incidentally would rely on rhythmic or harmonic variation to generate interest, may sound great when the harmony can be heard beneath it, but as we’ve already said, we can’t re-create that on our own, especially in the shower!

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We need to make sure that we think about the shape of the melodic lines we write, regardless of whether we are applying them to keywords. That little consideration can make a massive difference.

Figure 11.11 shows the third development in our progression toward crafting a melody with lyrics as guidance. Each keyword has now been assigned a different shape. Although there are two slopes in here, one of them is inverted so they are perceived as being very different by the ear. In case you are wondering what is happening to the additional melodic words and letters at this point, don’t worry—they will reappear shortly.

Figure 11.11

Contours for “Easier Done Than Said.”

Pillar Notes

If we look at a melody as the top line of our song, it follows that we need to plot strategic notes along its course that hold it up at structurally important points. We can call these notes pillar notes for what is hopefully an obvious reason. Because we are working with lyrics already in place here, the rhythmic placement of these pillar notes will be informed by the whereabouts of the stressed syllables in the lyrics, so we only need to concern ourselves with these stressed syllables in the first instance. The remaining syllables will slot between them afterward, but they are not of interest just yet because they aren’t functional in holding up the melody.

We already know what we need to about the notes we can use as pillars from the hard work in Problems 5 and 6. There, we discovered the payoff between confidence and character in both tonal and rhythmic elements. As a brief rhythmic recap, we need to remember that the strongest and most confident notes are those that land on or just before strong beats (primary and secondary metric stress points) and are those that are held for the longest or those that combine to last the longest. The notes with the most rhythmic character will be those that fall on the remaining beats.

RHYTHMIC PILLAR NOTES

As you can see in Figure 11.12, the rhythmic placement of pillar notes for each of the stressed syllables has been plotted as defined by the lyrics in question.

In practice, it’s best to do this by reading the lyrics associated with the keyword in question to a metronome. This enables us to quickly test various rhythmic patterns and to ensure that there is enough room between our stressed pillars to fit in the remaining unstressed syllables that we shall focus on shortly.

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Figure 11.12

Rhythmic pillars.

I have followed my own guidance with regard to where different keywords start against the measure. Keyword A starts beyond Beat 1, Keyword B starts on Beat 3

before the measure that holds it (Measure 16) to ensure that it has the anacrusic feel I originally plotted on the melodic framework, and Keyword C starts bang on Beat 1, which gives it the definitive quality desirable in a title line (which is what it is).

Notice that these pillar notes are all plotted on Beats 1 or 3, which provide the primary and secondary metric stress points. Where they don’t fall exactly on these beats, they are anticipated just before them and get the same degree of confidence plus an added dose of character thrown in to the deal as a result. Remember what we looked at in the “Note Length Combined with Placement” section in Problem 6?

Have another look if it’s all a distant memory. Plotting them on strong metric stress points like this ensures that these stressed syllables are given rhythmic prominence like they would have in speech. The rhythm of a melody is almost always going to be subservient to the rhythm of the lyrics. Even when we write the melody first, the lyrics have the right to change it around a bit so that naturally stressed syllables fall on stressed beats. We can change the rhythm of a melody, and no one will know it has been altered. If we change the rhythm of words, they become at risk of being unintelligible, and we should usually try to avoid that happening—unless we want to make a stylistic statement, of course.

I have also purposefully left a relatively long gap between Pillar Notes 2 and 3

in Keyword B to allow room for the vocalist to put some expression into those vowels. This should also help to rhythmically differentiate this keyword from those in other sections, and I have done this intentionally to ensure that it also lasts longer than the others, as previously explained. It also means that the chorus will have some long notes that might encourage some sing-along action from the listener.

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Where we don’t have lyrics to work with at the start like this, we can make sure that the stressed syllables in the lyrics we add afterward match up with the primary and secondary metric stress points in the melody. It really doesn’t matter which order we tackle it in. There are various rhythmic patterns that I could explore, but I have to narrow the options at some point, or this melody will never get finished.

We’ll work with these patterns for now and change them later if need be. There’s nothing theoretically wrong with them. In fact, in theory, they should work really well. This stage of the process has forced me to think about the rhythmic significance of the stressed syllables in my lyric, and I have done all I can to ensure the success of the melody up to this point.

RHYTHMIC PASSING NOTES

So, that’s the rhythm of the pillar notes sorted. Now we need to move onto plotting the rhythms of the remaining unstressed syllables that pass between them, and we shall we refer to these as passing notes. If we use the metronome technique to plot the rhythms of our keywords, it’s likely that these passing notes will already have found a home in each measure because we will have read them out loud along with the stressed syllables. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider moving them around a bit at this stage. For example, if we look at Keyword B with its rhythm of /—/-/, we can see that there is a full four beats in between the second and third pillar notes in which we need to place just one unstressed syllable. It could fit toward the start, somewhere in the middle, or toward the end. I have decided that I want the second pillar note in this keyword to have a decent-length duration for reasons already discussed, so I have decided to place the passing note just before the last pillar note to make sure this happens. See Figure 11.13 for visual clarity of this.

Figure 11.13

Pillar and passing notes.

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By reading the lyrics aloud to a metronome and then experimenting with their placement, the duration of almost all the pillar and passing notes will have been defined. The only exception to this is the final note in the keyword. If there is nothing following it, then there is nothing interrupting it and defining where it needs to finish. When this happens, we can think outside the boundaries of just one keyword and look to our melodic framework to tell us what will happen next in the melody. In the case of Keyword A, its first appearance is followed by full four-beat measure of space. If Keyword A was always followed by this, we could assign the last note a four-beat duration. However, its other appearances are immediately followed by two melodic words, one of which consists of two stressed syllables. These will need to be plotted on primary or secondary metric stress points to sound as strong as they ideally need to, and this eats into the four beats that we initially thought possible to hold Keyword A’s final note for. It actually leaves us with just half a measure because the additional two stressed syllables will need to inhabit the third beat of the following measure and the first of the next, respectively. The maximum we can give the second pillar note in Keyword A has to be half a measure, and that is therefore what it shall get! I want it to sound strong and assured, and maximum duration will help give it those qualities.

The point to take on board through all of this is that we should make sure we evaluate more than just our first rhythmic ideas. Shuffling pillar and passing notes around with regard to both placement and duration can lead to some really interesting variations that we wouldn’t have arrived at naturally. Taking the time to think about it can make the difference between “okay” and “oh, that’s better!”

In Figure 11.13 we can see all the syllables mapped in place as either pillar or passing notes. Just as in our previous examples, it looks a lot more involved than it actually is. This is just a graphical representation of how I have experimented with the spoken rhythm of the keywords to find a pattern that works. Whereas the pillar notes are plotted mostly on primary metric stress points, these additional passing notes are placed on lesser beats with much less structural importance. They add rhythmic character, but they aren’t given the responsibility of holding up the melodic line.

TONAL PILLARS

Now that we have the placement and rhythm of each keyword sorted, we need to get to work assigning different tones to each of the pillars in accordance with their ups and downs as defined by the contour selections that we have made. To start with, we won’t concern ourselves with the actual notes, but rather with the character and degree of confidence each of them possesses.

In addition to what we have remembered about rhythmic considerations of melody, there are a few tonal considerations we need to remember here, too. First, there’s the degree of confidence as dictated by the tonal hierarchy of the key in question. This is where a confident note will be happy to stand its ground, but a less confident one will want to resolve quickly and will drive the melody forward as a result. Then there’s the fact that a leap to a note will enhance its confidence or character all the more than a step would. Finally, we also need to pay close attention to the pitch of the note, where the highest and lowest notes are of significance in dictating the tonal boundaries of the line. That’s a fair bit of information to work with, but it’s all useful stuff, trust me!

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Here, we need to focus our attention on whether we want our pillar notes to have lots of confidence or character. We need to strike a careful balance between the two and decide where we want melodic motion to be generated or reigned in.

In Figure 11.14, I have mapped out one of various different options. Notice that the tonal decisions are now included, in addition to the rhythmic ones already made.

Figure 11.14

Rhythmic and

tonal pillars.

In Keyword A, I have purposefully married the first stressed syllable with an unconfident tone to give it an unsteady start that needs resolving. This should push it forward effectively until the motion is brought to a halt through the employment of a confident tone on the last stressed syllable.

Whereas Keyword A in the verse is a constant perfect repeat on both rhythmic and tonal grounds and would be notated as AAA within the entire section, Keyword B in the chorus isn’t. Here I have stuck to the same rhythm, but I have adjusted the degree of confidence assigned to each pillar note, and in doing so I have employed the pattern Bbb. I have done this to include some variation in the way the melody progresses through the chorus. At this stage, I intend the repetitions of Keyword B

to be a halfway house between shape displacement and individual tonal displacement, where the shape will be roughly the same but with some individual changes that will vary the degree of confidence and therefore movement generated.

If we look at the progression in the chorus that will be built with three Keyword B’s followed by one Keyword C, we can see the pattern of UCUC forming at the end of each of keyword, and this creates a good balance. Both movement and resolution are out in force where the chorus comes to a confident point halfway through, before setting off with a lack of confidence again (at the start of Keyword B’s third appearance). It strikes a good compromise between balance, confidence, and motion.

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The next stage in our development of the melody for “Easier Done Than Said”

is to assign actual tones to each of the stressed pillar notes, and this is where we combine the information we have in place so far with regard to tonal and rhythmic confidence with the shapes we want to create. We’re going to focus on Keyword A in the verse to demonstrate the sorts of things we can think about here. In Figure 11.15, we can see some of the many options available if we plot the pillar notes of Keyword A along the rhythm and contour already chosen (a descending slope). The unstressed syllables are left off at this stage for the sake of clarity.

Figure 11.15

Possible routes for Keyword A.

The general shape of a descending slope and the rhythm in the measure is constant for every option, as are the confidence of the two stressed syllables. The main things to take into consideration here are the range covered by the slope and the size of the intervals and leaps between the notes. When we consider our potential lines like this, we need to consider what kind of range we want our melodies to explore from section to section. It may be that we want a larger range in the chorus than in the verse, for example.

Personally, I like the third of these options for a couple of simple reasons. It provides a small tonal range. The interval between the F# and B is only a perfect fourth, and this should suit the verse because it will leave scope to extend the range into something grander for the chorus. It also ensures that when the additional unstressed note that is yet to be included is placed between them, it won’t generate a large interval that draws attention to itself. In addition to this, it also suits my vocal cords nicely in that it fits in the middle of my range, and it means there is room for me to sing higher in the chorus. That appeals at this stage too, and demonstrates the importance of knowing the vocal range of the intended vocalist.

Ultimately, our decisions should rest on what we like the sound of. Being able to theoretically argue the case for one melody won’t negate the fact that another one sounds better. Theory can help, but it should never make the decisions for us.

We won’t concern ourselves with the different options for Keywords B and C at this point. I’ll do that off the page, and you’ll just have to take my word for it.

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It’s the approach that we’re concerned with, not the results I get out of it. We need to move on to more pressing matters at this point anyway.

TONAL PASSING NOTES

Now that the pillars are dealt with, we need to think about connecting the dots—

that is, assigning tones to the remaining unstressed syllables and hitherto ignored rogue melodic letters and words that don’t feature in any keywords. They have been observing patiently from the sidelines, and it’s time we paid them some attention.

Tonal Tendency

There has been all sorts of research conducted by pretty much every musical scholar who ever breathed into what notes do and don’t sound good after each other. We have already recognized that some notes are more tonally confident than others.

This understanding of tonal hierarchy is very important in building our walkways between pillars. In addition to this, we also need to appreciate some other commonly understood melodic facts. The first of these is that a melodic leap will usually sound best followed by a step back in the direction from which the leap came. If we think about the effort that goes into a stretch of some kind in real life, it’s almost always going to be more comfortable to relax back than to stretch even further, and that principle applies melodically, too.

Second, the rhythmic distance between notes has a bearing on the tonal distance between them. Generally speaking, notes that change quickly should repeat or move by step, and leaps should usually be saved for longer notes. We have already seen this principle at work in the skip and jump contour earlier in this chapter.

Different Types of Routes

There are various different ways in which we can join the stressed pillars. The most obvious is the immediate route, in which we jump directly between them without landing on any other tones en route. In our current example of Keyword A, we know that we want to get from the B down to the F# and that we have to include an unstressed note on the way. An immediate jump would mean doubling either the B or the F# as that additional note. See Figure 11.16 for some visual affirmation regarding these options that we can explore when it comes to plotting the tonal values of passing notes.

Where we do want to assign unstressed notes tonal values other than those already employed by the pillar notes, there are two other options available to us.

They are what we’ll call the direct route and the indirect route. The direct route will only employ tones that are located between the pillars. In our current example, the direct route between B and F# could employ the A and the G from the scale of D Major (the key I have decided to work in for this song), and A# and G# if we wanted to include some particularly unconfident notes.

The indirect route will purposefully go around the houses a bit and employ tones that aren’t located directly between the pillar notes. In our current example, an indirect route would include a note higher than the B or lower than the F# and would employ any note that took our fancy. This would in effect generate a wave or arc as opposed to the slope that a direct route would.

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Figure 11.16

Options for different passing note routes.

Benefits of Each Type of Route

Remember what we have discovered about relatively large melodic leaps accentuating the confidence and character of the tone that is landed on? The immediate route maximizes the character of the interval between the two pillar notes in question. Employing passing notes that interrupt or detract from this interval will water down the intervallic quality it otherwise would have.

Employing the direct route is commonly the most obvious and safe option, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be the most effective. In generating a relatively smooth contour that meanders gracefully between pillar notes, passing notes on a direct route can serve us brilliantly in generating exactly the effect we might want to achieve. It’s the type of route that ensures the passing notes are doing nothing to attract unnecessary attention to themselves, and this helps to accentuate the prominence of pillar notes.

Finally, and conversely, employing an indirect route ensures that the melodic journeys between pillar notes don’t go off without drawing attention to themselves.

By daring to venture off the beaten direct path and stepping out of line, the passing note or notes that characterize an indirect route stick out and add their own distinct quality and character. This is therefore a really effective type of route to employ if we want to accentuate the tonal confidence of a note that falls on an unstressed beat.

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We aren’t going to concern ourselves with plotting the confidence levels of passing notes as we have done previously for the pillar notes. Although they do have an effect on the overall perceived confidence and character of a melodic line, we need to concern ourselves more with how they contribute contour. The pillar notes are the most structurally important. The passing notes add the shape.

Figure 11.17 graphically represents different options available by applying all these different routes to the journey from B to F#.

Figure 11.17

Options for B down to F# with just one passing note.

I have decided to opt for the direct route for the simple reason that it adheres most closely to my initial decision relating to contour. I wanted a descending slope, and this provides me with one. The immediate routes available would still be just about okay, but they would draw more attention to the interval than I would like in the verse. I want the melodic character to be enhanced in the chorus and would therefore focus more on the immediate route there. The remaining indirect options steer away from the slope that I want to create and effectively generate a wave instead. They are therefore no use to me according to the melodic framework I am working with.

So, we’re almost there. We now know the rhythm, shape, and all but one of the notes that will form Keyword A. All that is left is to decide is which tone I will use for the passing note in the middle. I know that I want to use a tone that is diatonic to the key so as not to draw unnecessary attention to it, and that provides me with the A and G to choose from, as previously discussed. Of those, A will be the easiest to sing because it is the fifth, whereas G is the fourth in the key, so I will opt for the A. Figure 11.18 shows a graphic representation of Keyword A as we have finally arrived at it.

Figure 11.18

Keyword A.

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The Remaining Melodic Letters and Words

It has taken a while to arrive at a keyword that I am happy with, but we got there!

Figure 11.19 shows a graphic representation of the first half of the verse melody I have arrived at, taking all of these considerations into account. First, notice the inclusion of Keyword A as just defined. Now, we can look at what has happened with the leftover melodic letters and words.

Figure 11.19

Plotted notes for the first half of the verse in “Easier Done Than Said.”

The opening melodic letter accompanies a short and unstressed syllable ( a in away in the lyrics) that appears on an unstressed beat. It is therefore of very little significance in the melody and could quite feasibly appear on all sorts of different tones. The only consideration here, really, is to keep it tonally close to the first stressed note (B) so that it doesn’t draw attention to itself by forcing a melodic leap of some kind. I have opted for an A because I like the idea of it coming from within the range of notes the keyword covers. For the first melodic word, I have opted to continue the descent of Keyword A down through step motion to the tonic note (D). This is neat with regard to contour, the continuation of the direct route, and it ensures that the halfway stage through the eight measures comes to a temporary breather somewhere safe and confident before it moves on again.

For the second word, I have started with the same first note as the first word for repetition’s sake, but instead of descending to the tonic, I have opted to step back up to the 3rd (F#). I have selected this note for a few reasons. It provides the last note in the melodic line and therefore plays a very important role in setting up the next section. It’s confident, so it sounds resolved, but not as confident as it could be so there is still a tension calling it home to Note 1. This creates a small spark of forward momentum. It generates a change in melodic direction from what came before (in the first word), and it’s just a step from the E that precedes it so it doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. Keyword A forms the bulk of the line, and the additional words and letters color it a bit with some added touches of confidence and insecurity. Where we have additional rogue syllables to play with like this, we can often use them to our advantage in this way. They are a great example of how variation can be used to offset repetition to good effect.

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Where we don’t have so many keywords, such as in the chorus scored in Figure 11.20, we have the option of generating variety through experimenting a bit with the manner in which we vary our repetitions of the keywords.

