Eurovision 2013 live blogging
[This is a live blog - hit 'refresh' in your browser throughout the evening and the most recently performed song will appear at the top. As in 2012, each song will be scored as we hear it. Geeky musicological commentary will be added wherever possible. As always I'm going to try (and will probably fail) to pick a winner.]
So, to the predictions. I am typing this at 22:07 on the night, and will, as in previous years, leave my (inevitably wrong!) top 3 here for posterity, and afterwards will post the actual winners below these. I got two of the top 3 right in 2012, but I’m worried this was a fluke. I really want Greece’s ‘Alcohol is free’ to do well, but I fear that there may not be enough irony in mainland Europe to fuel its deserved propulsion up the ranks. I’m also concerned that my grumpiness about Ireland may be misplaced – people might just buy those lyric clichés. They’ve done it before, and will carry on… till the end of time…
2013 Eurovision – my predicted top 3
- Denmark
- Norway
- Russia
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2013 Eurovision – actual top 5
- Denmark
- Azerbaijan
- Ukraine
- Norway
- Russia
So all of my top 3 were in the top 5 – but I missed two big songs (Azerbaijan and Ukraine) by a fair distance, only scoring them as 61% and 64% respectively. But the blog successfully predicted the winner in both 2012 and 2013 (albeit after a total disaster in 2011, where I failed to get any of the top 3).
Overall, I thought the song quality was way higher in 2013 than in previous years, with a general consistency of good quality songwriting across the board. See you next year!
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26 Ireland • Ryan Dolan • “Only Love Survives”
Don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… don’t say ‘Dancing ’til the morning light’… oh, you did. And did I hear a ‘Till the end of time’ in there as well? Dolan, you have wasted a perfectly good title by copying other people’s homework. Detention for you. But there is a lot of big synthy production here, and this might distract a fair few people from the slightly meandering chorus and downbeat melody on the title line. Apparently a lot of people like this, but I’m not one of them.
62%
25 Georgia • Nodi Tatishvili and Sophie Gelovani • “Waterfall”
First things first. This is a duet, so will not win. It’s a pretty good big ballad, though. The chorus is based on a standard diatonic four-chord loop but with a nice variation at the end of the chorus. And… wait. That was a great key change – wonderful use of a vocal pivot note. And because they made us wait, it sounded like a bigger key change than the semitone rise that it actually was. Not bad at all, and should at least make the top 10, perhaps even the top 5.
75%
24 Norway • Margaret Berger • “I Feed You My Love”
Really well done, this. The tension in the verse is built brilliantly, by using the same melodic lick over and over as the chords descend ominously. A strange combination of hope and threat. No pre-chorus, and rightly so. The rising melodic chorus line “I can see” (notes of F#-A-B) is nearly the pitch peak of it, and is just trounced in the next line (the word ‘feed’) which hits the 9th of C#, creating a lovely melodic shape over the title. Magnificent.
80%
23 Italy • Marco Mengoni • “L’essenziale” • The essential
If you’re going to do a slow power ballad, you might as well apply the adjective with some commitment. This is around 62BPM. And they threw in the key change (Ab to A) somewhere around verse 2. That’s just wasting your ingredients, like stirring icing sugar into the cake mix. The chorus is really well sung. Not sure why they didn’t go further with the harmonies, though. Nice b7 chord at the end of the chorus. Biggest power-to-tempo pro rata ratio so far, I reckon.
67%
22 Ukraine • Zlata Ognevich • “Gravity”
That’s cheating! You can’t put the last chorus key change IN the chorus! Perhaps the Lithuanians loaned them their harmonic randomiser. The title hook is nicely incorporated and that descending 4th over the word ‘Gravity’ works well (descending… gravity… see what they did there?). Unspectacular melodically, particularly in the verses. Fair to middling.
64%
21 Greece • Koza Mostra feat. Agathon Iakovidis • “Alcohol Is Free”
Oh yes! Some ska! In a sort of Greek way. And THIS is how to do a singable chorus – just repeat the title over and over! The loop in this one is Dm-F-Bb-A. This is a huge crowd pleaser in the hall, and I hope it’s not one of those songs that is more giggable than it is memorable. I think that this is so good that the Greeks must be panicking. If they win, what will the the 2014 gig hosting do to the economy?
