Since I wrote about songwriting the other day and how I felt it should be taught, I figured why not continue and do a short series on songwriting itself? After all, if you’re a composer, this is probably a subject that you’ll have some interest in. I’ll try to cover a variety of topics so that there is something in it for everybody. If the subject doesn’t interest you, you’ll probably want to shy away from this blog for a while. Having said that, let’s begin.
Today I want to talk about keeping your song on course. This is probably one of the biggest problems that new composers have. They start out in one direction and end up in a completely different place from where they started. When you do this, you confuse your listener. He can’t follow how you got from point A to point B and as a result, the song experience is less than it could have been.
What do I mean by keeping your song on course?
Here’s an example.
Imagine you want to tell a story about how you met this girl when you were a little kid. Maybe you were both 6 or 7 years old. And you want to tell the story in a way where you end up with the two of you getting married when you’re, say, 25.
How would you go about doing this while keeping the song on course and going in a straight line?
Probably the simplest way would be to tell about different time periods in your life. You might start with when you were 6 or 7 and then maybe jump ahead to when you both got into high school at age 13 for the next verse. After that, you might focus on the years when you went to college together. Maybe for the next verse you talk about the start of your professional lives apart, how you each went in such different paths and seemed to drift apart. But then in the last verse you reach that magic age of 23 or 24 when you found each other again and got married.
Notice how the song takes a very direct path from point A to point B? It flows. Even though there was that period of time when the two of them drifted apart, the timeline was consistent. There was no jumping from past to future to present to all over the place. You told the story in chronological sequence. That kept the song on course.
Time is one way to keep your song on course but it’s not the only way.
Another way to keep your song on course is through mood.
Let’s say you want to write a song about the way you feel. How are you going to do that? Well, if you want to keep the song on course, you’ll pick an emotion that describes the way you feel. It can be happy, sad, angry, aroused, whatever. After you pick the emotion, you make sure that every verse in your song deals with that emotion. You don’t want to jump from happy to sad to, well, you get the picture. Your audience won’t be able to follow you if you do that.
Here are two songs that I just popped out of my head focusing on mood. I’ve written three verses for each one just so you can get a bit of an idea.
Every time I see you
My heart starts to race
I feel like a sprinter
running in place
You make my blood boil
You make my hands sweat
I swear that I will have you
I swear I’ll have you yet
I think my head will explode
If I don’t have you soon
And they will find my body parts
Up there on the moon.
I think it’s pretty obvious what the guy is feeling in that one, right guys? Notice how that feeling of “tension” (it’s a family blog folks) continues throughout the song until he finally can’t take it anymore and ends up, well, you know.
Now, let’s take this mood.
The moment that I saw you
My fist clenched oh so tight
I saw red in every shade
And darkness in the light
My eyes they burned right through you
My mind a lethal box
I pictured you in prison
Pounding on those rocks
I can’t contain my outrage
At seeing you go free
I swear one day I’ll get you
For what you did to me
It’s quite obvious what this person is feeling is not all warm and fuzzy inside. He’s pissed to put it mildly. And thus, we’ve kept the song on course by sticking to one emotion, however you personally want to describe it. You could call it anger, rage, hatred, whatever. But it’s pretty consistent throughout the song in how it is expressed and without actually using the words anger, rage, hatred or whatever. You paint pictures of emotions by describing the emotions, not using the word itself. If you can do that effectively, you’ve taken a big step in writing a good song.
Now, it is quite possible to write a song that does not stay on course and still have it be a good song.
For example, you can write three verses, each talking about something completely different that seem to have nothing in common with each other and yet intrigue the listener because they wonder where you’re going with this unusual tale.
And then, in the fourth verse, you tie it all up with a little bow and the listener says, “Oh, I get it. I see how those 3 things are all related now.”
Lots of songs do that and it’s usually the last chorus that actually does the tying up. It could be a play on words that connect the three different ideas.
So there are exceptions to every rule. But by knowing the rules, you can know when to break them and how.
Keeping a song on a course is certainly not a rule, but it gives you a better shot at keeping your listener interested all the way through to the end of the song.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim