There are many musical forms, although you might not be aware of that if your knowledge is limited to modern popular music. Oh, yeah, all kinds of forms.
The basic song form that is commonly used now is pretty flexible, which is probably why it’s so popular. You start out with a piece of a song. A verse, a chorus, maybe four lines, maybe eight, however it comes together. Aerosmith’s regular formula is to start with a chorus. Steven Tyler says that if you’ve got a good hook, you can write a song around it. It’s the same method that Merle Travis, the great Country picker, liked to use. He would take one line and write the chorus backward from that line, making it the final one. Then he came up with verses that led to that chorus.
AC-DC has simplified the process even more. Since the death of Bon Scott, the standard AC-DC song takes the title and repeats it four times. There’s your chorus. Some of Bon’s tunes used to be a little more free form, but the Brian Johnson era has been their most successful by a long ways.
There are four basic elements of music; melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Those are all part of even a line from a song. You put together a group of lines, you have a verse or whatever. What you do with the lines, and the groups of lines, becomes the form.
Let’s say you’ve got a verse. Let’s write one, right now, all right?
Oh, baby
I love you
‘Deed I do
Really do
Whew! Look out, Lennon and McCartney! All right, there’s a verse. Let’s call that A. I don’t know what music you hear in your head for that, but let’s say it’s sixteen bars long. In the key of C, so the piano players can do it without any black keys. So it’s four bars of C, four bars of F, four of G, and back to C for the final four. Now, let’s do a second verse.
Oh, honey
Glad you’re mine
All the time
Dipped in slime.
We’re in a hurry, here. Same chord progression. Now we haven’t discussed a melody, tempo, instrumentation, or any of that. We have the basic rhythmic structure and the harmony, and that’s it. But that’s enough to show how a basic song is written. So we have pattern A, then we repeat it. A A. Now we need a chorus.
Baby honey mine
Guess that makes me yours
Gee, that’s really fine
Going? Shut the doors.
Keeping up? Okay then. Change the chord progression around a bit. Two bars of F, four of C, two of G, and repeat. That keeps it the same length as the verse, although it’s not necessary. But an important factor is that it ends on the V (five) chord, which leads back into the next verse. Oh, yes, there’s another verse. So let’s call this chorus the B section.
Right now, we have three parts to our song; A, A, B. Oh, all right, let’s just repeat the first verse and stick it at the end. Some great songs were done that way. Check out your hymnbook next time you’re at church. Of course, the sky’s the limit. We could do a lot more. Chorus again, then another verse, or write a third section and have that be the bridge. That would be C.
Let’s take a quick look at a popular, highly regarded song; Hey Jude, by the Beatles. It’s laid out like this:
Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge, which is that na-na-na-nananana part.
Or, A A B A B C.
This is basically how songs get written. Sometimes it’s that mathematical, by people who know how it’s done. Sometimes it’s practically by accident, by people who get lucky. The standard song form is so ubiquitous now, it’s pretty easy for even an unschooled amateur to at least know if he’s done it right.
Let me give you an example. You’ve given a kid a ream of paper and told them they can draw anything they like. Sky’s the limit. So they grab a pencil and begin. They start off with pictures of family, pets, things they know. They put away the pencil and get crayons, colored pencils, water colors, oil paints, pastels, and so on. They move on to pictures from their imaginations, which could be things that don’t even exist or have any conscious meaning.
You would think that this kind of freedom, with this much access to materials, that the kid would be able to reach to the heights of artistic accomplishment. And yet, when you gather the pictures all together, you suddenly realize that they’re all 8 ½ by 11 inches and have a white background. All 500 of them.
It’s kind of like listening to the radio. Song after song, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, one after the other. Switch from classic rock to country to easy listening to alternative and on and on. Different styles, themes, sounds, but in basic ways all the same; all 2 to 4 minutes long, constructed from verses, choruses, and bridges.
This century has been an interesting one from a musical standpoint. On the one hand, every time you turn around there are different sounds available and they’re put together in different combinations. An orchestra of instruments has been divided, recompiled, reconfigured and added to with yet whole new orchestras of instruments. To the strings, horns, and percussions of old were added electronic synthesizers and differing systems of amplification and recording, as well as effect treatments.
And yet for all this experimentation with tone and timbre, with rhythm, harmony, and melody, the basic form of composition has settled into what can only be called a deep rut. A perfect example of this is the band "Primus," which has certainly stretched the sonic boundaries of what can be done with guitar, bass, and drums. And yet, most of their pieces are still verse, chorus, and maybe bridge constructions of three to five minutes.