70%
20 Azerbaijan • Farid Mammadov • “Hold Me”
No amount of weird melody lifts in the verse can disguise the inevitability of the imminent four-chord loop in the chorus. But I do like the economy of the writing here – especially the short verse. They’re using form really well and not wasting any time structurally. A standard semitone lift (Bbm-Bm) in the final chorus, and a nicely-done downbeat final line, without losing any of the power created by the key change and dynamic. Big chorus hook, but might be too difficult to sing. Hotly tipped, apparently, but not doing it for me.
61%
19 Iceland • Eythor Ingi • “Ég á líf” • I am alive
A very restrained power ballad, but I think they are keeping some dynamics back in secret Icelandic underground pop arsenal silos, ready to unleash all their weapons near the end. Nice simple A-B-C# rising melodic motif. And…. THERE IT IS. Key change and dynamic lift straight to B major without a passing chord (basically, the same melodic pickup as in Whitney Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You. But I think they left a few important guns back at base. The wedge of cheese was not wide enough here. Nice melody though, and should do quite well.
65%
18 Denmark • Emmelie de Forest • “Only Teardrops”
Three phrases in the verse, then straight into the pre-chorus. Not messin’ about! Wonderfully melodic chorus. Some difficult to sing consonants (e.g. the sibilant ‘s’ at the end of ‘times’) that could have used some edits, but I think the melody is so strong that it compensates. That piccolo/fife melody is a great secondary hook, too. They achieved the feeling of a key change without actually leaving A minor behind – unless it started lower and I missed it (this is a real-time blog – can you smell the fear?). The classic chord loop Am-F-C-G will be much strummed by guitarists if it wins. And I think it might. My personal favourite so far.
86%
17 Hungary • ByeAlex • “Kedvesem” (Zoohacker Remix) • My darling
I am typing so fast that I don’t have much time to look up at the performers, but these guys seem to be the biggest mismatch between dress code and musical content. Looks like an urban carjacker, sounds like Peter Sarstedt. Chorus hook is annoying – more phrases that don’t really listen to the chords. Far too understated to make an impact. Folky-ish – but bland and uninteresting.
45%
16 Sweden • Robin Stjernberg • “You”
Proper Scanda-pop, this, and delivered with a whole lotta pop tricks, including some simple chord loops and a tempo of around 128BPM (the most popular tempo of 2012, as stated in a previous blog entry). The tension is lifted nicely through what feels like a double pre-chorus, which pre-signifies the chorus proper. We’re in F# major, which makes that chorus melody phrase based on notes of G#-A#-C#-A#-G# (and a drop off at the end of the melisma down to F#). This could be our first palindromic chorus hook of the evening. Perhaps the Swedes are only this good at making hooks because they catch so many fish…
76%
15 United Kingdom • Bonnie Tyler • “Believe in Me”
Here’s the UK’s entry, which is the only one I’ve heard plenty of times in advance. A fair to middling mid-tempo power ballad. The bridge has a nice b7 F major chord (we’re in G major) to open it, and the chorus ends with a slightly shorter phrase with the rest truncated. A well written song technically, but not quirky or interesting. And that 75BPM slow tempo is, as they say in Yorkshire, neither nowt nor summat. We need to do better than this if we are to compensate for the fact that so much of Europe isn’t keen on us.
56%
14 Romania • Cezar • “It’s My Life”
Nondescript verse, though I do like the lift to the D major in the harmony. The half time feel in the choruses certainly does highlight that bonkers falsetto vocal. This was, with hindsight, a mistake on the part of the arranger. It should have been disguised with many riffs. And… there’s the key change. Only up a semitone to Cm, but I’m amazed he had any headroom. Graham (Norton, UK commentator) has rightly just said “just because you can do something, it doesn’t follow that you should”. Amen to that. This guy is an amazing singer, clearly, but these octaves have had no place in my life since 1982. Melodically, a strange combination of dull and unpleasant.
41%
13 Netherlands • Anouk • “Birds”
Where are these chords going? This is madness! But it’s beautiful – I think I’ve spotten 3 key changes so far – not sure, but I think Ebm, Bbm and A major. And now we’re ending in B major with some weird b6-melody inspiring Em chords and mixolydian A majors thrown in. I love the chorus melody too. Musicologically, the weirdest one so far. In a good way! Cannot win. I can’t see the people of Europe linking arms over this, but I love it.
