ELEMENTS OF SONG

This first part will be boring or interesting depending on how interested in the legal identity of a song you are! But push through – the blood and guts stuff starts in a few paragraphs time…

In Australia/NZ songwriters are represented by the performers’ rights collection agency, APRA (in the U.S. there are two, ASCAP and BMI; in the UK it’s PRS and I’m unsure about other regions). Every songwriter should join and have their works registered with one of these agencies (it’s free… read more here: www.apra-amcos.com.au/MusicCreators/JoinAPRA.aspx).

Where a music publisher’s job (a company who you can assign your songs to under a specific contract) is to actively promote your music and get it placed in advertisements, TV/film etc (these are called “syncs”) and then collect the income on your behalf from reproductions of your music, organisations like APRA deal with collecting money from performances of your music – radio and TV play, venues, restaurants etc who are legally obliged to inform APRA of what music they are playing on air or in their venue and pay them a fee, which they then pass to you.

Interestingly, when you register a work (a song) with APRA, they consider the song 50% lyric and 50% music, and you are required to report what percentages of these components you composed. A subject of constant debate nowadays (and lawsuits) is what exactly the 50% music element is comprised of (i.e. if a session musician plays a solo guitar line and this becomes an identifying feature of the song, should they be considered part composer?).

The old school view (which I personally side with) is that the basic elements of song are melody and lyric. I’ve always viewed melody and lyric as the X and Y chromosomes of song (or X and X if you prefer) – they are at the core of a song’s identity. Your song sinks or swims on these two components. Someone said something to me as a 15 year old that has always stuck with me… “a great song is one that is just as powerful sung acapella around a campfire as it is through speakers with a full band”.

You can change an E minor to a C major in a song, but that’s generally agreed upon as being arrangement, not composition. You can speed or slow the tempo, change a swing to a shuffle, but once again I would consider this arrangement, not composition. The most gifted musicians and all the smartest production tricks in the world cannot hide a dud melody; the most low-quality, badly played demo cannot hide an amazing one.
Tempo, rhythm, harmony etc can be the walls, the floor, the décor of a song, but in my humble (and potentially incorrect) opinion melody and lyrics are the foundation, so I am spending most of the words in this blog looking at these two elements.

1. MELODY
As a 12 year old just beginning to play around with “writing” songs, my songwriting heroes were Alan Menken and his collaborators. Never heard of him? He is the man behind the golden era of ‘80s and ‘90s Disney film songs. “The Little Mermaid” in 1989 (Kiss the Girl, Under the Sea), “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991 (Beauty and the Beast, Be Our Guest, Belle), “Aladdin” in 1992 (A Whole New World, Friend Like Me) and “Pocahontas” in 1995 (Colours of the Wind) are all his… and these are only the Oscar nominated songs from these films!

I would say that in my early years of writing, my biggest influences were Alan Menken and the classical sonatas I was playing as part of my piano study. To me as a young girl, Menken and Mozart (not that I’m comparing the two) were the melody masters. When playing their songs, I was moved without ever having given them permission to move me.

I think you can learn to write melody to an extent, but to be honest, I think natural gift plays a massive part. All the writers I admire seem to have some inherent “knowing” and intimacy with melody that cannot be learned.
In saying that, so we all don’t get completely depressed, here’s at least a few things to think about that *might* help. (Maybe… I hope…)

1.1 Journey
A great melody takes you on a journey. A chorus melody of an uplifting song will often jump up in the scale and provide the “lift” that the lyrics typically mirror. Interesting melodies make use of intervals. Major thirds, minor thirds, major fourths… I personally tend to be obsessed with using major sevenths and suspended notes in melodies (and chords for that matter). Have a play around. Think about the journey you want the song to take you on.

See down the page at 2.1 for more on this.

1.2 Cohesion with Lyric
One of the key question I always ask myself about my songs is: “Is my melody mirroring what my lyric is saying?” (and vice versa). I usually find that one will always point me toward the other.