As already noted, this chorus employs the keyword pattern Aaa in each half with an additional melodic word on the end (and a further Keyword C on the end of the second half). As we can see, each keyword varies in its employment of confident and unconfident notes to push the melody forward as previously decided. In plotting the passing notes between the pillar notes, I have purposefully kept the first half of Keyword B the same so that the tonal variety appears in the second half each time. Changing every note might be a bit too much variation, and this strikes a good compromise between exact repetition and variety. The keywords are still strong and identifiable as such, but they each benefit from a minor bit of adjustment.

Figure 11.20

Plotted notes for the

chorus to “Easier

Done Than Said.”

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The first piece of this adjustment that demands attention may be small, but it is actually very significant. It’s where the C natural is employed in the first repeat of Keyword B. It is a very insecure note (Tonal Tier 6) that isn’t even in the scale of the song (D Major). It therefore isn’t short on character, and it draws quite a bit of attention to itself as a result. To compensate for this lack of confidence, the next pillar note is the most confident it can be (Note 1). This helps set things back on an even keel, but it does start to suggest a bit of harmonic ambiguity. This is because it features the notes C and D on stressed beats and could easily imply the key of G Major as a result (because these are the root notes of the subdominant and dominant chords of that key—the next two chapters will spell this out in clearer terms in case you’re a bit lost here!).

Aside from this tampering with the tonal makeup of the pillar notes in Keyword B, it is also worth pointing out here how a couple of the unstressed notes are stepping out of line slightly, too. For example, take the fifth note in the first appearance of said keyword. Its purpose is to join the pillar notes of the D and C#. The obvious step between them would be on the D or C# too, but instead it plumps for an indirect route and a step up to the unconfident E (the second in the scale of D Major).

This is a great example of an unconfident tone on an unconfident beat drawing attention to itself by purposefully wandering off the obvious direct route. It results in a generous dose of character. The D or C# would work perfectly well, but the daring temporary dash by this note adds an interesting bit of color to the line.

The second repetition of Keyword B includes a little more variety and so on. The only pillar note in the melodic word in the chorus is the F#, which is reasonably confident although it is surrounded by two insecure notes pushing things forward.

Finally, Keyword C employs passing notes following the direct route that create a simple and obvious line between the pillar notes already plotted.

Conclusions

Having gone through all of this in painstaking detail, let’s be honest with each other and admit that it’s incredibly unlikely either of us will ever write a full melody going through this process step by step. It’s just too dull and too much like hard work. You know it and I know it, so let’s not pretend it isn’t true. Why on earth have we just done it then?! Because it is a really useful process to go through in coming to terms with how we generate our melodies. It goes beyond saying,

“That sounds good” and into “Why does that sound good?” The truth is that a lot of this process actually goes on in our minds subconsciously. Ever wondered why words tend to reveal themselves to us when we are la-ing along with our chord progressions? It’s because our brains automatically dig out words that match the stress patterns inherent in the melodic line. We have just spent a few pages looking at how it works, and our brains do it in a flash for us. Amazing!

A lot of this melody-writing process does take place without us thinking about it, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about it. At the start of the chapter, we acknowledged that this isn’t the only process we can use. There are plenty of others. I expect you will have already come across a few techniques for using chords to act as a springboard for melodies, for example. However, there will always be times when using just one of the stages of this process will help us improve our melodies. One example might be when we become aware that our melody lines are too involved and we need to narrow down the amount of variety.

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Going on the hunt for repeating rhythmic patterns and generating a more limited number of keywords might solve the problem. We can leave the following few stages out if that is all we need to fix a mess.

Another example might be when we know that we like the shape of our melody, but we think it could sound better. In this case, we can try out various different placements and stretches of our shape until we get it right. There are other scenarios, but I’ll let you discover them “on the job.”

If we want to get better at regularly churning out melodies, these are the sorts of exercises we need to get our teeth into. It’s like fitness training where we start to develop our melody writing muscles. By slowly ingraining these sorts of skills and techniques into our brains, they will start to have an impact on the way we write.

For example, we will start to find ourselves maximizing repetitions of rhythmic patterns and suitably adjusting the shape and range of our melodic lines without having to think hard about it.

We started by looking at communication, and we will end with it. When we started to learn to read English words, it was hard, but gradually it got easier, to the point where you are likely reading this paragraph without any difficulty at all.

It’s the same with these techniques in spelling out melodies. There’s a lot to it at first, but it soon starts to become second nature. Stick with it. Just deal with one technique at a time if need be until it embeds itself in the way you work. Here are some exercises that should help focus your mind a bit!

Solution: Purposefully Develop an Initial Idea

Although we have acknowledged that there are various techniques available to us to grow a melody, this exercise will revolve around you going through the melodic mill like I just have! It shouldn’t take too long, and you will undoubtedly get faster at the process the more often you do it. If, by any chance, you are working through this book in parallel with someone else you know, it’s a good idea to both work on the same set of lyrics. It’s highly likely that you will get different results, and comparing what you each end up with can be really interesting.

STAGE 1: LOST FOR KEYWORDS

There are two parts to this first stage. The first is to exercise the mind a bit and to spend some quality time looking for keywords. Identify the repetitive melodic patterns found in your favorite songs and some of the songs that you write (assuming that they are different!). When you have discovered what they are, try to evaluate how effectively the variation has been employed. You may be surprised to discover just how few ideas have been used to grow some great songs. I expect that it’s easy to think you will just skip past this stage because it sounds too much like hard work. Don’t, though. It’s in the hunting that we do the discovering.

The second stage here is to take the lyrics that you wrote at the end of the previous chapter, or some of your own lyrics from elsewhere, and metrically scrutinize them for keywords. It’s exactly the same process that we went through in the

“Melodic Framework” section earlier in this chapter. You should end up with a scanned set of lyrics and at least one or two repeating rhythmic phrases (such as the /-/ and /—/-/ we identified in this chapter).

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STAGE 2: PLOT A MELODIC FRAMEWORK

Identify each of these repeating rhythmic patterns as named keywords and plot them on a melodic framework like the one in the “Melodic Framework” section earlier in this chapter. It doesn’t have to look anywhere near as neat! Remember that this is just an initial sketch of how the melody could look. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it does help get the ball rolling. Don’t forget to consider the proportional division of melodic events and rests.

STAGE 3: UPS AND DOWNS

Assign each of your keywords a different melodic contour, like we did in the

“Contour” section earlier in this chapter. Think about how you can vary the shape from section to section. Don’t forget to consider inverting and stretching each shape, too.

STAGE 4: STRESSED FOOT FORWARD

Plot the rhythmic placement and duration of your pillar and passing notes as defined by the stressed and unstressed syllables in your lyrics. Make sure that you consider varying note length from section to section and that you think about varying where each keyword starts within or out of each measure. Don’t forget the possibility of anacrusis and late starts.

STAGE 5: TONAL PILLARS

Now that the rhythm of the melody is sorted, start to think about how you can use the confidence of each of the pillar notes to give the melody rest or to drive it forward. Then start to assign actual tones to the pillar notes following your own guidance with regard to the contour of each keyword.

STAGE 6: PASSING ROUTES

Now you need to connect the dots and plot the tonal values of the passing notes between the pillars already in place. Think about whether you want a smooth journey or one that draws attention to itself and plot immediate, direct, or indirect routes accordingly. Remember to think about including variety from section to section, too.

STAGE 7: ADDING A TOUCH OF COLOR AND CHARACTER

Now that each of the keywords in your song is finished, you need to spend some time decorating around them with the remaining melodic letters and words that haven’t yet found a home. If your melodic framework is very lean with regard to the number of additional words and letters, then you may find that you have very little to do at this stage. It’s the keywords that are providing the bulk of the repetition, so you don’t need to concern yourself too much with how you can get these words to form repetitive patterns. However, you can use them to help color the character of each melodic line, especially if you pay due attention to those that fall on primary and secondary metric stress points.

We Write Chords without

Problem

Understanding Them

12

Have you ever accidentally stumbled across a new chord and found that it has quickly led to the creation of a new song? You are not alone if you have.

Finding new chords can be like finding the key or code to access the next level in a computer game. Suddenly, that chord becomes the mainstay of the next few songs until another one mystically appears (usually through playing another one slightly incorrectly), and then that one leads the way for a while. What if finding these chords wasn’t an accident? What if we could intentionally go after them? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? It might remove a bit of the magic, but it would also remove some of the hours, days, and weeks spent waiting for the magic to strike!

There is nothing inherently wrong with coming up with a chord sequence we like without having the vaguest idea how the chords relate to each other. Liking a chord progression is almost always going to be more important than understanding it.

However, just like every part of this songwriting game, understanding what is going on tends to help save us hours going around the houses. If we can keep at least some kind of order in the game, then we will be able to create songs more frequently, and we will get gradually better at doing so.

Building Basic Chords

Because different people have developed their understanding of chords from different angles and stages of musical training, we will start simple and add complexity with each passing page. This should ensure that we cover everything we need to know.

TRIADS

The most basic chords we can write our songs with are built with three notes and are therefore known as triads. Of all the chords that we can use, there are four basic types of triads that we can employ and build on.

Major and Minor Chords

We have already spent some time coming to grips with which tones are and aren’t confident in any key, and the significance of the 1st, 3rd, and 5th is particularly evident when it comes to building chords. If we start with a major chord, for example, we can see that it is built with the 1st, 3rd, and 5th degrees of a major scale, so in the key of C Major, a C Major chord would consist of a C, an E, and a G.

As you will hopefully remember from our voyage through music theory in Problem 5, we already know that a flat third note in a major scale will result in that scale becoming minor. If we now apply that fact to the building of chords, we discover that a chord featuring the 1st, flat 3rd, and 5th is a minor chord, so a C Minor would consist of a C, an E b, and a G.

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Diminished and Augmented Chords

While we are reminiscing about Problem 5, we should also remember that a flat 5th note is classed as being diminished. For this reason, a triad built with a flat 3rd and 5th in it is classed as a diminished triad. So, a C Diminished triad would include the 1st (C), the flat 3rd (E b), and the flat 5th (G b). Where a sharp fifth is included in a chord, that chord will have augmented in its name, so a C Augmented triad will include the 1st (C), the 3rd (E), and the sharp 5th (G#). Where a note is flat or sharp, we should always name it with the same letter that it would be if it wasn’t. For example, a flat 3rd in the context of C Major will always be an E b , not a D#. They sound like the same note on almost every instrument, but functionally they are different. A D# would be a sharp 2nd, and that isn’t what we mean when we’re talking about a minor third. Similarly, a sharp fifth in this context would be a G#, not an A b.

Seeing as it all comes down to mathematics at the end of the day, there are various ways of getting to the same answer with regard to how chords are built. We can have a keenly developed understanding of how they work and still be surprised with a new way of looking at it from time to time. Just one of way of understanding it all is to view these four types of triad as being built with intervals of major and minor thirds. We can see how this works in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1

C Major, Minor, Augmented,

and Diminished triads.

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DIATONIC CHORDS

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that the chords we use are built with the scales that we have already gone to great pains to get acquainted with. The diatonic scale works wonders in providing us with all sorts of natural harmonic building blocks. If we build chords by stacking thirds on top of each other, where we take the same pattern of 1-3-5 but start on different degrees of the scale, we start to see them taking shape, as revealed in Figure 12.2.

Figure 12.2

Diatonic triads in the key of C Major.

If you know any songs in the key of C Major, it is quite likely that the bulk of the chords in it are in this collection. This natural sequence of chords provides the fundamental harmonic building blocks of thousands upon thousands of songs.

Often classed as diatonic chords, we shall refer to them as family chords, owing to their close relationship to each other.

Although Figure 12.2 just reveals the diatonic chords inherent in the key of C

Major, the fact that they are built systematically on the diatonic scale means that the same pattern of major and minor chords will appear in any key. The right of the figure reveals the natural family chords inherent in G Major and F Major to illustrate the point. Notice how the order of the major and minor chords remains the same in each key.

WHAT WE CALL THEM

Our chord charts and lead sheets would be very overcrowded if we always wrote down the full names of chords. It makes much more sense to use shorthand to write them down, and various techniques have evolved for doing so over the years.

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Here is what we will work with in this book: Using chords with F at the root as an example, we will refer to F Major as F, F Minor as Fm, F Diminished as F˚, and F

Augmented as F+.

Beyond naming the chords like this, it is also useful to be able to name them with regard to their placement in the diatonic system. This enables us to appraise our chords purely on functional grounds and regardless of key. Back in Figure 5.16, we looked at different systems for naming notes in a scale, and the same principle applies here. There are various naming techniques in active service, but the most common are numbers, Roman numerals, or the other more serious academic words, as revealed in Figure 12.3.

Figure 12.3

Chord numbering and naming.

Notice how lowercase Roman numerals are used for minor chords, as opposed to the uppercase used for the major chords, and that the same academic names are used for chords as we have already seen for individual notes in our study of melody.

RELATIVE MINORS

Remember what we learned in Problem 5 about natural minor scales starting on the sixth degree of the major scale? Here we can see how that fact applies to the construction of triads. Figure 12.4 reveals how all but one (B˚) of the seven family chords formed in the key of C Major pairs off into three closely related major and minor triads. The root note of the Am triad is the 6th degree of the C Major scale, the root of the Dm scale is the 6th in the scale of F, and the same pattern applies to the relationship between G and Em. The close relationship between these chords has led to these minor chords being known as the relative minors of their respective major partners, and again, the same pattern applies to any key.

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Figure 12.4

Relative minor chords

in the key of C Major.

If you are wondering why the vii chord (the B˚ in the key of C Major) doesn’t serve as another chord’s relative minor, there are two main reasons. First, there are no major chords left after the others have paired off, and second, a Bm chord is the 6th in the scale of D Major, and a D Major chord doesn’t naturally feature in the key of C Major. The vii chord’s placement in the family of chords is a little awkward, as we shall gradually discover together.

DIATONIC CHORDS IN MINOR KEYS

Identifying the diatonic chords in minor keys is not as straightforward as doing so in the major equivalent because unlike in the major scale, there is more than one minor scale. We have already looked at the natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales, and if we take the modes into account too, it gets even more complex! We’re just going to focus on two of the minor scales for reasons that hopefully will become clear very shortly. Figures 12.5 and 12.6 reveal the triads that the natural and harmonic minor scales naturally harbor.

Along with our discovery of all of these chords that start to appear through this theoretical jaunt, it’s worth remembering that although they are all viable and theoretically correct, there are some that make only the most occasional of appearances in songs. In fact, we can generally narrow it down to just a few chords that are regularly employed—the most common of these being the i, V, bVI, and bVII.

In the key of A Minor, this would mean the chords Am, E, F, and G. In the key of Em, it would mean the chords Em, B, C, and D. Does that ring any bells with you?

You would be forgiven for thinking of this in terms of a major diatonic system because the chords could also be seen as the vi, III, IV, and V, where the only adjustment to the major diatonic chords would be the adjustment of the mediant (chord iii) from minor to major. This is why we have only included the natural and harmonic minor family chords here. It’s the harmonic minor scale with its raised 7th (providing the G# in the key of Am) that provides us with the major third in the dominant chord (E major) or the mediant (if we look at it in a major diatonic chord sense).

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Figure 12.5

Diatonic triads

in A (Aeolian)

natural minor.

Figure 12.6

Diatonic triads in

A harmonic minor.

Circle of Fifths

I expect that you were already at least loosely acquainted with most of what we just looked at. It gets interesting when we look at the relationship between these chords.

Just like any family, all family chords relate to one another, and it’s only when we fully understand these relationships that we are able to use them to full effect.

In Figure 12.7, we have the Circle of Fifths. It is to harmonic theory what tens are to the decimal system. If you have never come face to face with it before, fear not, for it is your friend. A close look at this little marvel will open up a whole world of wonder. If you don’t yet understand it, then bear with it until it clicks. It really is a magic moment when it all falls into place.

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Figure 12.7

The Circle of Fifths.

From our expedition through Problem 5, we have now learned to appreciate the harmonic and dominant significance of the 5th, and this cyclic wonder is built on the premise of that understanding, thus the name. One step clockwise results in a move of a 5th from where we were. The 5th of C is the G. The 5th of G is D. The 5th of D is A, and so on. By virtue of the fact that we are rotating in fifths in one direction, it automatically works out that we rotate in fourths in the other. The 4th of C is F, the 4th of F is B b , and so on. We look at it cyclically because, like scales, chords follow a cyclic pattern, and viewing them as such helps us come to grips with exactly what is going on.

This circle reveals the chords that are and aren’t closely related. The closer together chords are, the more closely they relate to one another and the better they get on. If we use the key of C Major as our way in, for example, we can see straight away that both F and G and their relative minor chords of Dm and Em, respectively, are close pals of C. They are close by, and we already saw how they relate to each other in Figure 12.2. If we test this relationship further, we can see that the major scales of F and G, and therefore the natural minor scales of Dm and Em, both share six notes in common with the C Major scale. Only one is different in each scale.

F and Dm include a B b instead of a B, and G and Em include an F# instead of an F.

Just one note difference is as close as they can get without being the same.

If we now rotate a little further in each direction and pick the chords of A and E b to scrutinize, we discover that both of these scales have three notes different.

Figure 12.8 spells this out graphically. If—just for the fun of it if nothing else—

we work our way right around to the dark side of the moon and look at F#, we discover that it has one note in common with C. If C is the easiest to understand by virtue of the fact that it has no sharps or flats, then F# is its antithesis, with sharps aplenty!

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Figure 12.8

Close and distant

harmonic relations.