59%
12 Armenia • Dorians • “Lonely Planet”
Composed by Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, apparently. And here’s the verse. Surprisingly diatonic and riff-free considering his input. Horrible chorus pitches. I hate it when people sing the fifth of the scale without taking account of the underlying chords. It’s in B major and that G#-F# two note fragment that makes up the chorus ‘melody’ is grim. Key change was OK – up a tone to C# major. So far, no one has beaten the Russians in the biggest-interval-in-a-final-chorus-key-change contest (a private contest that only happens in my head every year). And I don’t think anyone will beat them – going beyond a minor third is just too damn dangerous. Listening to the production, there was a time in my life when I would have forgiven this song’s mediocrity because of the twiddly metalhead guitar licks. But that time was 1985, Tommy Vance is gone, and I now listen to Radio 2.
46%
11 Germany • Cascada • “Glorious”
Why don’t we just let it show / tell me what you’re waiting for / I can feel the music in me. This is cut ‘n’ shut lyric writing. I don’t mind a good cliché – in fact I’ll tolerate them until the cows come home. Not convinced by this chorus. There are just too many long notes. Yes you can create big texture that way, but it doesn’t help people to remember the chorus. The Eb-Gm-F-Bb chorus chord loop is fair enough, but I think they’ve stacked all those layered synth chords over it to try to hide the underlying mediocrity of the chorus writing. Nothing to see here.
52%
10 Russia • Dina Garipova • “What If”
Nice use of rhetorical lyric repetition on the verses. How are they going to use the title in the chorus if they’ve used it up in the verse. Could this be an AABA form 32 bar standard? Ah. No. They’ve just used the ttle again in the chorus. Brave. I like the anthemic chorus harmonic A | C#m| F#m-D | Esus, and the supertonic pitch peak against the minor iii chord. And… blimey! A minor 3rd key change! These guys are on fire! Very fine. Could score well.
75%
09 Malta • Gianluca • “Tomorrow”
A-B9-D-A loop in the verse – quirky and fun, at a sedate 93BPMish. The ukulele is like McFly at their most recent and playful (in fact isn’t it the same loop as ‘If This Is Love’?). Smiley and enjoyable vocal. I love that 9th chord in the verse, and the loop doesn’t outstay its welcome on the run up to the pre-chorus. The ‘ohhh…oooh’ hook is going to go down well I think. He’s hitting A above middle C. Pretty good while running around and grinning with his fellow bumpkins. Cutesy but maybe too much so. I love it, but my cheese tolerance is greater than most people’s.
65%
08 Belarus • Alyona Lanskaya • “Solayoh”
There are always a few that do some solid Eastern European syncopations, and this is a pretty good. The verse builds the power and tension nicely. It goes very cleanly between E harmonic minor and E Aeolian, and sounds completely natural doing so. The chorus isn’t all that easy to remember after one listen, which might count against it, but actually by chorus 2 I was hooked. A drum breakdown – lovely. Is there going to be a key change up a semitone? Yes! And we’re in F minor. A good place to end. The crowd like it – and so do I. Good combination of simple melody fragments and interesting harmonic bed.
67%
07 Estonia • Birgit • “Et uus saaks alguse” (So there can be a new beginning)
Inoffensive piano ballad intro, clearly waiting for a dynamic lift to an inoffensive mid-tempo chorus. And…. there it is. The Csus4 resolution is a bit of a poor man’s ABBA, as is the use of inversions in the pre-chorus (or second half of the verse, depending on how you analyse the form). The chorus is a nice lift. Where’s the key change? Come on, people – this chorus is begging for it. Offend us with an offensive key change! No? Really? Trailing off on a bendy electric guitar note? Shame. A bit dated, harmonically, and not in a good way (by which I mean, ABBA).
52%
06 Belgium • Roberto Bellarosa • “Love Kills”
Just the two melody notes for the start of the verse, then. There are altogether too many C# notes in this song – it makes the verses dull, and they then have to work harder with the arrangement and dynamics to lift it out of the melodic sludge. But the hook ‘Love Kills, over and over’ is great – almost like it comes from a better song than the rest of it. Oooh nice middle 8 – Db to A – wasn’t expecting a major third drop from the tonic chord in such a diatonic song. And the big return to the repeated chorus is gratuitous but entirely justified. The memory of this chorus is slowly erasing the trauma of listening to that verse melody.
