[GuyBarry]

I've written a lot about lyrics recently so I thought I'd move on to a topic that perhaps hasn't been discussed much - song structure.

When I first conceived "Don't Mix Your Drinks" I imagined it as having a simple verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern.  It's one of those songs where the chorus essentially says the same thing over and over again in lots of different ways (another staple of comedy writing).  I had a fertile rhyme word in the chorus, "pears", so I ended up with enough material for about seven or eight choruses.  The trouble was that I only had two verses - there was nothing else I really wanted to say in the verse, since I'd set up the gag well enough.  What to do?

My first idea was to structure it as verse-chorus-verse-repeated chorus, so that I'd have had about six or seven choruses in a row.  I quickly rejected this idea, though, firstly because I thought it might get boring for the audience, and secondly because I'd written a nice little musical link from the end of the chorus back to the start of the verse - it seemed a shame to use it only once.

So then I came up with the idea of having two choruses for each verse, so that it went V-C-C-V-C-C.  That meant that I still had to write at least one more verse if I didn't want to waste a lot of the material I'd written - I could do either three verses and six choruses or four verses and eight choruses.  In the end I settled for the former because that made the length of the song about right, although it meant sacrificing some of the chorus material.  However I still had no idea what to put in the final verse.

A line came to me that happened to fit the tune, "now if you're feeling angry you should write to your MP".  I quite liked that, so I wrote a line that rhymed with it, and then tried to come up with another joke for the last two lines.  I tried it out on a small group of people and it didn't really work.  After much thought I came up with a different joke for the last two lines and a better second line.  There was my missing verse - entirely cobbled together!

It hadn't occurred to me when I started out that structure would be the hardest problem I had in writing the song.  Has this happened to anyone else?

[PaulAds]

hello Guy

structure is something i struggle with to be honest...

i'm quite non-conformist in my approach to most things...so i don't mind not always fitting in with what's expected...but my problem often seems to be that i'll have a tune suitable for a verse or chorus and then find that it doesn't really lead me anywhere afterwards...

i have a tendency to write tons of lyrics once i get going with a subject and so i usually have to scrap quite a lot of material to keep it to around 3-4mins.

i also think that there is so much great stuff around that doesn't fit a traditional structure that it's possible that i console myself with the thought that it doesn't matter when it probably does.

i'm probably just the kind of person who can come up with the odd good song - mostly due to good fortune and a spark of inspiration here and there - but can struggle and lose faith when the perspiration part proves necessary.

arrangements are interesting too...i listened to the full version of "careless whisper" the other day and it seemed to me - i may be wrong here - that the chord structure is pretty much the same all the way through...verse seems to be the same as the chorus and the sax bit...even the change "tonight the music seems so loud, etc" feels like it's the same chord progression...and yet it always felt like

intro - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - sax - middle 8 - chorus - sax - outro

you can - i think - sing the verse over the chorus/sax/middle 8 and vice-versa

and it's only basically four chords i think perhaps it's Dm - Bb - Gm - A ...i'm guessing as my guitar is in it's case next to me...

anyway, if i'm not way off the mark - it's amazing that a song lasting 5 mins or so can sound so good despite appearing to have the most limited of building blocks.

interesting thread!

[MartynRich]

I´m not convinvced structure was your problem here, it seemed more to be a lack of lyrics to make it the length you wanted. There are plenty of songs however, which have very few lyrics and are padded out with interesting instrumentation. In these cases you have to think outside the VCVC format and move into instrumental breaks. This will depend on your musicianship, the style of your playing and the genre. If comedy songs don´t lend themselves to this kind of thing then maybe you can just keep the song short - there´s nothing wrong with that either. Most of my stuff is normally not longer than three minutes because I like short songs, but if they go longer than that it´s because I´m writing an instrumental break as a completely separate part to the song rather than adding or swapping around the verses and the choruses. It obviously has to be complimentary to the song and add something, not just be there for its own sake.

[GuyBarry]

I´m not convinvced structure was your problem here, it seemed more to be a lack of lyrics to make it the length you wanted.

