Taylor Swift

Hit Songwriting Secrets (not!)

Posted on by IJ

I spend a lot of time perusing the internet for other songwriting news, tips, ideas, etc., in part for my own curiosity, and also because of the articles I write for Muse’s Muse and those I post here.

American country musician Taylor Swift perform...
American country musician Taylor Swift performing live. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One phrase that always makes me laugh is “songwriting secrets”…whether they are pitching a book or some kind of one-on-one session with you as a songwriter, or maybe they’re just trying to get you to sign up to their website so that they have your email address so they can spam with you with stuff later on;  the idea that there are secrets to songwriting that no one else knows is FALSE!

Why?  Because the songs that are successful are not secrets at all!  They are out there on the radio, on iTunes, on videos and CDs for you to listen to, analyze, reverse engineer and learn from.  If your ambition is to write a hit song, you have literally hundreds of thousands of hit songs out there at your disposal to teach you, they are not secret at all.

So how do you learn from them?  This is the the real “secret”.  What is it about a song that makes it successful?  Studying different hit songs, what they are comprised of and how every part works together, you will get a better sense of what makes it successful.

So let’s get to the songwriting first.  Some will tell you that there’s a secret “formula” to hit songwriting…for instance, always have a particular number of verses, always keep the intro short, always write in the first person, come up with a title first…etc., etc.  Don’t “always” do anything;  each song has its own personality and if you’ve already written a few of them, you know what I mean.  Do you use the same chords every time?  The same form or subject matter?  Of course not.  The only formula you need is to make it good, and “good” is a very subjective thing.  If you listen to the top ten pop hits right now on Billboard, (or country, or any other chart for that matter) you’ll discover a few things.

They don’t necessarily conform to any one key or song form (although as far as subject matter, when I checked Billboard for the most recent top 10 pop hits they were pretty much all about love/lust or breakups/relationships!), but they do use certain techniques to keep the listener hanging on.  Sometimes those elements are simply the recording and production itself, sometimes they are the way the verses and chorus (and/or pre-chorus) relate to each other, sometimes the lyrics and/or music are really catchy.  And often it’s simply the artist or band that has such a huge following, almost anything they do will become a hit.  If your ambition is to write a hit song, then your job is to study what’s out there and come up with something better!   Easier said than done, I know.

But lets back off the actually writing for a bit and consider what else makes a song a hit.  First of all, many songs that you hear are not necessarily “great”, but they make it to the charts because of the artist or band, as I mentioned earlier.  If these artists and bands don’t write their own material, who does?  A lot of them get their songs from their record label, who may have their own writers or have a publishing branch.  Quite often, the same circle of songwriters write a lot of the songs you hear…particularly in country and pop.   You can find out yourself by checking out the BMI or ASCAP records (or whichever performing rights organization exists in your country).  These P.R.O.’s have search able records online, so there’s no secret there either.

So, okay, a lot of it is who you know, in which case, part of your job as a potential hit songwriter, after you’ve come up with some great songs, is getting to know people.   Go to music centres like Nashville or Los Angeles or New York, research publishers who might be interested in your style of writing.  Join organizations that can help you like N.S.A.I. or songwriting associations that give workshops in all areas of the craft and business.  Be prepared to keep learning, learning, learning.  Hang on to your day job and save money for these ventures.  When you meet people who can help you, be polite, don’t shove your CD in their pocket, ASK first.

You also need to be patient.  I met a guy once who wrote his first ten songs and immediately went to Nashville to pitch them.  He was so sure that’s all he had to do…but when he got there he learned pretty quickly that he had spent nowhere near enough time on the writing part before he did the pitching part.  It was a huge reality check. That’s a true story. So remember to use your head and do everything in the right order!

The recent stories about Taylor Swift’s success are interesting because on her earlier releases she co-wrote a lot of material,  but on her most recent release “Speak Now” she wrote every single song herself.  She’s young and she’s smart, getting the experience she needed under her belt first by co-writing.  Co-writing is a “given” in the pro songwriting community…a lot of the songs you hear are written by more than one person, so you should consider doing that yourself too.  Chances are that if you get anywhere near working for a record label, you’ll be thrown into situations where you’ll have to write with someone you don’t know.  And if you’re a singer/songwriter and hoping to make it as an artist, you might take a cue from Taylor.  Don’t assume you know everything…you don’t!

There are no secrets to hit songwriting any more than there are secrets to any kind of success.  It comes down to the same things, whether you want to be a great chef, a successful financier or a best-selling author:  hard work, determination, patience, some talent and a little luck.  Shhhh…don’t tell anybody! 🙂

IJ

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    The Verse’s Purpose

    Posted on by IJ


    In a more recent article “Don’t Bore Us, Get To the Chorus“, we discussed the obvious importance of that part of a song. But while the chorus might be considered the “sexiest” or most pivotal part of the song…the verse is what really sets the chorus up to succeed. Behind every successful chorus is a strong verse 🙂

    So it’s important to understand that the verse plays as crucial a role as the chorus, and that you need to pay a lot of attention to whether or not your verses are doing their job. If the chorus is the summation, the peak, if you will, of the song, the verses are the storytellers that help to make the chorus make sense. And when I say story, I don’t necessarily mean “once upon a time”. This is something that confuses a lot of people at first, because not all songs are little 3 minute stories in the traditional sense of the word. However, all songs need a beginning, a middle and an end. When you look at your verses from a lyrical standpoint, sometimes it’s a good idea to give a one-line summation of each one, just to see how they are adding up within the context of the song.