66%
05 Spain • ESDM • “Contigo hasta el final” (With you until the end)
Big anthemic pipes intro in Ab major, into Ronan Keating-style plain vanilla acoustic pop guitar strumming. It picks up nicely in the classic wedge of cheese style. And here’s the chorus. The romance languages sound so great with big singable vowels. But I think this might be style over content. It’s a very ‘produced’ chorus, with big vocals, but for me the dynamic leaps between the big chorus and small acoustic bits are too obviously contrived to create peaks for the listener. Not bad at all, but not interesting enough to rise above the pack.
54%
04 Finland • Krista Siegfrids • “Marry Me”
This is more like it. Punk-pop no-nonsense verse. F-Gm-Eb-Bb loop for most (all?) of it. Chorus is cracking – really simple and extremely singable. The ‘o-o- a ding dong’ is classic Eurovision and is effectively an extra chorus for free. Oooooh! Rock breakdown section! That was unexpected. And it’s a crazy 142BPM – excellent up-tempo fun to be had. I have no comment to make on the gay kiss. This is musicology, not sociology.
74%
03 Moldova • Aliona Moon • “O mie” (a thousand)
Also in Dm, like the previous one. But the order is randomised, so unavoidable, I guess. Four-chord Dm loop for the verse. Fair enough. I like the descending melodic fragment on which the chorus is based but it’s not singable enough for the crowd. And now the key change – nicely done. They’ve left enough pitch room for the vocal pyrotechnics, and she’s obliging well. In Leona’s frock. Pretty good, and pleasingly melodramatic, but too shrieky to do really well, I think.
57%
02 Lithuania • Andrius Pojavis • “Something”
Dull verse. And this guy is singing nearly all of it so far below middle C. I’m hoping for big pitch peaks later. Mediocre vocal. Errrr… was that the chorus? I missed it. The chorus is hardly higher in pitch than the verse. “Because of the shoes I’m wearing today…” – is this really a reason to fall in love with someone. Harmonically it sounds like they can’t decide what chords to play – the changes to F and to Dm always sound like they are created by some kind of harmonic-randomiser plugin. Hmmm. I’d quite like to have a go on one of those.
43%
01 France • Amandine Bourgeois • “L’enfer et moi”
The verse sounds like Another Brick In The Wall slowed down to 90BPM and transposed into C#m. I do like the lift into the relative major (also taken from ABITW). The chorus is trying to succeed on pitch breadth, I reckon. That high C# octave works pretty well, but makes it less singable by the crowd. It’s great to have some good solid rock opening the show. But it won’t win.
Opening anthem
When I heard that choral intro I wondered why it all sounded like an ABBA masterpiece – skipping cross rhythms, playful inversions, massive anthemic chorus, loads of big vowels. Then Graham explained that it was the new Eurovision anthem We Write the Story written by Benny and Björn (with Avicii).
Oh and they’ve gone for the key change. Had to be done. Now the mixolydian overdriven guitar countermelody riffs are coming, in between the chorus phrases. Just like the Voulez Vous album. Heaven.
Take me down like I’m a four-chord loop
I’ve been analysing the PPL’s list of the top 10 most played pop songs of 2012, and discussing it today on BBC Radio Ulster with music journalist Chris Jones.