That's not true, because I could have structured the song as V-C-V-C-C-C-C-C-C and it would have been exactly the same length as it is now.  I just thought that having so many choruses in a row would become boring for the audience, both lyrically and musically.  By restructuring it as V-C-C-V-C-C-V-C-C I think I broke it up better.  It meant I had to sacrifice one chorus worth of material and write a new verse, but I think it's a better song as a result.  (Funnily enough, the line that I've been most often complimented on - "it wasn't Cider Como singing Catch a Falling Star" - is one of the lines that I wrote as "padding"!)

In these cases you have to think outside the VCVC format and move into instrumental breaks. This will depend on your musicianship, the style of your playing and the genre.

I don't accompany myself, so that's not a factor as far as I'm concerned.  You don't tend to get a lot of instrumental breaks in comedy because the focus tends to be on the words, but there's no reason for not including them.  One thing I did in one of my other songs when it was too short was to write a monologue to break it up, so that the chord sequence continued through the middle section but with speech over it instead of singing.  That can be quite effective sometimes.

[MartynRich]

I do think the fact you had to write a new verse to finish the song does show you had a lack of lyrics but ok, as you say.

I agree about the monologue over a strummed guitar, it works very well in comedy.

[GuyBarry]

I do think the fact you had to write a new verse to finish the song does show you had a lack of lyrics but ok, as you say.

Well, I had a lack of verse lyrics.  I had rather too many chorus lyrics and had to throw some of them away.

I agree about the monologue over a strummed guitar, it works very well in comedy.

Thanks very much!  The song that I'm referring to actually had a piano accompaniment, but I think the monologue worked well.

[tone]

I'm a big fan of taking song structure out of its usual mould and giving it a different shape. It's a good challenge, because you need a certain amount of predictability in structure to lead the listener in, but too many songs that just go V-Ch-V-Ch-Br-Ch can become boring from a writing point of view. Feeling like I'm stuck in a rut is a sure fire way to lower the quality of my writing, so I'm always on the look out for different approaches when I'm listening to music.

One of my favourite songs is 'what he wrote' (

) by Laura Marling - in part because of its unusual structure. It manages to remain predictable enough to avoid being jarring, but surprising enough to grab your attention.

Even though they're classic recordings, I find Bohemian Rhapsody and Paranoid Android a little too contrived for my tastes. I like a song to feel like a song, so subtlety works best for me. One of my favourite devices is to simply extend/ shorten one of the verses or choruses, or join them together in a new way half way through the song. In a couple of songs I've used a key change, but I always seem to modulate down rather than up - it gives a really nice darker feel.

I'm also a big fan of Neil Finn's arrangements - one trick I've borrowed on more than one occasion is to create a new section for the end of the song, so you'd have something like V-Ch-V-Ch-Br-Br (except I wouldn't call it a bridge anymore since it's not bridging anything). distant sun (

) is a good example.

Would love to hear some suggestions for creative arrangements if you guys have any.

[GuyBarry]

In a couple of songs I've used a key change, but I always seem to modulate down rather than up - it gives a really nice darker feel.

I'm also a big fan of Neil Finn's arrangements - one trick I've borrowed on more than one occasion is to create a new section for the end of the song

One song that does both of these very effectively in my view is "Mr Blue Sky" by ELO - the main song is in F, but when you think you've got to the end it modulates into E flat and you get an instrumental section with entirely new melodic material.  It's almost like another song added on to the end of the original one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjPqsDU0j2I

[The first link I posted didn't have the final section!]

[adamfarr]

Hate having the wrong material for the wrong places! On a couple of occasions I have ended up changing what I thought was a verse into a chorus or what I thought was a prechorus into a chorus for similar reasons and I don't recommend it!

Light and shade is an important function of this. I sometimes end up with verses that seem more interesting than my choruses which is (usually) not right for the listener. I remember someone on a podcast somewhere talking about middle 8s which often ought to be a high point in a song but in a particular case he thought it would have been more effective to write a "boring" middle 8 which would make for a much more memorable return of the chorus...

I think these things usually just feel right or wrong and it's good to experiment with various alternatives. Transitions between sections are another interesting and under-talked-about area in structure. And prechoruses are very popular in the pop genre currently as a way of increasing excitement and tension before the exploding chorus but I haven't quite nailed that yet...