The outcome of this orbit is that we learn how chords that will sound comfortable and at home in our compositions are generally those who are close neighbors, and the great thing is that the circle works in every key. If we think of chords that we are familiar with playing together, then it’s likely that we will think of the chords C, F, and G with the possible occasional Am, Dm, and Em in the key of C

Major. In A Major, the usual contenders tend to be A, D, and E with the odd F#m, Bm, and C#m thrown in for good measure. In G Major, the faithful few tend to be the G, C, and D with the occasional appearance of an Em, Am, and Bm to color the occasion (see Figure 12.9). Ring any bells? They all hang out together in the circle like friends do around a dance floor. The only exception to this is the previously acknowledged “awkward” chord vii (B˚ in C Major). We’ll come back to this in a bit when we can use it to unlock a few more mysteries for us.

Figure 12.9

The Circle of Fifths

(zoomed in on G Major).

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CADENCE

A cadence is the point in a piece of music where it feels like an ending of some sort has been reached. It can be helpful to look at cadences as musical punctuation because just as there are various degrees of rest and completion in sentences and speech, the same applies to musical construction. Sometimes a cadence will act as a full stop, and sometimes it will act more as a comma, where there is a brief pause before the music continues on its way. Although a thorough rummage around the musicological sock drawer will reveal many different types of cadence, we’re just going to concern ourselves with the big three. These are the perfect, the plagal, and the interrupted cadences.

Perfect Cadence = V – I

A perfect cadence takes place when the dominant (chord V) resolves to the tonic (chord I), meaning that all three notes in the triad move when it happens. First, there’s the movement from the 5th to the 1st at the root. Note 5’s close relationship to Note 1, as already discussed in Problem 5, plays a significant part in dictating its tendency to want to resolve there. Cast an eye back to Figure 5.21 in Problem 5 if you need to remind yourself of the manner in which tones tend to naturally resolve. Note 5 will naturally resolve to Note 1 because it has no other option. Every other note has less confidence. Although we could regard the 5th as not having to literally move because it features in the tonic chord too, it does move functionally. The movement from V to I is at the root of this cadence, so even if our inversions (more on this shortly, under the heading “Inversions and Slash Chords”) of each chord mean that the 5th note doesn’t actually move up or down to voice the chords, its function in changing from the root of one chord (chord V) to the 5th of the next (chord I) means that it does move harmonically, if not literally.

Second, as we can see in Figure 12.10, the dominant also includes Note 7 (B in the key of C Major), and this note’s significant lack of confidence and its inclination to want to resolve to Note 1 add an extra drive in encouraging the dominant to lead to the tonic.

Figure 12.10

Cadences

(shown in C Major).

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Lastly, although Note 2 is relatively more confident than Note 7, it too will want to head in the direction of Note 1 when given the opportunity. This means that all the notes in the dominant triad want to resolve to Note 1, and this helps explain why the perfect cadence of the dominant to the tonic is so strong and final. All of the notes in the triad are trying to get home to the same place!

It’s interesting to note that the dominant isn’t the only chord to include Notes 7

and 2 at the same time. Chord vii does too, and it’s for this reason that it also has a tendency to resolve to the tonic. Although it shares the same function as chord V in its tendency to resolve to 1 and is often referred to as providing a dominant function as a result, it isn’t formally classed as a perfect cadence, and it has all sorts of names in place. Of all of these, I personally believe that leading note cadence names it best because it spells out what it is clearly.

Plagal Cadence

A plagal cadence occurs when the tonic is preceded by the subdominant (chord IV).

Known to many as the Amen cadence due to its common occurrence in association with a sung “Amen” in church, a plagal cadence revolves around Note 4’s tendency to want to resolve to Note 3 in combination with Note 6’s inclination to move to Note 5. Just as the dominant isn’t alone in featuring Notes 7 and 2, the subdominant isn’t alone in its inclusion of Notes 4 and 6. The supertonic (chord ii) also shares that honor, and for this reason it too can be (and often is) classed as serving a subdominant function.

Interrupted Cadence

Although the dominant and subdominant sound “right” leading to the tonic, they don’t have to go there, and as we have already appreciated, giving listeners something other than what they expect is often the best way forward. Occasionally known under the alias of deceptive cadence, an interrupted cadence takes place where the harmonic movement does just this. Examples are V to IV or V to VI. It can lead to whatever chord we fancy as long as it doesn’t lead to where it could be identified as a perfect or plagal cadence.

In songwriting, interrupted cadences are commonly found interrupting proceedings at the start of sections, especially middle sections. The fact that they lead somewhere other than where we might expect helps generate the “something different” vibe that tends to be a desirable quality at this point in song structures.

Obviously, they can be used elsewhere too, but they will always generate the feeling of being steered in a direction we weren’t quite expecting. They can serve as a very handy compositional tool on such occasions, and they help keep listeners on their toes. Have you ever thought much about using harmony to play with the expectation of the listener? You really should if you haven’t.

The Cycle of Fifths

If we look at both perfect and plagal cadences in a different light, we can see that our most recent of acquaintances, the Circle of Fifths, is again working its magic.

It’s pretty obvious that the subdominant and dominant straddle either side of the tonic and that their relative minors also hang around the immediate vicinity, but this is where we can get to know (if we don’t already) a really useful harmonic

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phenomenon. It’s called the Cycle of Fifths (which is where we can put the Circle of Fifths to really good use). We have already appreciated the dominant’s tendency to resolve to the tonic, and it only takes a small turn of a brain cog to appreciate that this special relationship between the 5th and the 1st doesn’t have to apply to chords V and I in a diatonic system and is effective between any chords that are a 5th apart. For example, the chord progression ii, V, I (Dm, G, C in C Major or Am, D, G in G Major) is very common in thousands of songs. Play it now, and I’m positive it will sound familiar to you. If it doesn’t, then you need to get out more.

Why does the ii sound good going to the V? It’s because the root of chord ii is the 5th of chord V (D is the 5th of G). I appreciate that might be a bit of a brain fryer, so look to Figure 12.11 for some calming graphic reassurance if you need to.

The power of the fifth is what drives this sequence forward as it serves as a strong harmonic step toward home. It acts as a harmonic pivot point on which we can build our harmonic progressions.

Figure 12.11

The power of the fifth.

If we go a step further and precede this run of chords with the 5th of chord ii, we can call chord vi (Am) into action. Listen to the progression Am, Dm, G, and C. Sound familiar? Let’s go back one more step and add the 5th chord of the Am to the start. That gives us the Em. Em, Am, Dm, G, and C all sound very comfortable and strong in a row. This is the Cycle of Fifths in action.

If we look again at the Circle of Fifths to explain it, it all becomes crystal clear.

Forget the major/minor distinctions for a minute and just look at the letters. We’ll get there in two sentences’ time. E, A, D, G, and C are all next to each other. This is undoubtedly very tidy, and it is no coincidence. The only reason why some chords are major and some are minor is due to the governance of the diatonic series. If we want to keep chords in the same family, then we have to adhere to the diatonic framework and let that dictate the nature of the third note in each triad.

It is possible to ignore this framework and to change minor chords to major and vice versa, but we’ll get to that later in this chapter, under the “Secondary Dominants” heading.

HARMONIC FUNCTION

Now that we have had our brief but delightful stroll around Cadence Corner, we can focus a little on the difference between chords that can be classed as serving a tonic, dominant, or subdominant function. We have already seen that chords ii and IV both share a subdominant function, and what this means for us in practice is that they sound out and about or on the move, but not anywhere particularly close to getting home. This is largely due to the fact that they both contain Notes 4 and 6, respectively, and that when these notes move toward resolution, they naturally

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resolve to Notes 3 and 5 and not immediately back home to Note 1. If we want a family chord to sound as unresolved as possible, then they’re a good place to go.

They don’t naturally pull home with the force of chords that serve a dominant function.

The dominant function shared by chords V and vii means that they firmly point and want to resolve to the tonic directly. They are therefore a good choice of chord when we want to sound one stop from home. If a chord serving a subdominant function is out on its jollies having a wander around, then one with a dominant function is getting back in the car, train, or any other form of transportation and practically on its way.

There are still a few diatonic chords whose harmonic function we haven’t looked at yet. These are the tonic, mediant, and submediant (Chords I, iii, and vi, respectively). What can we say about these? Well, these are often classed as serving a tonic function. Chords iii and vi aren’t as resolved as the tonic, but neither are they as far from home as the other chords we have looked at. A good way to understand why this is the case is to look at this with regard to the degree of tonal confidence each family chord exhibits in its tonal makeup. If we look at Figure 12.12, we can see that the mediant and submediant triads both share two notes with the tonic triad. This tonal confidence in their makeup gives them that tonic character. It’s as if they have one foot away from home, but two still firmly planted inside the front door. (Chords have three legs, by the way!)

Figure 12.12

Note confidence in

harmonic function

(shown in the key

C Major).

That leaves us with an understanding of the harmonic function of each chord.

The tonic is home, and the mediant and submediant share its tonic function, providing them with a strong position in the harmonic ranks. The supertonic and subdominant share a subdominant function, which gives them an out-and-about quality, and the dominant and leading note chords act as the last stop on the expected route home.

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Coloring Chords

Chords don’t have to be built with Note 1 at the bottom and the remaining notes placed in the order dictated by a scale. We can mix them up as much as we like, and it’s often a good idea to do just that.

INVERSIONS AND SLASH CHORDS

When we reorder the vertical placement of simultaneously sounding notes, we create what are known as different inversions of the same chord. It’s important to understand that the chord itself doesn’t change when we do this—just its appearance does. If I stand on my head I’m still me, so I keep my name. I’m just standing on my head and probably going red. As you’re possibly already aware, these different orders have names, but as is often the case, there are different techniques for naming them. I’m not going to break the habit of a lifetime here, so I will ignore the classic terminology (including phrases such as first inversion and so on).

Instead we’re going to work with what are often referred to as slash chords, owing to the fact that they feature a slash when they are written down. In Figure 12.13, I have lovingly scored out examples for you.

Figure 12.13

Inversions (shown in

the key of C Major).

If you were to introduce me to someone while I was standing on my head, you would probably say something like, “Here is Danny, and he’s standing on his head.” The fact that I was doing something out of the ordinary means that you would more than likely draw attention to it. It’s the same with slash chords.

Instead of saying, “Here’s a C major” by writing a C on the page, we say, “Here’s a C Major with an E at the bottom” by writing a C/E. Slash chords don’t actually paint the whole picture. They state what note is in the bass, but they don’t specify the order of notes in the middle and which are on top. However, that’s fine as far as songwriting goes. It wouldn’t be in classical or more traditional music, but we aren’t concerned with song “arranging” here, so slash chords are more appropriate. We can leave it up to the musicians to dig out their own chord voicings.

That’s part of the fun of working with different musicians anyway.

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There are two main reasons why we might want to think about working with different inversions of chords. The first is simply that they can sound better when we do. Playing basic triads gets dull. Inverting them can make them sound fresher and more interesting. Second, and more significantly, inverting chords can cause successive chords to lead into each other all the more effectively through the process of what is known as voice leading. Take the chords in Figure 12.14 as an example. The first example features plain triads with the distance between the successive notes marked out to emphasize the distance each note has to travel. These leaps aren’t necessarily needed, and a more gradual step motion between notes as illustrated by the voice leading in the second example will often be beneficial. This is because harmony isn’t generally concerned with contour in the same way that melody is. As always, there are exceptions to this where the harmony in songs is voiced to create a strong contour (with the successive uninverted chords in Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” being a really good example), but neatness and efficiency are often more appropriate concerns in cementing harmony as a supporting element.

Figure 12.14

Inversions showing two

examples of different routes

from C to F to G to C.

Notice that although Examples 1 and 2 both feature the same chords in the same order, Example 2 is much more streamlined and features no changes in direction.

The harmonic motion is consistently downward. Notice too how the second example includes step motion in the bass line. This is one of the areas where inversions can be used to really good effect. Just changing the bass line alone and leaving the chords above them as plain, uninverted triads can still add a lot of color and interest to a sequence of chords.

While we’re on the topic of the bass line, we should also acknowledge that inversions can be created where the bass line doesn’t move at all and remains “pedaled”

on just one note as the chord above it changes. This can (and regularly does) work fantastically well because it means that the rest of the notes in the chords that dance over it are what create the tension and harmonic color. There are no rights or wrongs, but being aware of the option to invert chords to create this leading between notes or pedaling effect is useful. If you have never used either of these techniques, make a point of trying them out when you are next writing a chord progression. You may be surprised just how much difference a simple change can make.

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EXTENSIONS

So far, we have only looked at triads, but chords can and do often feature more than three notes. Although basic triads will provide the basic guts of chords, we can add color to them by adding the odd additional note here and there, and it’s worth having a look at what we can do to spice things up. We should acknowledge here that we are opening a door to a cavernous world of wonder when we do this, and that although the next few paragraphs are intended to be helpful, they will serve as little more than a well-spirited introduction!

There are plenty of self-taught musicians who get quite scared by all the numbers and symbols that can appear after chords, but it’s actually really simple. The number denotes which notes are included in the chord above and beyond (and sometimes replacing parts of) the triad. It’s a very similar principle to intervals, where the number relates to the note’s position in the major scale as defined by the root note of the chord.

7ths

Rather than explaining all this with words, it’s easiest to grasp if we start by looking at the 7th chords depicted in Figure 12.15.

Figure 12.15

7th chords

(shown built

on a C).

Here in Figure 12.15, taking Cmaj7 as our example, we can see that the chord is simply a C chord, but with the addition of the major 7th note in the scale. Notice here that where major 7 appears in a chord name, it means that the 7th note in the major scale is included, and where dominant 7 is used, it means that the 7th has been included but that it has been lowered a semitone. Where neither major nor dominant precedes the 7, it is universally understood to mean that the 7th is lowered (dominant). It’s also worth pointing out that the word minor in the name of a chord always refers to Note 3. The word minor is never used to describe the 7th note itself. It is therefore possible to have a minor major 7th chord (where the 3rd is lowered and the 7th isn’t).

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9ths, 11ths, and 13ths

If we carry on adding thirds above and beyond the 7th, we can and do fairly commonly find ourselves venturing outside the octave and up to 13ths via 9ths and 11ths. A 9th is the same pitch class as the 2nd, the 11th the same as the 4th, and the 13th the same as a 6th. We aren’t going to concern ourselves with 10ths and 12ths here because, although we could get really technical about it if we wanted to, the 10th is the same pitch class as the 3rd, and the 12th is the same as the 5th, so they are both usually in the triads already.

In Figure 12.16, I have just included a selection of chords to serve as examples and to save us spending ages going over the same ground. This is only supposed to be an introduction, remember?! Have a look through them to ensure that it all makes sense. The basic things to take onboard are that a 9th chord implies that the 7th is included, an 11th implies that both the 7th and 9th are included, and a 13th implies that the 11th, 9th, and 7th are all included, too. Implication is all that it is, though. We don’t necessarily have to include all of them, and in practice, it’s very rare to voice every theoretically possible note in an extended chord. One of the main reasons for this is because they can start to sound far too cluttered and busy.

A 13th chord, for example, will rarely appear with all 7 notes that it could include, and it is common to find it without the 5th and 11th included. We can get away with dropping a few notes, but we should never drop Note 7 from 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths. If we do, we will actually end up creating different types of chords that we shall get to shortly, under the heading “Other Chord Variations.”

Another reason why notes are sometimes dropped revolves around the issue of dissonance. The major 11th chord as depicted in Figure 12.16 is a good case study on this point. When an 11th is added on top of a major 9th chord (creating a major 11th chord), it creates an unpleasant dissonance against the major 3rd that is already in the chord. In the case of a Cmaj11, for example, the 11th note would be an F, and the 3rd would be an E. Although the 11th is likely to be in the octave higher than the 3rd, their pitch class dictates that they are just a semitone apart, and they clash as a result. One of two possible ways to deal with this issue is to simply drop the major 3rd from the chord altogether (resulting in C G B b D and F). When it’s voiced like this, the 11th can make a great extension for a dominant chord and is regularly used in that role.

When it comes to considering which notes we do and don’t employ in these chords, we also need to remember that our instrument of choice might actually force our hand a bit in the decisions we make. On a piano, for example, it’s relatively easy to play the chords as the theory reveals them to us, but a guitar fret board is not always so accommodating. Unless you are blessed with an abnormal number of fingers, it’s unlikely that you will manage to play every theoretically possible note in every chord on a guitar. Even if you do possess seven fingers, you’ll still find that the lack of a seventh string on a guitar is a hindrance when you’re trying to voice seven notes at once (unless you have a seven-string guitar, of course, but even then you’ll have to be a contortionist of sorts to voice all the notes in the theoretically correct order!). Dropping a few notes and reordering those that remain is usually the only way forward.

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Figure 12.16

A selection of 9th, 11th, and 13th chords (shown built on a C).

It’s important to realize that although we have grown out of the limitations of an octave here, these extensions don’t have to be placed in a higher octave and can nestle neatly alongside one another in just the one. When this happens, it is known as close harmony because all the notes are relatively close together. Figure 12.16

depicts the notes that are theoretically correct in building each chord. It doesn’t specify the order in which they need to appear. Inversions can be applied to any chord, including these, in just the same way that they can be applied to basic triads. We can put a 9 in the middle or at the bottom of a chord if we feel like it, for example. It might not give us the sound we are after, but there’s nothing theoretically wrong with it.

Other Chord Variations

Not all chords have to be built with intervals of thirds, such as those we have seen so far. There are some that include subtle adjustments to the notes already in the triad.

Figure 12.17 depicts the main chords that we need to concern ourselves with here.

Figure 12.17

Other chord variations (shown built on a C).