Here’s the list, and I’ve made a playlist of all the songs;
- 1 Jessie J – Domino
- 2 Gotye ft Kimbra – Somebody That I Used to Know
- 3 Emeli Sandé – Next to Me
- 4 Maroon 5 – Moves Like Jagger
- 5 David Guetta ft Sia – Titanium
- 6 Olly Murs – Dance with Me Tonight
- 7 Kelly Clarkson – Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)
- 8 Rihanna and Calvin Harris – We Found Love
- 9 Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe
- 10 Maroon 5 – Payphone
From memory, I recalled that all of these songs had some similar sonic characteristics, so I did some basic analyses to see which music/lyric elements they shared. I found the following;
- All of them are love songs of one type or another
- 3 of the love-related lyrics include references to dancing
- 5 of the songs have a tempo of 128 BPM (or pretty close)
- The lowest tempo is Next To Me (96BPM)
- The highest tempo is Dance With Me Tonight (a crazy 166BPM – but it’s a 1950s pastiche)
- All the songs are in 4/4 time (OK, pretty obvious, that one)
- 6 of the songs use 4-on-the-floor kick drum in the chorus
- All of the songs use four-chord loops over 2, 4 or 8 bars
- 5 of the songs use one four-chord loop throughout
- All of the songs are in chorus form (none are AABA) and most have very similar forms
- 2 of the songs contain specific references to other hits (Titanium opens with a sample from Every Breath You Take and Dance With Me Tonight uses the 8-bar chord loop from Stand By Me)
Some numbers;
- Mean average intro length is 11 seconds
- Mean average BPM is 124.4
- Mode and median intro length is 4 bars
Here are my stats if anyone wants them. Methodology note – I measured the BPM using a click-along manual counter (BPM Counter widget for Mac) so some of the BPMs might only be accurate within a tolerance of 1 or so. Corrections welcomed.
What can we conclude from this? Well, it certainly appears that the centre of popular mainstream has some pretty clear norms. Previous readers might remember that I ascribe some of this to economic Darwinism applied by listeners to songwriters via the marketplace. One might argue that the PPL list itself is unrepresentative, as it mainly represents songs that are playlisted in large numbers (i.e. it’s a DJ/radio station poll rather than a true measure of listener interest) but I don’t agree with this point of view. Yes, playlists influence listener preferences, but any radio station that didn’t play songs that people liked would lose listeners overnight. And the playlist does also include TV performances and venues – including pubs, shops etc. I think it is impossible to argue that these songs are anything other than extremely popular. Which, for me, makes them worthy of analysis.
I am of course fascinated by the prevalence of four-chord loops here (more in this annual top 10 than in any previous chart top 10 I’ve analysed), and I wonder if, in some types of mainstream song, 4-chord loops have become like choruses, breakdowns or intros – they’re just a part of the form that becomes a musical constant against which the track’s variables (lyric, performance, melody, production) are contrasted. Certainly when listening to them I don’t get bored by the loop itself. I’ve briefly alluded to chord loops as an evolved constraint before.
Most surprising to me was the prevalence of 128BPM. Not just 120+, but almost exactly 128BPM, in half of the songs. The mean BPM (124.4) is a fair bit higher than the mean average over the previous 60 years of US/UK chart hits (around 119BPM). Only Emeli Sandé is keeping us relaxed (96) and only Olly Murs is crazily jivin’ (166BPM).
All of this is to be poured into the songwriting creativity studies that will form the PhD thesis to be published in late 2014.
“You Won’t See Me” – in search of an epistemology of collaborative songwriting (abstract)
Here’s a forthcoming paper I’ll be presenting at the ARP conference this year in Québec. I’ll publish the full paper here later in the year. Here’s a paper I presented at the 2010 ARP conference (perhaps less glamorously, but no less interestingly, in Leeds).
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2013 ARP Conference
The 8th Art of Record Production Conference
July 12th – 14th 2013
Université Laval, Québec
“You Won’t See Me” – in search of an epistemology of collaborative songwriting
Joe Bennett, Bath Spa University
Abstract
Collaborative songwriting is an effective music industry creative working model, and a significant number of hits have been written by teams[1]. However, little is known about the operational specifics of the creative processes undertaken by successful songwriters, and academic research into songwriting creativity is constrained by a number of methodological challenges. This paper aims to analyse and compare the observation methodologies available to researchers, and to evaluate the reliability of the available evidence bases. Analysis of a finished creative work such as an audio recording may tell us little about the way it was created, so the search for usable evidence should perhaps start with the songwriters themselves. John Sloboda[2] identifies four methods by which we may gain understanding of a composer’s creative process – examination of manuscript; ‘general and retrospective’ interviews with composers; ‘live’ observation of composers; and observation of improvisatory performance. The first and last of these are discounted, respectively, because of the lack of iterative music notation generated by most songwriters, and also due to the non-real-time nature of songwriting, particularly in a technology rich environment such as a studio. This leaves interviews or real-time observation, but these two methods’ integrities, and even their status as primary sources, may be questionable. Interview subjects, for a variety of personal or economic reasons, may not be incentivised to provide reliable information to researchers about the reality of their creative processes. Real-time observation of a collaborative songwriting session partly solves this problem, but generates massive amounts of qualitative data, which must be reduced, necessarily destructively, to a manageable size before it can be a meaningful and usable research evidence base.