With C.S. Lewis Song, the lyric was largely led by the melody – I would get the various melody lines in my head and ask myself what they were saying. Same with ‘Arithmetic’ from What to Do with Daylight. I wrote multiple sets of lyrics for that song before the right words began to form, in the right order. The sets of lyrics I had written prior to the right ones were perfectly fine, but they weren’t what the melody was saying. The melody wasn’t flippant or boisterous – it was delicate, searching, serious – and so pointed me away from what the words shouldn’t be.

1.3 Meter (Rhythm) in Melody
I have verse melodies that use a limited number of notes and work because the rhythm of the melody is providing momentum and interest. I’m a fan of syncopation (placement of accents or emphases in odd places, around the beat rather than on). If I’m writing a particular type of song, however, I may deliberately write in a simpler, more traditional meter to achieve familiarity, nostalgia or singability depending on the purpose of the song. Think about mixing up the length of your sung notes also… if your verse melody has a quick movement, maybe try longer notes in the chorus and vice versa. Try varying the notes at the end of your phrases. Also, well placed pauses or breaths can help set up your melody for a win.

2. LYRICS
*Disclaimer * I would love to investigate and research in depth what we’re discussing in these blogs, quote other sources, analyse other artists’ material (of which there is ample and superior), however, I began this series simply to share my thoughts from my own journey as a songwriter, so I need to stick to that (because I have a record to write and if I spend all my time glued to my laptop it will never get done!). Please remember that this is certainly not well-researched university standard thesis. ☺

2.1 Journey
Sometimes a lyric feels like it takes you across the world, sometimes only across the room, sometimes just deeper into a particular emotion or thought, or elevated a couple of centimeters above your circumstance… but I think it should always take you somewhere.

Think about the journey that a great novel or film takes you on… Distil those same principles into song form. The notion of “story” and “journey” is something that seems ingrained in us as humans (I suppose it’s because it’s what we’re living), and language and oral tradition are the most ancient way of passing on information, myths, stories.

2.2 Cohesion with Melody
I find a disconnect between melody and lyrics in a song quite jarring and distracting. But when they’re flowing together, there’s nothing better. If the melody and harmony are slow, minory and dirge-like, it’s going to feel very strange if the lyrics are super happy and fun. Then again, sometimes that disconnect can be very interesting or compelling.

2.3 Rhyme
“Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky”

The rhyme scheme of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ is A A B B. “Star” and “are” rhyme, so we assign them the same letter (A), and “high” and “sky” rhyme so we refer to that rhyming sound as B.

Play with different rhyme schemes (rhyme patterns).

Here are a few of my songs from the past couple of albums and their verse rhyme schemes:

Arithmetic (below), Hymn: A B A B
[“I’ve been staring at the sky tonight (A), marvelling and passing time (B), Wondering what to do with daylight (A) until I can make you mine (B)”]
Love, Where is Your Fire?: A B C B
The Thief, Faithful: A B B C
Hosea’s Wife: A A A B

Internal rhyme
This is rhyming two words in the same line (sometimes even twice). I get a kick out of it.

“Making signals with sticks and odd ends and bits” – Love, Where Is Your Fire?
“I’m holding out for what you are about” – Love, Where Is Your Fire?
“If the flesh that I fight is at best only light and momentary” – C.S. Lewis Song
“Is this a soul that stirs in me, is it breaking free wanting to come alive?” – C.S. Lewis Song
“The climate changes, I’m singing for strangers about you” – Love is Waiting

Perfect/Imperfect rhyme
I’m not the biggest user of perfect rhyme (i.e. bed, head, fed), in fact, I quite enjoy the dissonance of clashing but rhyming words (e.g. ‘sticks’ and ‘bits’ as above and ‘morning’ and ‘for me’ in the chorus of C.S. Lewis Song). This is a personal thing. If two words that create a perfect rhyme sound or feel right, I will keep them. Sometimes I enjoy ignoring rhyme altogether, as in the first verse of Seeds (‘Night / field of stars above us / you pick one / we frame it with our fingers intertwined’) or Deciphering Me (‘Friend / it’s getting late / we should be going / we’ve been sat here beneath / these flickering neons for hours’)