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The 6th chord is very easy to understand. It is simply a triad with the major 6th note added on top. Sometimes the 6th will be added in the higher octave, but it’s still a 6th chord. The suspended fourth chord, usually referred to as sus4 or sus, is created when the 3rd in a chord is replaced with a 4th. Because Note 4 has a tendency to resolve to Note 3, the position of Note 4 in this chord sounds suspended in anticipation of the resolution, and thus the name.

When a triad includes a major 2nd, it can be known by two different names. To some, it’s known as an add2 chord for obvious reasons. Others pick up on the fact that the 2nd tends to be placed in the higher octave to avoid it clashing with the 1

and 3 that would otherwise be on either side of it, and for this reason, it is often called an add9 chord.

This is where we need to reconsider Note 7 in our building of chords. You may be wondering what separates a 9th chord from an add9 chord, and the simple answer is the involvement of Note 7. This is why a 7th note can’t be dropped from a 9th, 11th, or 13th chord. If it’s left out of an 11th chord, then that chord will become an add9/11 or something similar. If it’s left out of a 13th chord, then that could be referred to with a whole variety of names, but not a 13th. The reality of the matter is that there seem to be all sorts of colloquial variations on some of these obscure little beauties. I have seen the chord consisting of C E G and F as an add4

before, for example, but the point to note here is that a 9th, 11th, or 13th chord will always have a 7th in it. If the 7th isn’t there, then it’s a different chord.

We haven’t looked at the power chord until now because we have been focusing on building rather than stripping chords. It’s useful in “power” situations where the major/minor tonality issue is taken out of the question, and the confidence of the 1 and 5 are left to shine unabated by the lack of the 3rd.

ALTERATIONS

In addition to these basic extended chords, we can and do also regularly get away with coloring the chords further by raising or lowering some of these extending notes. If we want to make a note sharp or flat where it wouldn’t usually be, we can.

Sometimes we will do this because we want to inject some additional spice and color into a chord. Sometimes, though, we will be forced into it by the fact that notes don’t sit comfortably together. Another visit to the 11th chord is useful at this point.

Although the 11th chord depicted in Figure 12.16 is theoretically correct, it is hardly ever used as it is written because of the dissonant quality that we looked at earlier. We have already seen that one way to deal with this problem is to drop the major 3rd. In practice, the other thing that tends to happen with this chord is that the 11th note gets raised a semitone to avoid the dissonance. When this happens, the alteration is noted in the chord name. So, a Cmaj11 with a raised 11th would be called a Cmaj(#11) (C E G B b D F#). Another example of an altered extension would be a G(b13), which would include a flattened 13th (G B D F A C E b) .

In including notes that aren’t in the immediate diatonic family, altered chords have a little bit of spice to them and can be used for good effect in generating a little more interest. As we shall see shortly, they are also particularly useful when it comes to steering the direction in which we expect chords to move.

I have heard extensions referred to as adjectives before, and I think that sums them up beautifully. Every different type of extension and alteration brings its own

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character and color to the chord it adorns. I have heard an add9 referred to as the pretty chord on more than one occasion, for example. Rather than read through my own personal interpretation of the harmonic color each extension brings, the best thing you can do is play each of them and familiarize yourself with them so you understand them personally. When we are in a position where we know what each extension can do, we can draw on them when we please, like a carpenter draws on tools in his toolkit. Chord extensions and alterations tend to gradually work their way into our harmonic vocabulary like words do in our speech. We need to use them and try them out to see what we can do with them and where they fit best. Spend some quality time listening and reading through examples of songs that include a variety of chord extensions and alterations. I am positive that you will take something from it each time you do.

BORROWED CHORDS

Up until now, we have only looked at close family chords, and although we have looked at what happens when they are extended and altered, we haven’t yet looked at the other non-diatonic chords that are available to us. Although the majority of songs are built predominantly with close family chords, there is no rule that they have to be. In our pursuit of keeping listeners happy but also slightly on their toes, it can be a good thing to include chords that are more distant relatives within the family. Their inclusion will mix things up a bit and add even more color than the odd extension of alteration will.

These types of chords are often referred to as being borrowed because they actually belong somewhere else. If we intentionally pick a chord that doesn’t belong in the diatonic system of our current key, it does fit in somewhere else. We’re just borrowing it for a while.

It helps to think of the majority of them as more distant relatives, because just as cousins share a common grandma but different parents, most borrowed chords will share some notes with the current key but also include some that are foreign.

Figure 12.18 reveals this graphically, where we can see how the D Major triad relates to the key of C Major. The 1st and 5th of the D Major triad (D and A) fit, but the 3rd doesn’t. It therefore serves as a relative and a borrowed chord.

An even more distant relative is the C# Major triad. Its triad only includes one note that relates to C Major (the F). If we look at it closely, we discover that there is only one major triad that doesn’t relate at all. It’s the chord that is built on the interval of an augmented 4th from the tonic. In the key of C Major, this chord would be the F# Major, and the Circle of Fifths again proves its worth by placing these chords as far apart as humanly possible.

In days of old, this #4th note was referred to as the Diabolus in Musica (the Devil in Music), and the interval it formed with the tonic was therefore known as the Devils Interval. It was considered evil and not to be used as a result. These days, we tend to do away with some of the drama and call it a tritone (with reference to the fact that it is three whole tones from the tonic (T T T) or simply the augmented 4th, as previously discussed. The fact that it doesn’t share a note with the any of the tones from tonic major scale does a lot to explain why it was out-cast. We use it happily these days. It has a unique flavor of awkwardness that can serve us beautifully from time to time.

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Figure 12.18

Chord relations

(shown in rela-

tion to the key

of C Major).

Substitution

Where we purposefully decide to employ a chord in place of another, we do so through a process known as substitution, and there are different approaches to the types of substitution we can use.

One method is to substitute one chord for another that serves the same harmonic function. For example, in a progression such as I vi IV V (C, Am, F, and G in the key of C Major), we can identify chord V as serving a dominant function and replace it with a vii chord. Alternatively, we could substitute chord vi for a iii because they both serve a tonic function. This approach is particularly useful when we want to change the sound of a progression without changing its harmonic function and character. We don’t have to let consideration of harmonic function dictate what will and won’t work as a substitution, though. For example, we can substitute family chords without considering harmonic function at all. With our current example, this could lead to replacing chord 1 with IV and chord V with vi, for example.

Where substitution gets more interesting is where we substitute close family members for relatives or distant relatives. A substitution can take place as long as at least one of the notes in the chord being substituted remains in place.

A good illustration of how substitution works is to look at how we can replace one letter in a word to make another. Boat, beat, bear, tear, and team make up a string of words that feature a substituted letter each time. It’s a similar principle in chord substitution, except we keep at least one note the same rather than changing one note. It’s perfectly possible to substitute a chord for another that only shares one common note. In our previous musical example, we can substitute the F for the Am because these chords both share the notes A and C, and we can also substitute the Dm for the F because they both include the notes F and A. These examples are very safe because they are both close family substitutions and because they include two notes in common.

Figure 12.19 depicts all sorts of other substitutions that can be made when we go looking for different relatives using just one note as a common tone. As an example of what can be done, here we are looking for substitutions in place of the 3rd chord in the sequence I, ii, IV, V. We are using good ol’ C Major as our key, so we are basically on the hunt for chords that can replace the F chord. We therefore have the notes F, A, and C to use as common tones.

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Figure 12.19

Possible

substitutions for F.

You will notice that I have been methodical in my approach. Because we are on the hunt for triads in the first instance, we know that each of these common tones will only be able to function as the 1st, 3rd, or 5th of any chord we might want.

We therefore just have to ask ourselves which chords feature one of these three notes in each of those positions.

Obviously, there is some doubling up here. Among others, the F appears three times, and the Am gets a look in twice, for example. However, once we have eradicated doubles and the F and Dm chords (because we want to substitute the F with something other than itself, and the preceding chord is a Dm that we don’t really want to repeat), we have a good bank of chords to work with. They are D b, Bb, A, D, C, A b, Fm, Bbm, Am, F#m, and Cm. That’s plenty to try out, and they will all bring their own unique flavor to the table. Which of these will be most appropriate depends largely upon which sounds best for the job at hand and whether they clash with any melody that might already be in place.

Not all borrowed chords can act as substitutions, and those that can (by virtue of sharing common tones) will vary in how closely they connect and relate. For example, an E chord can’t act as a substitution for an F, as we have seen earlier. It does share a note with the F Major scale (the E), but that note does not feature in the F Major triad that it is substituting. In this example, the chords Fm, Am, and Dm include two shared notes with the F Major triad, so they are more closely related than those such as the Db, Bb, and Bbm, which only include one shared common tone.

Secondary Dominants

Remember what we said about chord V leading strongly to chord 1? This is where we discover that through the use of borrowed chords, we can employ V chords that aren’t close family members to lead to chords other than the tonic. What about when we want to land on chord ii, for example? Can we use the chord that is a 5th away from it to point to it? You bet we can. Let’s test it. We’ll stay in good ol’ C

Major for the time being, and let’s say we want to get our progression to chord ii (Dm, in this case). What’s the 5th in the scale of D? It’s A. We can therefore use an A chord to direct our ears to the expectation of Dm. Similarly, we can also use a B

to lead to an Em, an E to lead to an Am, a D to lead to a G, and so on. Figure 12.20 reveals each of the secondary dominants found in the key of C Major.

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Figure 12.20

Secondary dominants

(shown in relation to the key of C Major).

You will probably notice that chords I and vii don’t have secondary dominants.

This is because chord 1’s fifth is the dominant and therefore can not be a secondary one, and chord vii is so uncomfortable, it generally serves as a transitional chord rather than one we would choose to purposefully land on. In addition to that, its dominant would be the #4 chord, which is the most distant relative to the key in question.

In addition to using basic triads as secondary dominant chords, we can also spice them up a bit with some extension and alteration action. The most common way to do this is to include a lowered 7th on the dominant, thus making it a dominant 7th chord. If we look at the top half of Figure 12.21 that depicts the movement from an A7 chord to a Dm chord, we can see why this works so well. As well as the three notes in the basic triad all leading to the relative tonic (as discussed earlier in this chapter), we also now have the lowered 7th note (the G), which introduces the interval of a tritone (#4) into the chord between the G and the C#. This creates discomfort in the chord, and it’s this harmonic unease that generates the propulsion toward resolution. In addition to this, we can also observe that the G

will be Note 4 in the new chord of Dm. It has the option of resolving down to the 3rd (the F) or up to the 5th (the A), both of which are fundamentally important to the construction of the new chord and both of which are different than the tonic that all three notes of the triad are scrambling to get toward. The presence of the 7th adds harmonic richness to the chord itself and to the resolution it provides.

Figure 12.21

Dominant 7th resolution.

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Understanding the way a dominant 7th chord propels harmony forward is easier to comprehend when we look at the movement from a major chord to another major chord (as opposed to the movement to a minor chord in our current example). If we look at the bottom half of Figure 12.21, we can see the resolution from VI7 to II (as opposed to ii). If we look at the options open for resolution in this scenario, we can see that the G note only has to move a semitone to the F#, where it will find some confidence. Where the A7 chord is resolving to a Dm, this G is an equal distance (a full tone) from the possible notes of F and A, and its resolution is therefore not as obvious and concise as the semitone movement in the resolution to a major chord.

While we’re on the topic of using chords’ relationships to manipulate their direction, we should also remember the significance of the subdominant chords in setting up the dominants. Remember what we discovered about the ii V I relationship earlier? Here, we can apply that same logic and pattern to lead to a chord other than the tonic. We don’t have to stop at using just the dominant of the chord on which we want to end up. We can insert a chord with a subdominant function before it, too. If we are treating the A as our secondary dominant to point to D, and we know from earlier that the chords with subdominant function are the ii and IV, we can use the ii and IV of our target chord (D) in that place. This gives us the Em (as the ii) and the G (as the IV) in this instance. In practice, the ii tends to work more effectively than the IV by virtue of the fact that it, too, is a 5th away from the secondary dominant it is leading to, and so its intervallic power rules the day once more.

Figure 12.22

Chord ii leading to secondary

dominants (shown in relation to

the key of C Major).

Let’s just test all this, shall we? Figure 12.23 shows these chords in action, leading to a Dm after the tonic chord I (C Major). Play them on your instrument of choice and hear how it works. It’s great. Hopefully it’s obvious that this theory doesn’t just apply to arriving at chord ii. We can use it wherever we fancy. We just decide which chord we want to get to and insert its 5th on the way.

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Figure 12.23

Secondary dominants in action.

Solution: Think about How Chords Relate to Each Other

This exercise is very straightforward. We are going to take a few chords, employ some substitutions, and then experiment with some inversions to ensure that the theory in this chapter has sunk in!

STAGE 1: NAME THE NOTE

Identify the notes required in each of the following chords. This exercise is in the key of G Major to start with.

G, C, Am7, D9

STAGE 2: TRANSPOSE

Transpose those chords into the key of C Major.

STAGE 3: MAKE A SUBSTITUTION

Now that you know the chords in the new key of C Major, substitute the third chord for a borrowed chord. It is up to you whether it is a close relative (two or more notes in common) or a more distant one (just one note in common).

STAGE 4: TURN IT ON ITS HEAD

There are two parts to this stage. First, devise your own inversions of these chords so they lead neatly into each other, as we discussed in the “Inversions and Slash Chords” section earlier in this chapter. When you have done that, try another series of inversions that leads to step motion in your bass line. It is up to you whether you want that motion to ascend or descend.

STAGE 5: ADD A BIT OF COLOR

Now add extensions to each of the four chords so that each chord has the same note on top. Work out what each of those chords would be called.

STAGE 6: LET’S GO AROUND AGAIN

Repeat the previous five stages with the chords D, Em, Bm, and A transposed into the key of F Major.

We Don’t Think about

Problem

How We Use Chords

13

Achord progression will rarely sound that interesting on its own. Ever tried playing someone a “song” that doesn’t actually have a melody or words yet? I used to do that, and it puts supportive friends, family members, or band members in a tricky spot because it’s like asking them to say whether they like a background. The answer will usually be a tentative yes, but they are not getting the whole picture, and any answer they give won’t be that helpful as a result.

One chord sequence could be coupled with hundreds of melodic variations, and until that marriage takes place, the creative process isn’t complete.

A chord sequence could sound dull and boring until the melody sets it off, or it could sound great until a tedious or overenthusiastic melody comes along and spoils it. Chords and melodies need to set each other off. A melody will often work on its own, but a series of chords will usually seem a little pointless without the melody to join it. We can have chord sequences that sound great on account of the groove and the instrumentation that conveys them, but they are still at the mercy of the melody that will sit on top.

I don’t know any songwriter who always writes his songs the same way, but I do believe it is safe to say that the chord progression tends to be the element that kicks off the process for most writers. This tends to be followed or fairly immediately overlapped with some melodic meanderings, and then the lyrics tend to start revealing themselves.

However, if you don’t write that way, it really isn’t a problem. I’m mentioning this approach here because it enables me to point out that this book works through the songwriting process in completely the opposite direction. We have saved our appreciation of harmony until last, in the hope that it will raise some issues that usually sneak through the songwriting process unappreciated. In saving our assessment of chord progressions until the end, we are able to ask questions of them that those of us who usually start with chords don’t normally have to bother with.

Instead of setting the chord progressions in stone and adjusting other elements to fit, we have to spend more time learning how to manipulate the chord progressions to fit where they have to.

Hopefully, questioning the purpose of our chord progressions will improve our harmonic fitness levels. There can be a lot more to writing chord progressions than throwing chords at a wall and seeing what sticks. When we understand what chords can achieve and how they do and don’t feature in different families, we can purposefully call on them to serve a functional purpose as and when we choose.

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Repetition and Variation

Behind all of our endeavors in our construction of chord progressions must be an appreciation of our now-familiar friends, repetition and variation. First, we need to decide what chords to work with, and we will spend some time batting around the relevant issues in this chapter. When we have done that, we need to consider how we can repeat and vary our employment of those chosen chords. If we have a melody that features repeated keywords and phrases, there should be obvious scope for repetitive sequences, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t subtly vary the odd repetition here and there.

Once we have chosen our palette of chords, we can start to think about how we can repeat and vary our employment of them, and there are three key approaches we will look at here. First, we can vary the chords themselves. Second, there’s the speed at which we change between chords (which we will call the harmonic pulse).

Third, there’s the groove in which we play them (which we will call the harmonic rhythm).

As we’ll see, varying our application of each of these considerations can help lead to subtle or not so subtle contrast as we progress through our songs. We should always bear these things in mind and let them shape our decision-making processes when we start playing through chords that we think are worth pursuing.

Repeating them has benefits, but so does varying them.

THE CHORDS

As I expect you are already aware, there are common chord progressions that are continually used in hundreds of different songs. Just two examples are I, ii, IV, V

and vi, IV, I, V. Rather than reading my attempt at naming them all, your time would be much better spent listening for them yourself. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and to continually use the same progressions from song to song. Do you find yourself doing that? One of the best ways out of this situation is to listen to progressions found nestling in other songs that you like and go right ahead and steal them. No one will know. It’s very unlikely that a chord progression is unique to just one song, and if, when you have appropriated it, you find that it is still a bit similar to where you nabbed it from, simply change the key or the harmonic pulse or harmonic rhythm.

This technique will always help us get somewhere new, and almost everybody does it, so don’t feel bad about it. Once you have adopted that sequence and added it to your harmonic vocabulary, you can go on the hunt for others. Finding and experimenting with new progressions is one of the most immediately rewarding parts of songwriting. Something as simple as placing two different chords in sequence for the first time can really get the creative juices flowing.