When these data have been evaluated and analysed, the researcher is left with an overarching philosophical question, common to much creativity research, and addressed by Csikszentmihalyi[3] and Boden[4] – does a case study only become meaningful after the work is proven to be societally ‘successful’? The paper will discuss approaches to this problem and possible strategies for triangulating evidence bases, toward an informed understanding of the collaborative songwriting process.
[1] T. F Pettijohn II and S. F Ahmed, “Songwriting Loafing or Creative Collaboration?: A Comparison of Individual and Team Written Billboard Hits in the USA,” Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis 7, no. 1 (2010): 2.
[2] John Sloboda, The Musical Mind : the Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford [Oxfordshire] ;New York: Clarendon Press ;;Oxford University Press, 1985).
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Society, Culture, and Person: a Systems View of Creativity,” in The Nature of Creativity : Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, ed. Robert Sternberg (Cambridge ;;New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 325–339.
[4] Sloboda, The Musical Mind : the Cognitive Psychology of Music.
The Song Remains The Same – Why? (from Total Guitar Magazine)
This article originally appeared in Total Guitar magazine issue 228, June 2012. Reproduced by permission. Words: Joe Bennett. Illustration: Naomi Hocking. Click the image to download a pdf.
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Every song is different. Different words, different chords, different melody. If parts of a song sound similar to another, the musicologists get busy and the lawyers move in. But when you think about the way songs are constructed, you might say that they have more similarities than differences.
Dig out the chord sheet and lyrics for the last song you wrote, and play it through. Chances are, it’s in 4/4 time, lasts between three and four minutes, features the title in the chorus, has 4-bar sections, and stays in one key throughout. The chord changes probably occur on the barline or the half barline, and there will be two or three verses with rhymes at the end of each line – all sung by a first person character. Even if it doesn’t have all of these characteristics, it probably has most of them. Almost all successful songs do.
There’s no law that says we have to write songs within these constraints, and yet we keep coming back to them. Why should this be? One theory is that there’s a form of evolution going on, through a version of what Charles Darwin described as variation and selection. The logic goes like this: thousands of new songs are created every day with different characteristics. Music fans ‘select’ – through CD purchase, gig attendance, downloads, viral sharing etc – the songs with the characteristics that appeal to them the most. Most new songs don’t become popular, ie, they ‘die out’, while only a minority ‘survive’.
But evolution can’t exist without reproduction, so how do songs ‘reproduce’? In interviews, songwriters love talking about their influences. When we write songs, we’re affected by all the music we’ve ever heard. Chuck Berry begat the Rolling Stones, and the Stones gave birth to Primal Scream, who had a baby and named it Kasabian. As Darwin might say, songs inherit characteristics from their parents. When we write songs, we add new creative ideas to the mix; if enough people like our new song, it might become a success, and go on to influence other songwriters. Variation, selection and reproduction.
Of course, extreme ideas are constantly being tried. New songs might have long durations, non-rhyming lyrics and unusual time signatures, particularly in specialist genres such as metal or prog. But take a look at any list of classic favourites. Hardly any of them feature these more exotic characteristics, but they very often have some slightly quirky feature that makes them different enough to avoid cliché but not so ‘far out’ that music fans walk away.
Through the efforts of all songwriters, song evolution is constantly trying different mutations, and music lovers keep selecting the ones that they like the most. The result is a form of music that is always changing and refining itself, with each new song being a unique individual but resembling its ancestors in some way. Influential songs have themselves evolved from other successful songs, and so on back into history, presumably all the way to the prehistoric cave gig that started it all.
As songwriters, we already subconsciously know the ‘rules’ of song form, having absorbed them through a lifetime of listening to music. Over hundreds of years of songwriting and listening, songwriters and fans alike have learned these rules and passed them on. Eventually we’re not even aware of them – we just assume we’re going to write an intro, verse and chorus, and be finished before the egg timer pings.