It’s like having a fenced-in yard in which you keep a dog. The dog changes shape until it’s a caribou, a tiger, a gerbil, or a sperm whale, and yet the size of the yard never changes. And it still can’t break free. So now that you’ve seen the fence, here are some listening recommendations that might help you find a way out of the confines of 20th-century song form.
U2
These guys hit popular music back in 1980 as if they just stepped off the mothership from another world. They wrote and played like they were just inventing music themselves. Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was the only trained musician in the group, and none of them knew how to write songs. They used this to their advantage and simply did what sounded best to them. I think it’s telling that Bono, upon accepting the Grammy award for Song of the Year for "Beautiful Day" laughed because the song had no hook. Check out their first album, "Boy," or middle period stuff like "Unforgettable Fire" and "Joshua Tree."
Frank Zappa
I could make a long list of rock songwriters who play around outside the norm, but nobody did it better than Frank. He considered himself more jazz than rock, and jazz has never really been comfortable claiming him either. He was actually more of a disciple of avant-garde composers like Edgar Varese and Aaron Schoenburg than any popular songwriters. The difference between Frank and his inspirations was that Varese, Schoenburg and their ilk made music that is all but unlistenable. They had to explain the intellectual basis for their music to get anyone to listen to it. Zappa, on the other hand, took the same intellectual groundings and made exciting, interesting, and sometimes even danceable records with it. His crude sense of humor was what tended to attract people’s attention, but the music was incredible. He made over fifty albums, and just about all of them are amazing, but some are rather difficult to stomach unless you’re really into toilet humor. I recommend "One Size Fits All," "Roxy and Elsewhere," "Freak Out," and "The Yellow Shark" for starters.
Progressive Rock
In the seventies there were a lot of bands that added synths and maybe a violin or a flute to standard rock and roll and called it progressive. Then, there were the real ones that rose above the pretenders. Groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Hawkwind, Nektar, Gentle Giant, and on and on. Extended composition was the order of the day, and album-length compositions were the coin of the realm. Plus, people came out of these bands after they broke up and stretched even further, usually in obscurity but the stuff is out there. Here are some of my favorite mind-stretchers:
Yes – "Close to the Edge"
ELP – "Tarkus"
Genesis – "Foxtrot"
Gentle Giant – "Power and the Glory"
Todd Rundgren – "Utopia"
Jethro Tull – "Thick as a Brick"
That’ll keep you busy for a while.
Jam Bands
As much as I dislike the Grateful Dead and Phish, the movement that grew in their wake has some pretty cool stuff. As a young songwriter, I was captivated by the notion that music moved in a linear fashion, but visual art like painting and sculpture was outside the boundaries of time. I contemplated the idea of music that could exist outside these boundaries. Then one day I realized that jam bands did this all the time. A good jam tune really had no beginning or end, just an endlessly revolving middle. Recordings do not really do this music justice, but even so I would direct you toward the work of Duane-era Allman Brothers like "Eat a Peach" and "Live at the Fillmore" for this genre at its best. Most good jam bands occupy a loosely-knot left field between country and blues. Just google "Bonaroo" for good links.
Jazz
That’s an awfully big area to cover. For our purposes today, look to Duke Ellington, especially "The Great London Concert" and his later bebop-influenced stuff. Also Miles Davis, who never stayed in one place too long. There’s also modern Free Jazz to consider. One particular album I would recommend for its sonic bravery is one from 1973 by guitarist John Abercrombie and keyboardist Jan Hammer, called "Timeless." It’s named that because they shied away from even using time signatures. Just about anywhere you go in Jazz, you’re going to find something interesting. Jazz was, and should still be, about breaking boundaries.
Classical
This is where the boundaries came from in the first place, in Western music anyway. The chromatic scale and the written language of music came from here. You would be hard pressed to find modern standard song form here at all! The deeper you get into the classics, the more inspiration there is to find. And many of these ideas have not even been scratched for use by a rock band. Just think of it; a whole palette of idea, just waiting for electric guitars and drums.
Film Score
Some of the most imaginative music of the twentieth century is used for background music in movies. Wanna get your socks knocked off? Put in a DVD of "Singing In The Rain" starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Find the scene called "Broadway Melody." Now, close your eyes and ignore what’s happening on the screen. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, I give up.
I can’t begin to tell you how many movies have good music in them. Most, really, to be honest, and hardly any of them just string together pop songs. You want to get really amazed? Then check out old Warner Brothers cartoons. I’ve got a CD of this music, composed by Carl Stalling, and it’s nothing short of brilliant. A songwriter or musician should listen to this and wonder how anyone could think of it.
So here’s hoping you find in this the inspiration to look beyond the three-minute song.