If you would rather not appropriate someone else’s ideas, an alternative place to start is to think about the harmonic function of the chords you want to use. We have already looked at the tonic, subdominant, dominant, and borrowed nature of different chords in or out of a family, and we can purposefully call on their character to achieve the flavor of progression we are after. For example, if we are at the point of wanting to write a chord sequence for a pre-chorus, we could purposefully start away from the tonal center on a chord with a subdominant function, such as chord ii, and we could then end that section with a chord with a dominant function,

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such as chord V, to draw on its tendency to point back home to chord I. It’s for this reason that so many pre-choruses start with a subdominant chord and end with a dominant one on their way to a chorus. Obviously, the same kind of reasoning and methodical approach can be applied to sequences in other sections of songs, too.

Another route forward is to think about the notes in our melody and think about which chords will hold those notes up most effectively. This is the technique that we will pursue in this chapter because it is where we can really get the brain cells whipped into action. Along with considerations of harmonic function, we should always remember that chords have to share the stage with the melodic tones. If something clashes and sounds nasty, then something has to give at some point. It’s up to us whether the melody or chord will have to change, but in the context of this chapter we’re focusing our attention on harmony, so we will look at how to adjust a chord progression to fit with a fixed melody. So then, on to business.

How Many Progressions and How We Use Them

One section of a song doesn’t have to equate to just one repeated chord sequence.

We can incorporate variation and use more than one progression per section if we feel like it, especially if the section is relatively long and would benefit from some variety. Have you ever really thought about that? Do you find that most of the sections in your songs are built with the same pattern of repeated sequences? If not, then good for you. If yes, then I’m glad to have brought it to your attention. If we incorporate more than one sequence, it’s generally best not to use any more than two. This ensures that there is enough variation to be interesting, but not so much that it sounds like it’s too many ideas in a short space. Feel free to ignore that advice if you so chose, but it is usually a safe guideline to follow.

Figure 13.1 shows some examples of the different ways we can incorporate sequence variation into the way we build our song sections. They all feature the employment of just two chord sequences.

Figure 13.1

Sequence

variation.

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New Section, New Sequence

In addition to considering more than one sequence within one section, we can (and obviously should) think about using more than one progression for different sections, too. Like melodies, chord sequences don’t get better as they get more involved and complicated. It is perfectly possible to write a great song using just two or three chords. Don’t ever believe otherwise, because you would be wrong.

It is true that some genres tend to feature more chords than others, but that doesn’t mean there is anything unaccomplished about writing a song with just two alternating chords. In fact, writing a harmonically simple song that works really well is very difficult and indicative of a great deal of ability. We don’t have to chuck every chord we know at a song to make it better. Doing the complete opposite is often the best way forward.

That said, a new section does tend to be marked by a new progression unless the melody above it is doing something particularly new and interesting. It can consist of the same chords from the previous section in a different order, but the progression will be different enough to mark it out as a change. I, IV, V can become IV, V, I, for example, and this highlights another key point that we should look at here.

The chord that each section starts on is very significant. It sets the context of the following chords and dictates whether they are working their way away from home or toward it. If the verse starts at home on the tonic, for example, then the following chords will be a journey away (unless the tonic repeats, of course). If it starts away from home (on any other chord), then the chords are always going to be held in tension with their relationship with home and will always be working their way toward it, even if they don’t actually ever get there.

In addition to contributing to a sense of journey, the order and placement of chords can also generate immediate contrast to what has gone before. Do you find that some of your songs have sections that aren’t particularly distinct? If that is the case, investigate whether they tend to start on the same chord. If they do, it won’t help you create contrast from section to section.

A lot of urban songs currently (at the time of writing) feature the same repeating four- or eight-bar sequence throughout, with the usual exception of the middle section, and they don’t suffer for it because the arrangement and melody are working hard to create interest in other ways. There’s nothing wrong with continually repeating chord sequences from section to section, but it is at least worth thinking about changing them from time to time. Obviously, we also need to consider the genre and what is going on within other layers and parameters, but using a new sequence to mark the beginning of a new section is a good way to immediately contrast what has gone before, especially if the first chord is different than the first chord of the previous section.

HARMONIC PULSE

Have you ever paid much attention to the duration you give each of the chords in your songs, and do you find that each chord tends to be held for the same amount of time? If you find that you aren’t guilty of this one, that’s great, but plenty of us are. We can get so hung up on thinking about how we change the tonality of the chords we use that we don’t stop to think about how we use them rhythmically.

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There is no rule that chords have to be held for the same amount of time within or across each song section. Remember what we discovered about the significance of note duration in melodies back in Problem 6? The same principles apply to the amount of time that we hold chords for. A chord held for a relatively long period of time next to those that surround it will be perceived as slowing the relative pace at that moment. Similarly, a chord that is held for a comparatively brief amount of time will seem to ramp up the pace. One chord per measure will seem quick after one chord every four measures, but slow after one chord every beat. Revisit the

“Character of Note Duration” section in Problem 6 if any of this seems like a distant memory. Figure 13.2 should also help clarify things. Notice that Examples 1

and 2 are the same progression. They feature the same chords in the same order.

The only difference is in the harmonic pulse. Example 3 steps up the pulse all the more noticeably through a more intense distinction between the relative length of each chord’s appearance.

Figure 13.2

Harmonic

pulse.

We can and should use these adjustments to relative pace to our advantage within sections or from section to section. For example, if we have a verse that is immediately followed by a chorus, and we want that chorus to sound the more lively of the two, we don’t have to adjust the beats per minute (bpm). We can simply adjust the harmonic pulse and make the chorus change chords more frequently. This will help create contrast, too. Similarly, we can accelerate or decelerate the relative pace within sections if we feel like it. Suppose, for example, that we want our pre-chorus to get more excited in anticipation of the chorus as it progresses. In addition to choosing chords that provide the harmonic function to create that tension tonally, we can also gradually increase the harmonic pulse to accentuate the effect.

We have already discussed how different layers of a song should support rather than compete with each other, and that principle applies here, too. In addition to considering how we can adjust the relative pace, we should also bear in mind that a busy harmony and melody both vying for the listener’s attention won’t do each other any favors. For this reason, it is a good idea to support a busy melody with a simpler and less cluttered harmony, and a slow-flowing melody will usually benefit from a chord progression that chops and changes a bit more with a relatively lively harmonic pulse. Listen to some of your songs. How do they do in this department? Have you intentionally used harmonic pulse to your advantage?

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HARMONIC RHYTHM

Beyond considerations of how frequently we change the chords we use, we can also think about the rhythm in which we play them. We can accentuate different beats in the measure to generate a different feel from section to section—and within each section if we want to. It’s a simple change to make, but purposefully employing different rhythmic patterns on top of the same bpm can make a big difference to the feel and can help generate contrast.

In Figure 13.3, we can see an example of different rhythms being applied to different sections of a song. Even if just one chord was voiced throughout, the contrast created by this variation in harmonic rhythm would be enough to make these sections distinct. In this particular example, each section lasts for four measures and the verse and chorus employ different accents on the beat whereas the pre-chorus employs off beat accentuations, too. It’s a very simple idea, but can work wonders if we employ it carefully and appropriately. Do you vary the rhythmic pattern of the chords you write from section to section? It’s not a must by any means, but it is another device that we shouldn’t forget in our quest to make things as interesting as possible.

Figure 13.3

Harmonic rhythm.

COMBINING THESE TOOLS FOR VARIATION

We can combine all of these approaches to create contrast however we like. For example, we can stay with just one chord progression throughout the song and vary its appearance from section to section through harmonic pulse, through harmonic rhythm, or through both. Alternatively, we can have the same harmonic pulse with a different sequence of chords or harmonic rhythm from section to section, or we can have the same harmonic rhythm with a different harmonic pulse and/or chords, and so on.

We can vary the degree of subtlety, too. The more variation we include in one go, the more dramatic the shift will be. For example, if we keep the same harmonic rhythm and pulse and just change the sequence, it won’t be as bold as changing the harmonic pulse at the same time. Adding a change of harmonic rhythm into the mix at the same time too will make the change in harmonic support even more noticeable. We need to think carefully about how we employ our combinations and variations of chord progression, harmonic pulse, and harmonic rhythm.

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OTHER WAYS TO GENERATE CONTRAST

In addition to these considerations, we can also think about how we might want to add or subtract chords from section to section. This technique provides us with a good way to generate variation without completely changing the sequence. For example, we could take the sequence of C, Dm, F, and G from one section in a song and subtract a chord or two to vary it for the next. In this example, this simple technique could lead to a sequence of C, Dm (subtracting two chords off the end), or C, F, G (subtracting one from the middle). Alternatively, we could add a chord or two, and here we have the choice of whether we want to add a chord that has already featured in the sequence or to add something completely new. With the example we already have on the go, we could add another appearance of the Dm after the F so we get C, Dm, F, Dm, G, or we could add something new, such as an Am that could lead us to C, Dm, F, Am, G or any other order we fancy. If we decide to add a new chord, we could always add in a borrowed chord, too. The employment of a borrowed chord in this sequence could leave us with C, D, F, G, for example.

We can add contrast by using slash chords or pedal notes here as well. This means that we can get the benefits of variation creating contrast while maintaining a degree of repetition by employing the same chords, just voiced differently. If we keep with the example of C, Dm, F, G in one section, we could follow it with something like C/E, Dm/F, F/A, G/B to create some subtle variation.

Of all the chords that we can use, we should not forget the option of chord substitutions, too. Using them can make our sequences more colorful, interesting, and most importantly, unique. However, we should not just substitute at will, allowing ourselves to forget the harmonic function of each of the chords in the diatonic system. A chord may theoretically support a melodic movement, but it may not serve the harmonic function that we need it to. This tends to be most evident at the end of melodic phrases. It’s generally desirable to finish a melodic line with a harmonic indication that it is finished, or that it is about to finish when it resolves to the final chord in a second or two. Chord V or IV is so often found at the end of melodic lines for this reason. Their cadential significance (as discussed in the previous chapter) points us back to the tonic. If an ambitious voyage through Substitution City leads us to a borrowed chord that is effectively in harmonic no man’s land at the end, then we will be left with the harmonic equivalent of asking,

“What’s the point?”

The point is this: As well as writing chords that support a melody, we also need to write them so that they strike a balance between sounding interesting and serving a solid harmonic function. We have lots of tools and devices at our disposal, and we should keep them all close so we can call on them as they fit the bill. Being constantly aware of them and prepared to try them will only help us write more effective progressions.

Harmonizing a Melody

If we look at harmony as the background of a painting in which the melody is the focal point, then it follows that a different background will place the focal point in a different context. For example, a C note on a C Major chord will sound comfortable and very self-assured because it is the root note, but over an F# Major

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chord, it will sound dissonant because it doesn’t fit into the chord and is a semitone flat of its fifth. Play it, and you will hear it in action.

If we apply this understanding to the way that lots of popular song chord progressions are built, we can see why so many songs work with melodies that repeat just the same note or sequence of notes over and over again. These repetitions maintain interest because of the new context that each new supporting chord brings them. Figure 13.4 shows a very simple outworking of this principle in practice, with various different chords painting a C in a new light. Over the C, the note is the root as already established. Over the Gm(add4), it is the 4th. Over the F, it is the 5th, and over the D7, it is the 7th.

Figure 13.4

Changing harmony providing a

repeating note with new context.

Not all chords will provide a melodic note with any kind of support, and of all the theoretically correct chords that do, not all of them will provide it to the same level. If we stick with our C note as an example, we can see and hopefully hear that over a C Major, it’s the root of that chord and sounds very strong. How about over an Eb6? There, it is the 6th of that chord, and although it is welcome to an extent, it’s not at the hub of the action. In being Note 6 in the chord, it contributes more in the way of character and color than confidence. What about a B(b9)? There it acts as the chord’s alteration and draws attention to itself by adding a lot of harmonic color and sounding as if it really wants to get out of there. This “get me out of here” quality leads us to something significant: movement.

MAKING AN UNCONFIDENT NOTE SOUND SECURE

We have already seen how a lack of confidence results in a note wanting to resolve and to move somewhere safer, and just as the position of a note in a scale can dictate its degree of tonal confidence, so too can any chord that underpins it. For example, let’s assume that we are still in the key of C Major and we play a D note.

That D is Note 2 in the scale, on Tier 4 of our tonal confidence hierarchy, and therefore it is fairly short on confidence. If we feature it in a melody over a C chord (C E G), its lack of confidence is clear for all to hear. Although the D in this instance could be regarded as the 2nd or 9th in the chord and therefore just there to add harmonic character, we are looking at it in light of how it would sound in a melody, and in this role its lack of confidence results in it sounding like it wants to move somewhere else.

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However, what if we support it with a triad that belongs in the harmonic family of C Major but that includes the note D in it? We have three options if we try this.

We can use the Dm (where D is the 1st), the G (where D is the 5th), or the B˚

(where D is the 3rd). Try it. What we get here is the D being supported by the chord that underpins it. It’s as if it has stepped out, making a stand away from the tonal center, and has been joined by some mates looking over its shoulder and giving moral support. The underpinning chords are not as confident as they could be (none are the tonic or serve a tonic function in this example), but they do provide some temporary support for that note. It’s for this reason that we will refer to this sort of harmonic support as providing the melodic note with temporary implied confidence. Both the melodic note and the chord want to resolve, but by standing together in mutual support, they find temporary confidence to stand their ground. By being supported by a chord that holds it up, a melodic tone with little confidence will be bolstered enough to hang around longer than it otherwise would.

MAKING A CONFIDENT NOTE SOUND UNSURE

So, that deals with how we can give an unconfident note some temporary support.

What about where we have a note that is tonally confident in the scale (Note 1, 3, or 5), but we want to make it sound less confident? We can do that too, by underpinning it with a chord that doesn’t share its confidence. Let’s say, for example, that we are still in the key of C Major and that our melody is now on note G.

That’s a confident note. It’s the 5th in the scale and is on Tier 2 of our tonal confidence hierarchy. We could place a C Major chord beneath it, and this would provide the G with a strong, confident platform (because G is the 5th in the chord).

How about a Dm (chord ii), though? It’s a family chord, but the G doesn’t feature in it so it sounds like something needs to move. Harmonically speaking, we could just consider the G in this scenario to be adding some color to the Dm by adding a 4th or 11th into the equation. However, in its role as a melodic note, it sounds like it wants to resolve (to note F or the A), and it’s this implied need for movement that we’re interested in here. It’s not that the G sounds dissonant, because it doesn’t. It’s more that the Dm beneath it makes the G contribute more in the way of character and color than it otherwise would.

The same principle applies to chords such as F (IV) and Am (VI). What is actually happening here is that the G is being employed as an extension to the chord.

For example, a G in an Am minor chord would act as the 7th and create an Am7

chord. The fact that it is a common extension means that it fits okay and doesn’t sound dissonant, but melodically it will not sound as sure-footed as it could, certainly compared to what it would sound like if it resolved up to the note A. Again, the harmonic support in this scenario is robbing the G note of some of its natural confidence and forcing it to contribute more in the way of character and color than it usually would.

What all this does is provide us with what we can refer to as a temporary implied character. The note itself may be confident according to the tonal center of the song, but that confidence and strength can be temporarily questioned, and the note can be made to contribute more in the way of color and character than it otherwise might. The fact that a melodic note is confident in the context of the key doesn’t mean that we can’t generate movement around it by using chords that are less confident.

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Melody and harmony work together, but they can independently generate the need to move and resolve. We should always bear this in mind when we are choosing our chords. They have to strike a balance between generating support and movement.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO WITH ALL THIS KNOWLEDGE?

Because we are working through this example with a melody already in place, it makes sense to start deciding how we want to support each of the notes in it. They will all have their own natural degree of tonal confidence, but as we have just seen, we can accentuate or play down that confidence and replace it with implied character through the chords that we place under them. Rather than working through each note at a time, it also makes sense to initially focus on the pillar notes. Have a look at Figure 13.5. Here we have the harmonization of a simple two-measure melody in 4/4 with the two confident pillar notes C and G (1st and 5th in the scale of C Major), separated by the three passing notes, D, E, and F (notes 2, 3, and 4

in the key).

Figure 13.5

Pillar notes and supporting harmony.

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I have purposefully picked a really easy melody to make it as clear as possible to follow, but the only way to fully appreciate all of this is to listen to each example.

If you play and sing them, you should be able to hear how each of the two chords in each sequence varies the levels of confidence of the pillar notes that sit on top of them. Where a note loses confidence, it gains character and vice versa. For example, the first example of the chords C Major to G Major give the accompanying pillar notes of C and G a very confident grounding. The C is the 1st and root in the underpinning chord of C Major, and the G is the 1st in the chord of G Major that supports it at the start of the second measure.

Further down the examples, we can hear the C Major to F Major progression giving the G note a less confident base as it sits on the F chord, contributing the extension of a 9th to that chord. The F chord doesn’t make the G sound dissonant, but it does compel it to contribute more character and make it sound less sure-footed than it otherwise might, certainly compared to how it sounds when it resolves to the F or the A on either side of it. Various options have been included here, including a few extended and borrowed chords. Play each of them and try to assess whether you feel the need to hear resolution. It really is the best way to get a handle on this thing. Pause on each of the pillar notes (the C and the G) and question whether they sound like they would sound more comfortable and confident if they resolved. They all vary slightly in how they seem to suggest the need for movement.

Notice that although we are appraising these sequences with regard to how confident and resolved they make the pillar notes sound, there are a few sequences in here that raise an issue with the passing notes involved. Take the progression right at the bottom of the graphic as an example. What we have here is a C over an Ab chord, which is confident because the C is the 3rd of A b, leading to a G over a C chord, which is also confident because the G is the 5th of the C chord. The issue lies in how the passing notes in between the pillar notes of C and G clash with the A b chord. It means playing an E natural note over an E b note in the chord of A b in the first measure. In theory, this clash should really stick out and sound plain nasty, but in reality, these passing notes don’t sound that bad. The reason why this is the case is purely down to their rhythmic placement. The theoretically clashing notes in this example (the E and the Eb) both make their concurrent appearance between metric stress points, and therefore on nonstressed divisions of the meter.

Their positions aren’t prominent in the measure, and they therefore pass by relatively off-radar.

A clash isn’t easy to define. We could say that we should avoid melodic notes in chords that are a semitone apart, but that clash may actually create tension that helps propel the melody forward, so we can’t rule that out. As we have just seen, a lot depends on the rhythmic placement and length of the notes involved. If the clash occurs on a weak subdivision of a meter and doesn’t last long enough to get clocked at a more prominent stress point, then we will generally get away with it, especially when there is a resolution to a confident note immediately afterward.

Just listen to what you have, and you’ll know whether it works. Always let your ear make the final decisions. Every now and again something will sound great, and it’s really hard to try to figure out why. Breaking the rules sometimes gets the best results, and there’s nothing wrong with that when it comes to marrying chords and melodies.

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A Case Study

Let’s put all of this into practice, shall we? We have our lyrics and melody for

“Easier Done Than Said” in the bag, so now it’s time to put some harmonic background into the picture to provide some context. Figure 13.6 details the first half of the verse melody with an assortment of different chord progressions that could support it. We won’t go any further than analyzing the verse here. It provides us with plenty of food for thought.

Figure 13.6

Some harmonic options for the verse of “Easier Done Than Said.”

Although there are plenty of other options available, I have chosen to list these five options for the variety that they offer. We have a basic diatonic progression, a more minor approach drawing on the relative minor of D (Bm) to provide a more somber context, some slash chords, and a couple of sequences that include some variation in the harmonic pulse. All of these progressions work. None of them sounds wrong, and they all add their own degree of color to the proceedings.

If we’d like, we can just select our progression on these grounds, but we’re going to endeavor to be intelligent and to apply some of the logic that came out of the previous 5,000 words in this chapter. We’re going to assess exactly what is going on in the verse with regard to implied tonal confidence and character as each of the chords adds new context to the notes dancing on top of it.

Starting with the first example here in Figure 13.7, let me give some explanation as to exactly what is going on here. We can see the Melodic Tones row detailing the position that the note in question has in the key of the song (D Major, in this case).

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The next row details the chord progression under scrutiny in this example, and the third and final row details the position each of the melodic notes holds in the scale of the chord that is underpinning them. For example, the D note at the start of the fifth measure is note 1 on the first row because it’s the 1st and root in the key of D major. However, it’s the 7th of the Em chord that underpins it in this example and is therefore notated as a 7 on the bottom row. Got it? The pillar notes are marked as bold on the piano roll for clarity.

Figure 13.7

Implied melodic confidence and character in the first half of the first verse in “Easier Done Than Said.”

It’s actually a lot quicker to just think or sing it through without writing it down or drawing fancy diagrams, but I’m afraid that we don’t have much option in a book! The final thing to explain is the use of parentheses around some notes. For example, notice that the F# at the end of the third measure is a 3 that then quickly becomes a bracketed 7. This is because that note is held over a D at first (over which it is the 3rd), but this chord changes to a G (of which it is the 7th) without the melodic note changing. Parentheses are used to highlight where a shift in chord under one note changes its implied confidence or character. Hopefully we’re good to go on now.

We will only concern ourselves with pillar notes here, and the first of these is the B over the D chord. It is the 6th over this chord, so it’s not as confident as it could be, but neither is it dissonant—it does just enough to make the melody want to move on a bit, which it duly does.

The second pillar note is the F#, which is the 3rd in the key of D major, and therefore relatively confident. However, here it is over an A chord that gives this normally confident note a temporary implied character that it wouldn’t usually have as it becomes an implied 6th. It therefore generates the need for movement and resolution. The next pillar note is the B over a D chord again, which creates a touch of tension as it did in the first measure. The next three pillar notes are in a row (F#, E, and D), and where they would normally be notes 3, 2, and 1 in the key

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of D Major, the chords that underpin them give them far less confidence. They temporarily become the 7th, 6th, and 7th, respectively, and this insecurity drives the melody further onward in its pursuit of resolution. It’s not until the end of the melodic line that it comes with the F# acting as the 3rd of the final chord, which also happens to be the key of the song, D Major.

So, that’s what we get if we assess the implied confidence and character of different notes in the verse, but obviously, we can look at the chords we use in other ways. If we think about the harmonic function in this section, for example, we can see that it follows the pattern T, D, T, S, S, D, T, D (where T = tonic function, D =

dominant function, and S = subdominant function). There are a few significant things to observe here. The first has to do with the harmonic function of the chords that start and end the section. It starts on the tonic, and this means that the progression therefore begins at home and then moves away. It also finishes on a dominant chord, and this leaves the progression with a strong cadence point at the end.

Another thing to consider is the amount of time the progression spends on each type of chord. There’s a pretty even share in this particular example, with the tonic and dominant sharing a slight territorial dominance over the subdominant chords (with three measures each), but along with this, it’s also worth noting that the only two consecutive chords to share a harmonic function are the two subdominant chords (the G and the Em, chords IV and ii, respectively) in the middle. This means that, harmonically speaking, the halfway point of the section is the furthest from home, and this gives the section a sense of harmonic journey. If we think about the harmonic pulse as well, we can see that the chords each occupy one measure. It’s very steady, with no pace variation trickery at work.

All of this observation is all very well, but it’s only really of any use to us if we use it to compare the progression to another alternative. Let’s try another from the list of options in Figure 13.6. See Figure 13.8.

Figure 13.8

Alternative implied melodic confidence and character in the first half of the first verse in “Easier Done Than Said.”

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Here we have Example 3 featuring some slash chords, and we can see the same sort of thing happening. The first pillar note (the B) is the 6th in the key of D major, but here it has the temporary implied confidence of a 3rd over the G that underpins it. The second pillar note (the F#) becomes the 6th of the A chord placed beneath it. It would naturally be a relatively confident 3rd in the key of the song, but this temporary implied character thrust upon it by the A chord generates momentum and kicks the melody forward nicely as a result. The Bm chord that underpins the next pillar note (the B in the third measure) sets the melody off with a temporarily implied confident 1st before it is followed by an implied 6th, 2nd, and 5th over the A, D, and G chords, respectively. The D that sits on the G chord at the start of the fifth measure is an interesting one, because although the D is the root of the song and is the 5th of the G chord that underpins it at this point, it still sounds a little unresolved. On this occasion, though, it’s not the note’s position in the supporting chord that is the issue, it’s the harmonic function of the chord. We have to appreciate that the harmonic function of chords will always play their part in dictating how a harmonic progression will and won’t work.

So, if we now look in more detail at the harmonic function in this progression, we can see that it’s very different than what is found in Example 1. Example 3

follows the pattern S, D, T, D, T, S, D, T, D, T (where T = tonic function, D = dominant function, and S = subdominant function). Obvious differences between this and Example 1 are that this progression starts on a chord with a subdominant function. This makes a massive difference to the feel of the progression in that it starts away from home and has to work its way back from the very start. We can also note that there are no two chords in a row that share a harmonic function.

That’s a significant difference, too. In addition to this, we can also observe that there is variation in the harmonic pulse where Measures 4 and 8 include two chords, and the remaining six measures just include one. There are a few significant differences between the two progressions we have looked at so far, and it’s always wise to try various progressions like this to make sure we get our harmony doing what we want it to do.

For a more purposeful variation in the role of harmonic pulse, compare the two examples conveniently named “Varied Harmonic Pulse 1 and 2” (Examples 4 and 5) in Figure 13.6. It’s easy to see here that the progression in Example 4 is considerably busier and therefore perceived as being quicker than the one in Example 5.

Example 4 includes two chords in almost every measure, whereas Example 5 doesn’t change chord at all for the first four measures, and this has a significant effect on the feel of the melody and the perceived pace of the song. Whereas the progression in Example 4 doesn’t change pace (with the exception of that fact that its first measure includes just one chord), the progression in Example 5 has a considerably stronger sense of waiting around before beginning to move with a bit more urgency when the harmonic function of the chords change in the fifth measure.

Another way of appraising or creating a chord sequence is to consider the role of cadences in generating movement and progression. In Example 4 from Figure 13.6, for example, we can see the ii – V – I progression and secondary dominants at work in the second measure (C# to F# to B) and in the fourth measure (A to D

to G). If we compare the way this progression works to Example 3 in the same figure (13.6), we can observe that Example 3 features no ii – V – I movements and only includes two perfect cadences (between the A/C# and D in Measures 4 and 8).

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Example 3 is considerably more dependent on step motion between the chords than the power of the V – I relationship in moving it forward.

Different types of cadences will achieve different things for us. If we have another look at Example 4 in Figure 13.5, and more specifically at Measures 6 and 7

within that progression, we can see an Em7 and an A7 setting up a D (as chord ii and chord V), but here we get an interrupted cadence rather than the perfect cadence that we might be expecting. In this particular example, this cadence serves the harmony really well in taking a minor detour through the last two measures of the section before it can repeat again.

There really is a lot to consider when it comes to writing harmonic progressions, and many writers have many different approaches. Sometimes a chord progression will be governed by consideration of harmonic function. Sometimes it will be more centered around giving melodic tones more or less implied confidence or character.

Sometimes it will come as the result of focusing primarily on harmonic pulse or harmonic rhythm issues. Sometimes it will appear through a theoretical outworking of cadences, and sometimes it will just seem to show up without us thinking about it at all! However we arrive at it, we need to remember that all our harmonic endeavors need to complement each other. There is no use in constructing a theoretically marvelous secondary dominant parade if it is going to clash with the melody, for example. Similarly, we need to consider implications of harmonic function when we are considering adjusting the implied tonal confidence or character of notes in the melody. Employing a borrowed chord might seem clever, but it can also wreck the flow and purpose of harmonic support in doing so if we aren’t careful.

We could go on for days assessing all these things, but these examples have served their purpose, so we will now draw to a close. The final thing to include here is to again reiterate that a chord sequence isn’t necessarily better for including more chords, more variation in stress pattern, more variation in employment of chords serving different harmonic functions, or more of anything else, for that matter. It can be easy to regard a complicated progression as superior to a simple one, but that is not necessarily the case. Making things complex for the sake of being clever will very rarely be a good idea when it comes to writing harmonic progressions. If simple is right, then simple is best. Simple.

In all of these songwriting considerations, use your ears. They are what really count at the end. Even if you can’t quite figure out why something works, if it sounds right, go with it. You can always try to figure it out later….

Solution: Learn to Appreciate the Context That Harmony

Gives a Melody

Here we have some simple harmonic exercises to work through that should help you put some of this theory into practice.

PART 1: HARMONIZE A MELODY

For starters, pick a song of your own or one of someone else’s that has a strong melody for you to work with. When you have done that, devise three chord sequences each for two different sections of that song. In other words, write three

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different chord progressions for the verse and then another three for the chorus or any other sections you fancy. One must be purely diatonic, one must include at least two borrowed chords, and one must include at least two extensions.

PART 2: EXPERIMENT WITH PERCEIVED CONFIDENCE AND CHARACTER

Work with just one of your progressions from Part 1, and purposefully interfere with the implied confidence or character of different notes in the melody by adjusting the chords that sit under them. You are not allowed to change the melody. It’s the chords that need to do the work in this exercise! Identify which notes are and aren’t confident in the first place, and then experiment with various notes and see how you can adjust the implied momentum by changing the harmonic support. If, for example, the first note is confident, try decreasing that confidence so the melody starts on the move. If it starts on an insecure note, then try to give it some harmonic support so that its desire to move is temporarily quashed.

PART 3: EXPERIMENT WITH THE PACE OF THE HARMONY

Revisit the progressions that you wrote for Part 1 and pick out the progression with the fewest chord changes. Now, without changing the nature or placement of any of the chords themselves, see whether you can increase the perceived harmonic pace of the section by adding additional chords. When you have done that, select the chord progression that initially had the fastest harmonic pulse, and try to slow it down by removing some chords.

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References

Appendix

Chapter 1

1. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 49.

2. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 152.

3. “Death Cab for Cutie Gets Analog in a Digital Age.” By John D. Luerssen. American Songwriter magazine. Mar/Apr 2008. Vol. 23. Pg. 62.

4. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 85.

5. “Travelling Star.” By Graham Hazelwood. Acoustic magazine. Apr/May 2008. Issue 21.

Pg. 17.

6. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 409.

7. “Travelling Star.” By Graham Hazelwood. Acoustic magazine. Apr/May 2008. Issue 21.

Pg. 17.

8. “Daniel Lanois: Fighter for the Spirit.” By David McPherson. American Songwriter magazine. Mar/Apr 2008. Vol. 23. Pg. 43.

9. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 23.

10. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 16.

11. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 205.

12. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 10.

13. “Death Cab for Cutie Gets Analog in a Digital Age.” By John D. Luerssen. American Songwriter magazine. Mar/Apr 2008. Vol. 23. Pg. 62.

14. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 22.

15. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 128.

16. “Daniel Lanois: Fighter for the Spirit.” By David McPherson. American Songwriter magazine. Mar/Apr 2008. Vol. 23. Pg. 42.

17. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 412.

18. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 164.

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19. “Heart of the Country, Home of the Hits.” By Ben Thompson. The Observer.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1262249,00.html. 18 July 2004.

20. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 163.

21. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 611.

22. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 169.

Chapter 2

1. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 326.

2. “Travelling Star.” By Graham Hazelwood. Acoustic magazine. Apr/May 2008. Issue 21.

Pg. 18.

3. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 152.

4. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 333.

5. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 296.

6. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 135.

7. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 126.

8. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 47.

9. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 46.

10. And Then I Wrote. Edited by Tom Russell and Sylvia Tyson. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996. Pg. 11.

Chapter 3

1. Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting. By Jimmy Webb. New York: Hyperion. 1999.

Pg 128.

2. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 144.

3. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 365.

4. Song: The World’s Best Songwriters on Creating the Music that Moves Us. Edited by J. Douglas Waterman. Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books. 2007. Pg 13.