    For instance, the first verse might be “I met him (her)”, the second “we had a great time” the third “something went wrong”. That’s just a very basic story line, but you get the idea. You can examine other songs that way to see how they work. I took a look at a couple of more recent pop/rock hits, for no particular reason and with no bias toward any, other than the fact that my guitar students have wanted to learn them. One of those was “Bubbly”, by Colbie Caillat. Now I wouldn’t exactly call the lyrics of that song brilliant or inspired, but they are kinda cute.

    Bubbly is basically just a love/lust song, describing how he gives her “tinglies in a silly place” :-). So how do the verses stand up to the story test? The first verse starts with “I’ve been awake for awhile now”. The second describes being in bed and “the rain is falling on my window pane”. And the third verse begins with “I’ve been asleep for awhile now”. The rest of the song more or less describes how he makes her feel, especially the chorus. But the verses do meet the criteria of creating a beginning, a middle and an end. Waking up, fooling around, going back to sleep :-).

    Another song is “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s. This song is almost written in the form of a letter, the first verse being a kind of “hey, how are you and how’s it going?”. “Hey there Delilah, what’s it like in New York City?”. The next verse is expressing the thought that one of these days things won’t be so hard and we’ll have a better life together. The last verse more or less says take care of yourself…something you might end a letter with. The chorus, interestingly, is just one line “Oh, it’s what you do to me.” repeated over and over…the melody is what makes that chorus stand out. It’s beautiful. So in this song, similarly to “Bubbly”, the verses are telling the story, the chorus is simply expressing or describing a feeling.

    The third song I’ll look at is Taylor Swift‘s “Teardrops On My Guitar”. Again, this is a love song…this one about unrequited love. It sets up the story with the first line “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see”, and goes on to lament the fact that Drew has somebody else, but the singer is still pining for him. There’s continuity with the first line of the second verse, “Drew talks to me, I laugh because it’s so damn funny”. And the third verse begins “Drew walks by me, can he tell that I can’t breathe?”. In this particular song, the bridge carries on the story “So I drive home alone…”, and at the very end of the song, the last line is a repeat of the first line “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see”. This is a little songwriting trick that I’ve used myself before. I call it the 360, because the effect is to create a feeling of coming back to the beginning again, coming full circle. In a song like this about unrequited love, the feeling is never resolved, is it? So the effect of the 360 is that the story continues on indefinitely.

    One very critical final point about the verse; the first verse, specifically. The first line has to draw the listener in, so in spite of all of the hullabaloo over the importance of the chorus, pay attention, very special attention, to your first line. Sometimes the chorus is sung first for a similar effect…to draw the listener in.

    So far we’ve only discussed how verses can work best in a lyrical context. But what about the music? Usually there is a musical contrast between verse and chorus, and more often than not, the chorus melody lifts to some degree. I once heard someone say that the chorus always contains the highest note in the song 🙂 I can see why he’d say that because there is certainly is a feeling of a lot of choruses being at more of a fever pitch compared to the verses. Sometimes that is created just as much by the production than anything else; lots of background vocals coming in, maybe strings or other extra instruments being introduced, and the drummer riding the cymbals. This can give a sense of the chorus being louder and “higher”.

    If you listen to the song I mentioned above, “Bubbly”…the melody of the chorus is not all that different from the verses, the notes are simply organized a little differently, they are shorter in length and the chords change more frequently. The melody in the chorus of each of the other songs definately lifts up to some degree.

    “Teardrops On My Guitar” follows the classic contrast of a softer verse and more emotionally dominant chorus. The notes are longer in the verses, the melody is in the lower register, but there’s a kind of intimacy in the way it is sung that pulls you in. Verses do tend to be more low key (I don’t mean IN a lower key, I just mean softer), but if you make them too much so then you take the chance of losing a listener pretty quickly. Where else do you think the line “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” came from? 🙂 Songwriters often make the mistake of paying less attention to the verse melody and chord progression. But just as the verses need to drive the “story”, they also have to be compelling musically, enough so to keep those listener’s ears perked long enough to get to the chorus, if there is one. The performance, of course, also has an integral role. A lackluster vocal performance will make even the best melody a little mediocre. But I digress!

    In “Hey There Delilah” the verse melody is again in a lower register, but the verses are more developed and much longer than the chorus. That’s because they are really doing the job of telling the story because the chorus has only that one emotional statement and that’s it..”Oh, it’s what you do to me.” You could write just about anything around a chorus like that. But it is made stronger by the verses, which do exactly the job they are meant to do, melodically and lyrically–to set the chorus up. Sometimes as you’re writing or re-writing a song, you realize that your verse melody seems to stand out more than your chorus. This is a good lesson…what do you do? One possibility is to switch them…make the verse melody the chorus and vice versa. Or you might want to find a new melody for the chorus altogether.

    So now that we’ve examined the role of the verses more carefully, it’s time for you to go back through your songs and see how they measure up! It doesn’t mean you have to re-write anything that doesn’t work (although that’s certainly a good exercise!), but it will make you more aware of the function of the verse the next time you sit down to write a new tune. And remember, that sometimes things just work because they work, even if they break the so-called “rules”. Think of everything here simply as a guideline…but remember that sometimes it’s just as interesting to colour outside the line 🙂

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