2.4 Imagery
Let’s look at a verse from my song “Seeds”:
“Night / field of stars above us / you pick one / we frame it with our fingers intertwined”

There is immediate imagery and subtle imagery at work in this line. The immediate imagery is the picture the line paints – at least to me, I imagine an adult and child lying on the ground in the backyard or on a trampoline, looking up at the stars and making frames for them with their fingers. That’s easy for me though because I wrote it and know what I intended – not sure whether or not I effectively painted that picture for you!

The more subtle imagery in the line comes in by comparing the vast number of stars in the sky to a field, perhaps of flowers, and then the phrase “pick(ing) one”, to underline the metaphor. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

On occasion I’m a little more deliberate and technical about it using imagery. Recently, for example, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek lullaby-ish love song that used sailing as a metaphor (it might turn up as a B-side somewhere, I don’t know). I brainstormed words that came to mind around the theme and sentiment, then (embarrassingly) googled yacht parts, synonyms for journeying kinda words and worked the pieces of the puzzle around ‘til I had a working form of a half decent lyric, which I could then refine. For example I used the word “decrepitude” in the bridge… it described exactly what I was trying to say, but it sounds ugly and ridiculous so I will be replacing that word with something a little more appropriate to the song.

Usually my process is a little more organic (and certainly google-less), however. In bringing imagery into lyric, I’ll write down any individual phrases that come to me that relate to what I think the theme/mood of the song may be at that point and scribe different words that I like that don’t even necessarily make any sense but evoke the right image or emotion. At the moment I’m doing a lot of this… my songs in the past have often been neat little lyrical essays, but I’m more interested at the moment in creating songs that feel more like you’re diving into a painting than reading chronological prose.

2.5 Balance, Clarity/Ambiguity, Grammar/Colloquialism, Voice/Character (1st person, 3rd person)
This is already turning into a novel so I’m not going to go into all these! But they are things that come into play with lyric and are worth thinking over.

3. HARMONY/RHYTHM/TEMPO
I’m going to keep this section pretty brief also, for time and for sanity it’s not indicative that these elements are less important.

If we think of a song like a movie, the melody might be your main character, the lyrics the dialogue of your main character, and the harmony, rhythm, tempo, instrumentation and arrangement I suppose would be both the landscape in the background and the car your character is using to travel through it.

3.1 Harmony
The right chord choices, voicings, even key changes (once in a blue moon – they are pretty out of vogue) will paint the right landscape for your song. Whether the song wants to be a barren desert or a lush rainforest, a tragedy or a victory, a funeral or an icecream in the sun, your harmonic bed can tell this story for you.

3.2 Tempo
I usually always end up having to speed my songs up in tempo, as I naturally feel things very slowly… they sound fine in my head, but when I listen to them back they sound like they’re in slow mo. I always have to keep this in mind when playing live, as everything sounds really fast and hyper to me but it’s not coming across that way through the PA. Be aware that changing a tempo by even two clicks can make a big difference to the feel.

3.3 Rhythmic Elements
‘Albertine’ and ‘Hosea’s Wife’ were both written from rhythm… the strumming patterns inspired the melody, which inspired the lyric and so on.

It was then important in the studio that the guitars and rhythm section (bass and drums) were all working together to complement the rhythm rather than get in the way of it… I suppose this is getting into arrangement now though rather than composition, so I’ll stop.

Congratulations if you made it this far! Next blog I’ve decided will be “Part 3: Mystery”. It will be sooner and shorter!

Thanks for reading friends. ‘Tis truly a privilege to have your ear (or eyes).