Does this mean that we’re not creative as songwriters? Are we just recycling the same song over and over? Far from it. A haiku has seventeen syllables. Most movies last longer than one hour and less than three. Video games have goals, progression and achievement. Novels are usually more than 100 pages and fewer than 1000. All of these art forms have their own rules, geniuses and classics. Form doesn’t restrict creativity – it defines it.
Most of the really great songwriters listen to lots of other songs. We can’t escape our influences – they live on in every song we write. Darwin may have missed the birth of rock ‘n’ roll by around 75 years, but he sure seemed to know a lot about songwriting.
Where the banshees live…
My K6 phonebox has finally arrived!
Click the picture for a full slideshow of the delivery
Don’t Bore Us – Write a Chorus (Techniques for Songwriters)
This article originally appeared in Total Guitar magazine issue 227, May 2012. Reproduced by permission. Words: Joe Bennett. Illustration: Naomi Hocking. Click the image to download a pdf.
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Here’s a psychology experiment. Tell a group of mates that you’re going to ask them to sing the verse of a well-known song, and that they have to start singing as soon as you reveal the title. Get them to breathe in deeply and be ready, and then tell them the title is… All Right Now. Everyone will sing the chorus, even though you had asked them to sing the verse.
You’ll find this trick works with any title-based classic – try it with All You Need Is Love, Sweet Child of Mine, Smoke On The Water, No Woman No Cry or Blowin’ in the Wind. Why should this be? I think it’s because the title of the song has put the chorus into people’s minds, and these particular songs use the title in their choruses. Rock music history has proved time and time again that music fans like songs with big choruses more than they like chorus-less songs. Take Radiohead – a band that (I’m sure we can agree) has done some work that’s pretty challenging and ground-breaking, including lots of songs that don’t have anything you’d call a ‘chorus’. But if you look up their most popular songs on Spotify or iTunes you’ll find the chorus-heavy Creep right at the top of the list every time. Try the same with 1970s prog rockers Yes, or their contemporaries Genesis. At the top of their respective lists you’ll always find big-chorused tracks such as Owner of A Lonely Heart and Invisible Touch rather than the more complicated ‘album track’ material. Whether you prefer these popular singles or the less well-known stuff is a matter of personal taste, but the message from the download charts is clear – lots of people like big choruses based on a simple title.
We already know that well-loved choruses are usually higher in pitch than the rest of the song, meaning we tend to put more energy into singing them (see TG215’s ‘Rules of Thumb’). But we can learn from their other characteristics too. Have you ever thought about that word ‘chorus’? The original ‘Greek chorus’ was a group of singers who would comment on the action in the theatrical plays of ancient Greece, summarising the story for the audience or revealing the characters’ innermost feelings. In songs, the job of a ‘chorus’ – to summarise meaning for the listener – can be just the same. For a straightforward example look no further than The Beatles’ She Loves You; the verse provides background plot about the characters’ relationships, and the chorus simply chants a summary of the song’s meaning. Not all songs do this of course, but run the numbers: it’s amazing how often a chorus follows that ancient Greek wisdom.
So we know that many successful songs have big choruses based on a simple title, are higher in pitch, and summarise the meaning. Now reverse-engineer the logic. You want lots of people to listen to your songs? Write big choruses based on a simple title that are higher in pitch and summarise your meaning. Simples!
Or it would be, if we did not fear cheese. Lots of songwriters say that they don’t want their music to be thought of as ‘obvious’, ‘cheap’ or – for some the worst crime of all – ‘commercial’. So we sometimes stay away from simple successful ideas like repeating the title in a chorus. Is this ‘cheesy’? Not many Van Halen fans would use that word to describe Runnin’ With The Devil, Jamie’s Cryin’ or Jump, all of which have title-heavy choruses. REM-lovers are pretty pleased with Everybody Hurts, and no Chili Peppers show would be complete without Californication.