Chapter 4

1. Songwriters on Songwriting. By Paul Zollo. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Pg. 204.

Index

A

audience

breadth of appeal, 51–53

A-Ha, 72

depth of appeal, 51–53

A harmonic minor chords, 290

editing for, 84–85

A major scale, note numbers for, 119–120

good songs, deciding on, 43–44

A natural minor scale, 115–116

melody of song and, 94–95

acoustic, 217

sections in songs and, 61

Adams, Bryan, 34

writing for, 46–48

adaptability in lyrics, 174

audiomap.tuneglue.net, 44

add2 chords, 302

augmented chords, 286

add9 chords, 302–303

additive rhyme, 231

Aeolian mode, 118

B

Aeolian chords, 290

Bacharach, Burt, 17, 26

agogic accents, 222

on melody, 94

Alice in Chains, 44

on sections, 80

“All About Soul” (Joel), 80–81

Back to Bedlam (Blunt), 52

“All About Your Love,” 177–178, 181

Backstreet Boys, 32

“All Fall Down” (Cope), 233

bad songs, dealing with, 17–18

alliteration, 189, 231

bagpipes, 217

alterations

balance, 86–88

to chords, 302–303

in rhyme, 233–235

for secondary dominant chords, 306

in sections, 64–66

amazon.com, 44

in verses, 69

Amen cadence, 294

well-balanced songs, 9

amphibrach, 217

bars. See measures

amphimacer, 217

bashing heads approach to collaboration, 26

anacrusis, 265

bass guitar, 217

anadiplosis, 206–207, 213

bass line, inversions and, 298

analyzing songs, 12

bassoon, 217

anapaest/anapest, 217

beat, 139

anaphora, 207, 213

insecure beat, 145

“And So It Goes” (Joel), 80–81

metric stress and, 141–144

Anka, Paul, 50

missed beats, 152–153

“Another Girl” (The Beatles), 77

and rhyme, 232

antimetabole, 209

The Beatles

antonyms, dictionaries of, 188

“Hey Jude,” 58, 77

A&R persons

intros in songs by, 77

factors affecting decisions, 41–42

malapropisms, use of, 210

good songs, deciding on, 37–38

varied pace, use of, 151

arch contour, 269

bedroom players, 57

arrangements

Ben Folds Five, 72

melody and, 105

Bergman, Alan, 68

quality of, 32

Bergman, Marilyn, 68

art, songwriting as, 8

binary feet, 217

artist and repertoire (A&R) persons. See A&R persons pyrrhic foot, 221–222

association, power of, 32–35

in rhyme, 234

assonance, 230

bland songs, 52–53

329

330

R I G H T I N G W R O N G S I N W R I T I N G S O N G S

Blunt, James, 52

basic chords, building, 285–290

The Bodyguard, 34

borrowed chords, 303–308

“Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen), 58

contrast, generating, 315

borrowed chords, 303–308

diatonic chords, 287

bpm (beats per minute), 139, 141

diminished chords, 286

brainstorming for lyrics, 241–242

“Easier Done Than Said” case study, 320–324

breadth of appeal, 51–53

extensions, 299–302

breaks in songs. See sections in songs

fifths and, 123–124

breves, 146

harmonic function and, 295–296

bridge, 55

harmonic pulse, 312–313

“Bridge over Troubled Water” (Simon), 7

harmonic rhythm, 310, 314

Brown, James, 104

inversions, 297–298

Browne, Jackson, 8, 24

major chords, 285–286

melody and, 104–105, 309

C

minor chords, 285–286

naming techniques, 287–288

C major

progressions, use of, 311

cadences in, 293

relationships of, 308

diatonic triads, 287

relative minor chords, 288–289

inversions in, 297

repetition of, 310–315

secondary dominant chords, 306

secondary dominant chords, 305–308

triad, 286

sections and progressions, 312

C major scale, 110, 137

sequence variation, 311–312

guises for, 111

slash chords, 297–298

intervals on, 121

substitution of, 304–305

natural tone resolutions, 126

triads, 285–286

note numbers for, 119–120

variation

tonal confidence tiers in, 125

combining tools for, 314

cadence, 293–295

sequence variation, 311–312

Cycle of Fifths, 294–295

voice leading, 298

in “Easier Done Than Said,” 323–324

chorus, 55, 66–68

interrupted cadence, 294

accessibility of, 67

perfect cadence, 293–294

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 247–248,

plagal cadence, 294

251, 281

cajon, 217

and lyrics, 178–179

“Candle in the Wind” (John & Taupin), 35

middle sections followed by, 74

“Can’t Buy Me Love” (The Beatles), 77

chromatic scale, 110–112. See also tonal confidence

“A Case of You” (Mitchell), 162, 218

descending intervals, 122

catchiness of melody, 100

intervals applied to, 121

catharsis, writing as, 47

pitches in, 112

causes, writing for, 50

Cilmi, Gabriella, 44

CDs, length of songs and, 58

cinquains, 162

cello, 217

Circle of Fifths, 290–297

character

cadence and, 293–295

of note duration, 150–152

clarity in lyrics, 170

pillar notes and, 271

Clearmountain, Bob, 32

temporary implied character, 317–318

clichés in lyrics, using, 209–210

tonal confidence and, 128

clocking in, 155–156

chiasmus, 208

“Close Enough” (Cope), 169, 174–175

chords. See also cadence; Circle of Fifths; diatonic close harmony, 301

chords; slash chords

club DJs. See DJs

6th chords, 302

co-writing, 25–27

7th chords, 299, 306–307

models of, 26–27

9th chords, 300–301

codas, 78

11th chords, 300–301

Cohen, Leonard, 46

13th chords, 300–301

collaborative writing. See co-writing

add2 chords, 302

commercials and association, 35

alterations, 302–303

communication, writing for, 50

augmented chords, 286

I N D E X

331

complementary layers, 9–10

dictionaries, 188

“Complicated” (Lavigne), 221

rhyming dictionaries, 188, 235

compositional editing, 83

diminished chords, 286

concert pitch, 6

diminished intervals, 121

concurrent pieces of song, 1–2

direct routes for pillar/passing notes, 277–279

confidence. See also tonal confidence

The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes

in harmonic function, 296

(Parsons), 129

and metric stress, 144–146

disc jockeys. See DJs

pillar notes and, 271

dissonance and chords, 300

connotations in lyrics, 187

divisions in songs. See sections in songs

consecutive pieces of song, 1–2

DJs

consonance, 231

factors affecting decisions, 42

construction of songs, 7–8

good songs, deciding on, 40–41

context of lyrics, 167–168

predicting sales, 44–45

contours, 268–271

dominant 7 chords, 299

importance of, 270–271

dominant chords, 123, 289, 299. See also Circle of Cope, Danny. See also “Easier Done Than Said”

Fifths

(Cope)

secondary dominant chords, 305–308

“All Fall Down,” 233

dominant fifths, 123

“Close Enough,” 169, 174–175

Dorian scales, 118–119

“I Need to Be with You” (Cope), 131, 134, 158

dotted notes, 147–150

“Right Here with You,” 259

double bass, 217

“Scary Man,” 39

double whole notes, 146

“The Way It Works,” 229

Dozier, Lamont, 2, 20, 45

Costello, Elvis, 26

dreaming songs, 15

couplets, 162

drums, 217

courseptr.com, “Scary Man” on, 30

and melody, 104

cretic, 217

Duffy, 44

crotchets, 140, 146

Dylan, Bob, 7

Crowded House, 50

on lyrics, 166

Crystals, 44

Cycle of Fifths, 294–295

E

“Easier Done Than Said” (Cope), 174, 184–185

D

case study for lyrics, 242–253

dactyl, 217

chorus, plotted notes for, 281

“Dancing in the Dark” (Springsteen), 15

contours for, 271

David, Hal, 26

harmonic options for, 320–324

dead metaphors, 195

implied melodic confidence and character in,

Death Cab for Cutie, 6, 21–22

321–322

degrees of the diatonic scale system, 120

melodic framework for, 267–268

delays in pre-choruses, 72

metric lyrics, metric analysis of, 266

delivery

pillar notes in, 276

of lyrics, 167–175

plotted notes for, 280–281

of songs, 7–8

verse ideas, 246

denotations in lyrics, 187

editing, 82–86

depth of appeal, 51–53

compositional editing, 83

descending intervals, 122

to grab listeners, 84–85

detail in lyrics, 167

for length of song, 85

Devil in Music, 303

mechanical editing, 83

Devil’s Interval, 303

reasons for, 83–86

Diabolus in Musica, 303

egos

Diana, Princess of Wales, 35

and collaborating, 26

“Diana” (Anka), 50

songwriting and, 47

diatonic chords, 287

11th chords, 300–301

in minor keys, 289–290

emotions and inspiration, 23

diatonic scale, 112–113

emphasis and rests, 149

note naming system, 120

end rhyme, 228–229

Eno, Brian, 24

332

R I G H T I N G W R O N G S I N W R I T I N G S O N G S

epiphora, 208

G

“(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” (Adams), 34

Gadd, Steve, 104

expectations

genres, 20–21

and balance, 64–66

chords and, 312

rests and, 149

form of song and, 82

and rhyme, 234–235

topics for, 48

extensions, 299–302

Gibbard, Ben, 6, 21–22

for secondary dominant chords, 306

“Girl” (The Beatles), 151

“God Only Knows” (Wilson), 7

F

Goffin, Gerry, 26, 46–47

F chord, substitutions for, 305

“Good Day Sunshine” (The Beatles), 77

fact of lyrics, 168–175

good songs

fadeouts, 78–79

association and, 32–33

falling rhythm, 217

deciding on, 35–41

family chords, 287

elements of, 31

feasibility of melodies, 97

factors affecting decisions on, 41–42

feel

hit potential, assessing songs for, 42–43

of lyrics, 168–175

quality and, 31

syncopation, 154–155

success and, 49–51

feet, 216–217. See also binary feet; metric feet Grant, Hugh, 13

metric feet, 217–218

grief and inspiration, 23

pyrrhic foot, 221–222

groove

feminine rhymes, 229–230

melody compared, 103–104

fifths, 123–124

syncopation, 154–155

“Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” (Simon), 104

Groove Quantize feature, 154

figures of speech, 191–192

guts of song, 4, 11

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 243–244,

249–250

H

finding, 254

half notes, 146

finality of phrase, 233–234

half tones, 113

delaying, 239

“Happy Birthday”

Finn, Neil, 50

melody in, 132–133

first inversion, 297–298

phrasing in, 163

first person lyrics, 171

“A Hard Day’s Night” (The Beatles), 77, 210

firsts, 123

harmonic function, 295–296

Fisher, Climie, 71

in “Easier Done Than Said,” 323

five-note scales, 110, 117–118

substitution of chords and, 304

flats in A minor natural scale, 116

harmonic minor scale, 116

Fletcher, H., 105

harmonic pulse, 310, 312–313

flexibility in lyrics, 174

in “Easier Done Than Said,” 323

focus of song, 85

harmonic rhythm, 310, 314

form of song, 79–82. See also editing

harmony. See also Circle of Fifths

balance and, 86–88

close harmony, 301

genre and, 82

confident notes, supporting, 317–318

key moments, placement of, 90

developing, 324–325

lyrical content and, 81–82

“Easier Done Than Said” case study, 320–324

lyrical theme and, 81–82

as layer of song, 2–3

Four Weddings and a Funeral, 34

melody, harmonizing, 315–319

four W’s of lyrics, 169–174

passing notes and, 318–319

fourths, 124–125

pillar notes and, 318–319

framework, 139–146. See also meter; time values repeating notes in, 316

melodic framework, 265–268, 284

7th chords and, 307

meter, 139–140

unconfident notes, supporting, 316–317

time signatures, 140–141

Hawkes, Chesney, 72

frequency, 5

hearing sound, 5

Frey, Glenn, 25

“Help” (The Beatles), 77

full rhyme, 228–229

heptameter, 218

functionality, 55–57

I N D E X

333

heptatonic (seven-note) scales, 110

John, Elton, 26, 27

modes, 118–119

“Candle in the Wind,” 35

Hertz (Hz), 5–6

“Joy to the World,” 137

hexameter, 218

“Hey Jude” (The Beatles), 58, 77

K

Higgins, Brian, 25

“Kansas City” (Leiber), 15

hit potential, assessing songs for, 42–43

Kershaw, Nik, 72

Hit Song Science program, 43

key moments, placement of, 90

homonyms

keywords, 257–260. See also pillar notes

dictionaries of, 188

content of, 261–262

puns with, 202–203

contours for, 268–271

homophones

ideas for, 283

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 249–250

length of, 261–262

puns with, 202–203

literal keywords, 260

honest opinions, obtaining, 19–20

repetition, 258–260

“Honesty” (Joel), 80–81

variation and, 262–264

hooks in melody, 99–100

tonal displacement, 262–264

horizontal line contour, 269

variation and, 262–264

Houston, Whitney, 34

kilohertz (kHz), 5

Howe, Bones, 58

King, Carole, 26, 46–47

“Hunting High and Low (A-Ha), 72

on middle section of song, 73

King, Stephen, 20, 22

I

K.I.S.S. principle, 64

“I Need to Be with You” (Cope), 131, 134, 158,

182–183

L

“I Want to Tell You” (The Beatles), 77

“Lady Madonna” (The Beatles), 77

“I Will Always Love You,” 34

Lang, K. D., 26

“I Wish” (Wonder), 72

Lanois, Daniel, 14

iambic pentameter, 218

last.fm, 44

iambic substitution, 220

laughter, writing for, 50

iambs, 217

Lavigne, Avril, 221

ideas for lyrics, 166, 241

layers, 2–3

idioms in lyrics, 188–190

combining, 8–10

immediate routes for pillar/passing notes, 277–279

complementary layers, 9–10

implied pre-chorus, 72

matched and mismatched layers, 9

indirect routes for pillar/passing notes, 277–279

leaps. See melodic motion

individual tonal displacement, 262–264

learning songwriting, 12–15

inspiration, 13

Legrand, Michael, 68

location for writing and, 23

Leiber, Jerry, 15

instrumentalists, editing songs for, 85

Leiber and Stoller, 15

internal rhyme, 231

length, 57–58

interpretation of lyrics, 167

editing for, 85

interrupted cadence, 294

of keywords, 261–262

intervals, 120–122

of syllables, 222

descending intervals, 122

Lennon, John, 190

intros, 75–77

letters

inversions, 205–206, 297–298

melodic letters, 280–281

understanding, 213

notes as, 257

inverted contour, 269

links, 79

Ionian mode, 118–119

listeners. See audience

“It’s All Been Done” (Barenaked Ladies), 151

location for writing, 21–23

“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” (Joel), 81

“The Long and Winding Road (The Beatles), 77

“I’ve Got a Feeling” (The Beatles), 77

loudness, melody and, 105–106

“I’ve Just Seen a Face” (The Beatles), 77

“Love Changes (Everything)” (Fisher), 71

“Love Is All Around,” 34

J

“Love Me Do” (The Beatles), 77

Jaws, 132

love songs, writing, 50

Joel, Billy, 80–81

loving songs, 20–21

334

R I G H T I N G W R O N G S I N W R I T I N G S O N G S

Lydian scales, 118–119

syllables and, 215–216

lyrics. See also metaphors; meter (lyric); rhyme; system for writing, 253–255

schemes; synonyms; tropes

Taylor, James on writing, 14

adaptability in, 174

theme of, 165–166

anadiplosis, 206–207, 213

themes, lyrical, 81–82

anaphora, 207, 213

titles and, 179–180

antimetabole, 209

verses in, 175–178

brainstorming for, 241–242

“what” in, 173–174

chiasmus, 208

“when” in, 172

chorus and, 178–179

“where” in, 172

clarity in, 170

“who” in, 171–172

clichés, using, 209–210

words within words, 210

combining facts and feelings in, 174–175

and complementary layers, 9–10

M

connotations in, 187

“MacArthur Park” (Webb), 58

content and tempo, 82

major 7 chords, 299

context of, 167–168

major chords, 285–286, 299

delivery of, 167–175

major scales, 110, 113–114

denotations in, 187

Ionian mode and, 118

detail in, 167

note numbers for, 119–120

“Easier Done Than Said” case study, 242–253

“Make it Funky” (Brown), 104

epiphora, 208

malapropisms, use of, 210

fact and feeling of, 168–175

Manilow, Barry, 32

feet, lyric, 216–217

mapping lyrics, 184–185

figures of speech in, 191–192

marketing, 43–44

flexibility in, 174

association and, 34

four W’s of, 169–174

masculine rhymes, 229–230

holes in, 177

mathematics in music, 6

ideas for, 166, 241

Matrix, 221

idioms in, 188–190

McCartney, Paul, 15

interpretation of, 167

Mead, David, 71

inversions in, 205–206

meaning of songs, 6

as layer of song, 2–3

measures

mapping, 184–185

and meter, 139–140

meaning of, 164–175

for sections of songs, 89–90

melody and, 106–107, 264–271

mechanical editing, 83

metaphors in, 192–196

mediant chords, 289, 296

metonymy, 200–201

melodic framework, 264–268, 284

middle sections and, 182–183

melodic minor scale, 117

nucleus of, 165

melodic motion, 128–133

oxymorons, 203–205, 212

in “Happy Birthday,” 132–133

pacing of, 226–227

Parsons Code, 129

package of, 164–167

pitch class and, 129–130

personification, 198–199

types of, 130–133

phrasing in, 163

variation in, 132–133

point of, 166–167

melody. See also keywords; melodic motion

pre-chorus and, 180–182

anacrusis, 265

puns in, 202–203

arrangement and, 105

pyrrhic foot, 221–222

building melodies, 261–264

quotations in, 190–191

chords and, 104–105, 309

repetition in, 206–209

communication and, 257–260

rhythmic uniformity in, 162

contours, 268–271

sayings, use of, 209–210

defined, 93–94

scansion, 216

direction and, 269

similes in, 196–197

drums and, 104

speed and stressed syllables, 226–227

“Easier Done Than Said” case study, 321–322

stanzas, 161–163

emotional concept of, 94

stress-time language and, 223–226

end point for, 265

substitution in, 220–222

groove compared, 103–104

I N D E X

335

harmonizing, 315–319

minor chords, 285–286

hooks in, 99–100

diatonic chords, 289–290

importance of, 102–103

relative minor chords, 288–289

as interesting, 98–99

minor intervals, 121

as layer of song, 2–3

minor scales, 110, 114–117. See also natural minor letters, melodic, 280–281

scales

lyrics and, 106–107, 264–271

harmonic minor scale, 116

repetition in, 101–102

melodic minor scale, 117

rhythm considerations, 97–98

Mitchell, Joni, 162, 218

riffs and, 104–105

mixed metaphors, 195–196

as singable, 94–98

mixing, quality of, 32

start point for, 265

modes of scales, 118–119

stressed foot forward pattern, 265–268

modulations in middle sections, 73

syncopation, 154–155

money, writing for, 50

technical concept of, 93–94

motion. See melodic motion

tonal considerations, 94–97

movies, writing for, 50

variation in, 100–101

Munson, W. A., 105

volume and, 105–106

music. See also harmony; melody

words, melodic, 280–281

good songs and, 33

memories, association and, 32–35

Music and Lyrics, 13

metaphors, 192–196

music press and good songs, 38–40

creating, 193–196

music videos and association, 35

dead metaphors, 195

“My All,” 207

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 249–250

“My Heart Will Go On,” 34

folders for, 193–194

myspace.com, 37

mixed metaphors, 195–196

understanding, 211

N

meter, 139–140. See also meter (lyric)