There are techniques we can use to break these ‘chains of cheese’ that can push our creativity into unproductive self-doubt – and our songs away from popularity. If you’ve got a good title, try singing it over and over, trying out different notes and phrasing until you hear something you like. Push your voice so you’re singing towards the top of your range, and if it isn’t working or doesn’t feel right, try changing the key or underlying guitar chord and see what comes out. This will give you the pitch peak and might go some way towards suggesting a chorus hook. And while you’re chanting that title, perhaps a summary of the song’s overall meaning is starting to form in your mind. Look behind you. Standing at the back there’s a bunch of Greek guys in masks…
Lyric rhyming in songwriting
This article originally appeared in Total Guitar magazine issue 226, April 2012. Reproduced by permission. Words: Joe Bennett. Illustration: Naomi Hocking. Click the image to download a pdf.
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There once was a guy from Japan,
Whose limericks never would rhyme,
He tried really hard,
But couldn’t do it,
And after a while he gave up!
If you raised a faint smile reading the paragraph above, it’s because the first line of the poem promised rhymes that never appeared. We’ve all heard hundreds of limericks, and the form requires a specific AABBA rhyme scheme, where the first, second and fifth lines rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth lines rhyme as a separate couplet. That expectation of rhyme has been hard-wired into your brain by all the limericks you’ve ever heard.
A similar expectation is built into the brains of music fans through years of listening to popular songs. There are examples of successful non-rhyming songs, but these are pretty rare – almost all songs use rhyme in some way. For the songwriter, rhyming your lyrics really goes with the gig. And if you’re writing in the English language, pretty soon you run into the universal songwriter’s problem: all the best rhymes have been used.
A large part of the craft of writing songs is the ability to be a problem-solver, and rhyming could be viewed as a simple word puzzle, where our task is to find the solution. Let’s say you want to convey a classic song idea such as “You’re the one I love”. There are only three ‘perfect’ rhymes available for the word ‘love’, and they are ‘glove’, ‘above’ and ‘dove’, all of which have been so heavily used by songwriters for hundreds of years that they’re near impossible to use without sounding clichéd. One solution is to choose a ‘forced’ rhyme that doesn’t quite work so well, such as rhyming ‘love’ with ‘enough’ or ‘of’. This works some of the time, but again it’s a well-known rat run for songwriters. The love/of rhyme appears in thousands of songs, such as the 1928 jazz standard I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, which rhymes the title phrase with the slightly tortuous ‘That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby’.
And these rhyme challenges are the same for all of us. The word ‘heart’ is the only really useful noun in English that works as a decent metaphor for ‘feeling’, ‘spirit’, ‘my emotional self’ etc. And the only useable rhymes (apart from the obvious rude one) are ‘start’, ‘art’, ‘smart’ and ‘part’, plus related two-syllable words such as ‘apart’ and ‘restart’. This limited palette is endlessly recycled by songwriters, but the Heart-shaped well shows no signs of drying up. The difficulty is that some of the rhymes can force the song into particular phrases. How many times have we heard ‘back to the start’, ‘tear us apart’ and ‘playing the part’? It’s a fine line between classic and predictable.
Sooner or later – usually sooner – every songwriter runs into what I like to call a Rhyme Trap. This is where you write one line, then end up actually changing the meaning of what you’re trying to say just because you need the next line to rhyme. The character in Oasis’s Supersonic seems pretty macho, and perhaps isn’t the kind of guy who would drink ‘gin and tonic’, but the rhyme works, and the phrase sings well, so Noel chooses singability and rhyme over meaning. He’s a bit of a serial offender – the character in She’s Electric has a ‘cousin’. In fact she’s got about a ‘dozen’. By the third line, the verse’s AAA triple-rhyme structure has run out of perfect rhymes, forcing the ending with ‘oven’ (this is called a double assonance rhyme, poetry fans).
So what’s a poor songwriter to do? Going back to our example, we could simply tweak the phrase ‘You’re the one I love’ until it reads ‘I’m in love with you’. This leaves us with the much easier problem of rhyming ‘you’. Suddenly our rhyme pallette is enormous, giving us well over 30 perfect rhymes including ‘blue’, ‘clue’, ‘do’, ‘shoe’, ‘through’, ‘to’, ‘view’ and ‘who’. Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love shows this technique in action; the song sidesteps the ‘love’ rhyme trap by putting the word in the middle of a line, so that the lyric reads ‘Looking out for love in the night so still / Oh I’ll build you a kingdom in that house on the hill’. No hands in gloves, turtle doves or skies above to be found here. So, if there’s no solution, change the problem. Or take those tricky rhymes and wobbl’em.