names

bpm (beats per minute), 139, 141

for chords, 287–288

feel and, 141

for notes, 119–120

identifying, 141–144

Nash, Graham, 76

syncopation, 154–155

natural minor scales, 114–116

tidying up, 255

Aeolian mode and, 118

time signatures, 140–141

note numbers for, 120

meter (lyric), 215–222

9th chords, 300–301

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 250–253

Nirvana, 44

manipulation of, 237

note duration. See time values

syllables in, 215–216

notes, 109–136. See also chords; passing notes; pillar metonymy, 200–201

notes; scales; time values; tonal confidence

metric feet, 217–218

intervals, 120–122

lyrics, 220–222

keywords, 257–260

spondee, 222

letters, reference to, 257

variation in, 218–219

naming notes, 119–120

metric stress, 141

pitch class and, 111–112

confidence and, 144–146

stress, indication of, 142

optional patterns, 152–156

syllable length and, 222

rhythmic stress and, 153–154

understanding role of, 134–136

tonal stress and, 157

“Nowhere Man” (The Beatles), 77

understanding role of, 157–160

nucleus of lyrics, 165

metric variation, 218–219

nurturing songs, 11, 23–25

“Michelle” (The Beatles), 77

middle sections, 55, 72–75

O

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 248–249

octameter, 218

and lyrics, 182–183

octaves, 110

placement of, 75

frequency and, 6

position and number of, 74–75

intervals and, 120–122

“Mine and Yours” (Mead), 71

pitch class and, 111–112

minims, 146

“Old Grey whistle test,” 100

Mink, Ben, 26

336

R I G H T I N G W R O N G S I N W R I T I N G S O N G S

On Writing (King), 20, 22

pitch, 5–6

“One Week” (Barenaked Ladies), 151

chromatic scale, pitches in, 112

“The One and Only,” 72

insecure pitch, 145

onelook.com, 191

melody of song and, 94–97

originality, personality and, 15

relative pitch, 223

oscillations, 5

rhythm and, 138–140

outros, 77–79

variation, 223

codas, 78

pitch class, 111–112

fadeouts, 78–79

melodic motion and, 129–130

oxymorons, 203–205, 212

plagal cadence, 294

play.com, 44

P

point of lyrics, 166–167

Polyphonic HMI, 42–43

package of lyrics, 164–167

pre-chorus, 55, 70–72

padding in songs, 70

dummy pre-choruses, 72

pandora.com, 44

implied pre-chorus, 72

“Paperback Writer” (The Beatles), 77

and lyrics, 180–182

Parks, Van Dyke, 46

predicting sales, 45

Parsons, Denys, 129

present tense in lyrics, 172

Parsons Code, 129

presentation of songs, 55–91

Parton, Dolly, 34

expectation and, 64–66

party DJs. See DJs

functionality in, 55–57

passing notes, 273–274

lengths of songs, 57–58

duration of, 274

sections in songs, 59–63

and harmony, 318–319

simplicity in, 63–64

routes for, 277–279, 284

press and good songs, 38–40

solutions for, 284

pretty chords, 303

tonal passing notes, 277–282

primary metric stress, 141–142

past tense in lyrics, 172

process of songwriting, 11–12

pauses, 148–150

producers and good songs, 37–38

Pearl Jam, 44

production, 32

“Penny Lane” (The Beatles), 77

elements and songs, 10

pentameter, 218

mixing, quality of, 32

pentatonic (five-note) scales, 110, 117–118

reviews and, 40

perceived speed and notes, 150–151

progressions of chords, 311

perfect rhyme, 228–229

public transportation, ideas on, 21

performers

publishers

melody and, 94–97

A&R persons and, 37

perception of songs and, 32

factors affecting decisions, 41–42

reviews and, 40

good songs, deciding on, 36

writing for, 48

puns, 202–203

personality and originality, 15

“Put Your Records On” (Rae), 72

personification, 198–199

puzzle, song as, 15–17

phrasing in lyrics, 163

pyrrhic foot, 221–222

Phrygian scales, 118–119

piano, 217

“Piano Man” (Joel), 80–81

Q

pieces of song, 15–17

quality control, 18

pillar notes, 271–282, 284

A&R persons and, 37

duration of, 274

myspace.com and, 37

and harmony, 318–319

standards, setting, 18–20

joining stressed pillars, 277–278

quantitative accents, 222

rhythmic pillar notes, 271–273

quarter notes, 146

routes for, 277–279, 284

quatrains, 162

solutions for, 284

Queen, 58

tonal pillars, 274–277

quotations

dictionaries of, 188

in lyrics, 190–191

I N D E X

337

R

riffs and melody, 104–105

“Right Here with You” (Cope), 259

radio. See also DJs

rising rhythm, 217

length of song and, 57–58

“River of Dreams” (Joel), 81

marketing and, 44

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 34

Rae, Corinne Bailey, 72

Ronettes, 44

range of performer, 94–97

root note, 123

reasons for writing, 49–51

routes

record producers and good songs, 37–38

for pillar/passing notes, 277–279, 284

Red Book standard, 58

for writing, 22

refrain, 68

rejection letters, 37, 41

relative minor chords, 288–289

S

relative pitch, 223

sadness and inspiration, 23

repetition. See also melodic motion; scales

sales, predicting, 45

anadiplosis, 206–207

saxophone, 217

anaphora, 207

sayings, lyrics using, 209–210

antimetabole, 209

scales. See also C major scale; chromatic scale; chiasmus, 208

diatonic scale; major scales; minor scales;

of chords, 310–315

octaves; tonal confidence

epiphora, 208

defined, 109–110

and harmony, 316

heptatonic (seven-note) scales, 110, 118–119

of keywords, 258–260

intervals, 120–122

in lyrics, 206–209

mathematics of, 6

of melodic motion, 130

modes, 118–119

in melody, 101–102

naming notes in, 119–120

understanding, 213

pentatonic (five-note) scales, 110, 117–118

variation and, 262–264

pitch class, 111–112

rests, 148–150

scansion, 216

reviews from music press, 38–40

“Scary Man” (Cope), 39

rhyme, 227–236

“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (Joel), 81

balance in, 233–235

schedule for writing, 22

decreasing perceived speed, 238

schemes, 192, 205–209

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 244–245

anadiplosis, 206–207, 213

finality of phrase, 233–234

anaphora, 207, 213

delaying, 239

antimetabole, 209

finding, 254

chiasmus, 208

increasing perceived speed, 238–239

epiphora, 208

notation for, 227–228

inversions, 205–206

reworking, 238–239

understanding, 212–213

rhythmic qualities of, 231–233

second person lyrics, 171

speed and, 233–234

secondary dominant chords, 305–308

structure in, 233–235

secondary metric stress, 142

types of, 228–231

seconds, 124

words and, 236

sections, 59–63. See also specific sections

rhyming dictionaries, 188, 235

balanced sections, 65–66

rhythm, 3, 137–160. See also framework; rhythmic chord progressions and, 312

stress

and form, 80

harmonic rhythm, 310, 314

measures and, 89–90

melody and, 97–98

number of, 60–63

passing notes, rhythmic, 273–274

structural components of, 88–93

pillar notes, rhythmic, 271–273

semibreve, 146

pitch and, 138–140

semitones, 112

and rhyme, 231–233

intervals and, 120–122

tonal confidence and, 156–157

in melodic minor scale, 117

understanding role of, 157–160

in natural minor scales, 114–116

rhythmic stress, 152–156

seven-note scales. See heptatonic (seven-note) scales syncopation, 154–155

sevenths, 124–125

338

R I G H T I N G W R O N G S I N W R I T I N G S O N G S

7th chords, 299, 306–307

syllables

shape displacement, 262–264

length of, 222

“She Loves You” (The Beatles), 77

in meter, 215–216

“She’s Always a Woman to Me” (Joel), 81

speed and stressed syllables, 226–227

Shirelles, 44

stress-timed language, 223–226

similes, 196–197

syncopation, 154–155

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 249–250

synecdoche, 200–201

understanding, 211

synonyms, 187–188

Simon, Paul

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 243–244

“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” 7

finding, 254

“Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” 104

and stressed syllables, 225

“Still Crazy After All These Years,” 68, 154

Simon and Garfunkel, 154

T

simplicity of presentation, 63–64

tambourine, 217

sixths, 124

Taupin, Bernie, 26, 27, 35

6th chords, 302

Taylor, James, 7, 43

skill, development of, 13

on lyrics, 14

skip and jump contour, 269–270

tears, writing for, 49–50

“Sky Blue and Black” (Browne), 24

“Tell Her About It” (Joel), 81

slash chords, 297–298

tempo

for contrast, 315

lyrical content and, 82

in “Easier Done Than Said,” 323

note duration and, 150–152

slope up or down contour, 269

temporary implied character, 317–318

slotting in approach to collaboration, 26

tenor horn, 217

social devices, songs as, 49

tension, 64–66

soul, writing for, 49

pre-choruses and, 70–72

Soundgarden, 44

tercets, 162

speed

ternary feet, 217

and rhyme, 233–234

tertiary metric stress, 142

stressed syllables and, 226

tesitura, 94

SPL (sound pressure level), 105–106

tetrameter, 218

spondee, 222

stressed syllables and, 225

Springsteen, Bruce, 15

“The Way It Works” (Cope), 229

standards, setting, 18–20

themes

stanzas, 161–163

lyrical themes, 81–82

steps. See melodic motion

of lyrics, 165–166

“Still Crazy After All These Years” (Simon), 68, 154

thesauruses, 188

Stone Temple Pilots, 44

for idioms, 189

“The Stranger” (Joel), 81

third person lyrics, 171–172

stress. See also metric stress; rhythmic stress thirds, 124

language, stress-timed, 223–226

13th chords, 300–301

pillar notes and, 272

three-minute pop songs, 57

tonal stress, 157

3D themes in lyrics, 173

word patterns and, 215–216

tied notes, 147–150

stressed foot forward, 284

time signatures, 140–141

structure, 3

time values, 146–152

in rhyme, 233–235

character of note duration, 150–152

Stubblefield, Clyde, 104

clocking in, 155–156

Stunt (Barenaked Ladies), 151

dotted notes, 147–150

subdominant chords, 307

keywords and, 261–262

submediant chords, 296

measuring note duration, 146

substitution

for passing notes, 274

of chords, 304–305

for pillar notes, 274

in lyrics, 220–222

placement compared, 155–156

subtractive rhyme, 231

rests and pauses, 148–150

success and good songs, 49–51

syllable length and, 222

Supremes, 44

syncopation, 154–155

syllable-timed language, 223

I N D E X

339

tied notes, 147–150

V

understanding role of, 159–160

vacated metric stress, 144

variation of, 150–151

variation. See also chords

writing down note lengths, 146–147

and keywords, 262–264

Titanic, 34

in melodic motion, 132–133

titles

in melody, 100–101

editing songs and, 84

metric variation, 218–219

and lyrics, 179–180

pitch variation, 223

placement of, 179–180

in structure, 56

tonal confidence, 122–128

writing for, 50

character compared, 128

verses, 55, 68–70

in ending passages, 127

chronological placement of, 69–70

in middle passages, 127–128

in “Easier Done Than Said” case study, 246

natural tone resolutions, 126

lyrics and, 175–178

rests and, 149

order of appearance, 69–70

rhythm and, 156–157

violin, 217

in starting passages, 127

vocal aerobics, 98

tiers of, 123–125

vocalists. See performers

understanding role of, 134–136

voice leading, 298

tonal displacement, 262–264

volume, melody and, 105–106

tonal naming systems, 120

tonal passing notes, 277–282

tonal pillars, 274–277, 284

W

tonal stress, 157

wave contours, 269–270

tonal tendency, 277

waveforms, 5

tones. See also tonal confidence

Webb, Jimmy, 58

intervals and, 120–122

weddings, writing songs for, 49

tonic chords, 296

“what” in lyrics, 173–174

Tonic Sol-Fa system, 120

“when” in lyrics, 172

top-liners, 28

“where” in lyrics, 172

topics and genres, 48

“who” in lyrics, 171–172

Townshend, Pete, 47

whole notes, 146

trackers, 28

whole tones, 113

triads, 285–286. See also chords

Wilson, Brian, 7, 23, 47

major triads, 285–286

“The Windmills of Your Mind” (Bergman, Bergman

minor triads, 285–286

& Legrand), 68

trimeter, 218

Winehouse, Amy, 44

tritones, 303

Wonder, Stevie, 72

trochee, 217

Word of the Day websites, 188

iambic substitution and, 220

words. See also lyrics

trombone, 217

melodic words, 280–281

tropes, 192. See also metaphors; similes

notes as, 257

metonymy, 200–201

rhyme and, 236

oxymorons, 203–205, 212

work environment, 21–23

personification, 198–199

puns, 202–203

X–Y

synecdoche, 200–201

xylophone, 217

understanding, 211–212

TuneGlue software, 44

“Yesterday” (The Beatles), 15, 77

TV commercials and association, 35

“You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” (The Beatles), 77

2D themes in lyrics, 173

Z

U

Zappa, Frank, 42

“Underground” (Ben Folds Five), 72

Zollo, Paul, 96

“Uptown Girl” (Joel), 80–81

Document Outline

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 We Don’t Know What We’re Trying to Achieve

What Is Songwriting?

A Little Bit of Mathematics

Back to the Music

The Delivery

Songwriting Is an Art

Back to the Layers

Product Doesn’t Indicate Process

Product Can Inform Process

Can We Learn to Write Songs?

Everyone Is Different

Writing Enough

Setting Standards

Do You Love Songs?

Writing Location

Nurturing

Co-Writing

Collaborative Approaches

Writing a Part Apart

Conclusions

Solution: Know What Works for You and What Doesn’t

2 We Don’t Know Why We Are Writing

What Makes a Good Song?

Where Is the Appeal?

The Power of Association

Who Has the Right to Decide What Is Good and What Isn’t?

Who Actually Does Decide?

How Do People with These Jobs Make These Decisions?

What Informs These Decisions?

How Do We Know What Works?

Who Are We Writing For?

Who Will Perform the Songs?

Who’s Supposed to Be Listening to Them and Buying Them?

Does a Song Have to Be Successful to Be Good?

Ask the Right Questions

Breadth and Depth

Conclusions

Solution: Know Why You Are Writing before You Finish

3 We Don’t Present Our Songs as Effectively as Possible

Functionality

How Do We Know How Long Our Songs Should Be?

Why Do We Have Sections at All?

How Do We Decide How Many Sections We Want?

Simplicity

Expectation and Balance

Structural Components

Chorus

Refrain

Verse

Pre-Chorus

Middle Section

Intro

Outro

The Link

Form

Other Form Considerations

Editing

Mechanical and Compositional Editing

Why Edit?

Consideration of Balance

Conclusions

Solution: Assess the Structural Effectiveness of the Song

4 We’re Not Sure What Our Melody Is All About

What Is a Melody?

Two Key Responses

What’s Important about Melody?

It Should Be Singable

It Should Be Interesting

It Should Be Memorable (with Hooks)

Variation and Repetition

Variation

Repetition

How Important Is Melody?

Comparison to Groove

Comparison to Chord Sequence/Riff

Comparison to Arrangement

Comparison to Volume

Comparison to Lyric

Solution: Think Carefully about the Role Melody Plays in the Songs We Write

5 Notes Fall Out of Our Heads without Us Thinking about Them

Scales

Chromatic Scale

Diatonic Scale

Major Scale

Minor Scales

Pentatonic Scales

Modes

Naming Notes

The Names We Give Different Notes

Intervals

Tonal Confidence

The Hierarchy of Chromatic, Ltd.

What This Hierarchy Tells Us

Confidence versus Character

Melodic Motion

The Three Alternatives

The Characteristics of These Alternatives

Type of Motion

Solution: Understand the Role and Effect of the Notes That We Employ

6 Rhythms Fall Out of Our Heads without Us Thinking about Them

Framework

Meter

Time Signature

Identifying the Meter of a Song

Confidence and Stress

Time Values

Note Duration

How We Write Down the Note Lengths

Dotted and Tied Notes

Character of Note Duration

Playing with Stress Points

Playing with Rhythmic Stress

Note Length Combined with Placement

Combining Tonal and Rhythmic Implications

Solution: Assess and Understand the Role and Effect of the Rhythms That We Employ

7 We’re Not Sure What We’re Trying to Say

Stanza

What Is It Supposed to Say?

The Package

The Nucleus

The Theme

Finding the Idea

What’s the Point?

The Delivery

Context

The Fact and the Feeling

The Four W’s

Combining Fact and Feeling

Working Toward the Structure of the Song

Verse

Chorus

Title

Pre-Chorus

Middle Section

Conclusion

Solution: Lyric Mapping

8 We Take Too Long to Say Too Little

Denotations and Connotations

Synonyms

Other Useful Resources

Idioms

Quotations

www.onelook.com

Figures of Speech

Tropes

Metaphors

Similes

Personification

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Pun

Oxymorons

Schemes

Inversion

Repetition

Additional Things to Try

Playing on a Saying

Words within Words

Solution: Say More in Less and Figure Out Figures of Speech

9 We Don’t Take Meter and Rhyme Seriously Enough

Meter

Syllables

Scansion

Feet

Meter

Metric Variation

Substitution

The Musical Elements of Speech

Syllable Length

Relative Pitch

Stress-Timed Language

What’s the Point?

Altering the Perceived Speed

Rhyme

How We Mark Them

Different Types of Rhymes

The Rhythmic Qualities of Rhyme

Using the Rhythmic Qualities of Rhyme to Our Advantage

Tracking Down Rhymes in Rhyming Dictionaries

Letting Rhyme Dictate the Words?

Solution: Manipulate Meter and Rework Rhyme

10 We Don’t Think about How to Grow a Lyric

Brainstorming

Case Study: Easier Done Than Said

Conclusion

Solution: Try and Work within Some Sort of System

11 We Don’t Think about How We Grow Our Melodic Ideas

Melody as a Means of Communication

Keywords

Identifying a Keyword through Repetition

Building Melodies

Keyword Length and Content

Combining Repetition and Variation

Plotting the Route

Starting with Lyrics and Guidance

Melodic Framework

Contour

Pillar Notes

Rhythmic Pillar Notes

Rhythmic Passing Notes

Tonal Pillars

Tonal Passing Notes

Conclusions

Solution: Purposefully Develop an Initial Idea

12 We Write Chords without Understanding Them

Building Basic Chords

Triads

Diatonic Chords

What We Call Them

Relative Minors

Diatonic Chords in Minor Keys

Circle of Fifths

Cadence

Harmonic Function

Coloring Chords

Inversions and Slash Chords

Extensions

Alterations

Borrowed Chords

Solution: Think about How Chords Relate to Each Other

13 We Don’t Think about How We Use Chords

Repetition and Variation

The Chords

Harmonic Pulse

Harmonic Rhythm

Combining These Tools for Variation

Other Ways to Generate Contrast

Harmonizing a Melody

Making an Unconfident Note Sound Secure

Making a Confident Note Sound Unsure

So What Can We Do with All This Knowledge?

A Case Study

Solution: Learn to Appreciate the Context That Harmony Gives a Melody

A: References

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X–Y

Z