Lyrics and Music: Music Theory and Songwriting Techniques for Aspiring Songwriters 9781097464630

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Lyrics
Part II: Chords and Progressions
Part III: Melody
Part IV: Rhythm
Part V: Arrangement
Appendix - Analysis of Great Songs

Citation preview

Lyrics and Music Music Theory and Songwriting Techniques For Aspiring Songwriters

By Willy Minnix

Lyrics & Music: Music Theory For the Aspiring Songwriter Water Moccasin Press Copyright 2019 Willy Minnix All Rights Reserved: No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing by the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages for review. ISBN: 9781097464630 Edited by, Front Cover Image and Interior art, And Book Design: Willy Minnix Printed and Bound In the United States of America First Printing May, 2019 Water Moccasin Press Shrub Oak, NY www.willyminnix.com

To Jonny, My cousin and closest friend, you made my childhood wonderful. I appreciate you more than you will ever know. Thank you for sharing all of these wonderful songs and moments with me. And to Jordan, Thanks for being a great student and friend, and for encouraging me to write this book. Don’t stop following your dreams. Keep writing, you have something important to share with the world. And to Liam, I was afraid of you pursuing a musical path, but your talent is evident. I hope your journey is fruitful, and fulfilling. I’m proud to call you my son.

Table of Contents Introduction Part I - Lyrics Part II - Chords and Progressions Part III - Melody Part IV - Rhythm Part V - Arrangement

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Lyrics & Music

O

Introduction

ne upon a time, boys and girls, there was a magical time period, and though I cannot explain exactly when this time period was, I can tell you that it was a marvelous time. I remember being excited each and every day to rise up early from my bed and turn on the radio. Each and every station had something interesting to play. Maybe the oldies station had great songs by some long forgotten band that perfected their craft when my parents were kids. Maybe the pop station would play something new by Elton John, or Phil Collins, or Peter Cetera. Maybe a new band from England would get played on the radio. Maybe an old forgotten oldies band like The Moody Blues would come out with a new song that blew all their older material away. Maybe an old favorite like the Beach Boys or one of the former Beatles would release a new song. Even if the dial accidentally got turned to the country station, that would be ok, because a group like Alabama might release a really good har3

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mony laced song. Perhaps the Eagles might put out something new, or if you were really lucky, the reclusive Bob Dylan might actually put out something new for you to decipher and enjoy . I remember every single week, my cousin Jonny and I talking about what new awesome song came out that we couldn’t listen to enough. We had taken to recording hours upon hours of radio broadcasts just to capture that one special song that we needed to hear over and over, and then share with each other at our next meeting, typically at our grandma’s house after church on Sunday. This time period was short lived however. Garth Brooks came along and murdered the country stations. Waylon, Willie, Johnny and Kris were getting old, and not putting out as much. Shaniah Twain came along and brought her pop laden music with a country twang and quickly turned the country stations into a morass of music not fit for demented babies to enjoy. We quickly began to feel that the country stations were being polluted by pop musicians who weren’t good enough to make it on the pop stations. The AM stations quickly dropped the oldies lineup in favor of talk shows and Mexican om-pa music. While the pop stations began to divert away from melodic driven music in favor for heavy dark and depressing grunge. While some of it still carried the traits of melody driven music that came before, a great deal was like trying to listen to Stravinsky in his 12 tone era. Yet, for all of that, every once in a while someone who knew how to write a song that would inspire, elevate or grab you with something interesting would sneak through the darkness and illuminate the senses through music. I remember the exact day when I think I realized the end was drawing near. I was helping my parents renovate a rental house that they took care of for my grandmother. The people who had lived in the house previously had been evicted for turning the house into a drug manufacturing facility. I think the cops took out a bunch of pot plants and God knows what else out of there. The people were in jail, but the house remained in a horrible state. They had used one of the bathrooms as a litter box for their cats (a really bad thing for my dad who was allergic to cats.) There were holes in the walls that needed to be patched. The floors were stained with pet urine. The ceiling was falling in places, and all the walls needed a fresh coat of paint. 4

Lyrics & Music

At some point, my mom brought us lunch, and as I sat in the hot steamy upstairs apartment with rolls of nasty carpet around me and dust rising in the air as a single fan blew to try to breakthrough the sweltering heat of the summer, I distinctly remember hearing the opening chords of a song. I instantly knew it had to be an Elton John song, even before he started singing. The first chord hung for what seemed like forever, a C major chord with a D dramatically overwhelming the bass line. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I could felt it in my being as I sat in that dung heap of an apartment, I’m not sure if I would feel it the same way now, but I did then. And I sat transfixed. At some point, as if miles away, I heard my dad’s Sawzall start up as he went back to work, but I strained all the harder to hear that amazing music, as Elton sang of “the One.” And then, as quickly as it began, some DJ was interrupting it with some vain pointless babble that I don’t remember. And I was back to work hauling carpet with my cousin Jonny. I looked over at him and I could see that he felt it too. We had just witnessed the last blast of the magic slipping away. We didn’t know then, but soon Elton would go Disney and Phil Collins would follow suit, and the music we loved would forever be a thing of the past. Well, maybe it hasn’t been all bad since then, but it did signal the long slow decline that slightly over 20 years later would lead to the swamp of horrible music that we are forced to process today. If you are reading this book, I must assume it is because you have decided that you want to write songs. I don’t know what your dreams and aspirations are, nor do I have a lot of advice on how to sell song once you have written them, and in all actuality there are a great number of books and resources out there that will teach you those things. But what I have noticed is that there is not a good single source that has all of what I consider to be important information for the actual process of writing a song. I have spent the better part of three decades writing and arranging songs for myself and other people, and have taught music theory for a great many students. But up until recently my methods have been more experiments and ideas floating around in my head. Some of my recent students have been focusing a great deal on songwriting, and have inspired me to put down some of my methods into an organized form that I hope will help them and you to write better songs. 5

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I believe there is a great deal that can be said for anyone who sits down and attempts to write a song. But just because a song has been written doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good song. Some people write a great deal of songs, but they don’t seem to be able to write anything that is catchy or interesting to a listener. They scratch their heads and wonder why their songs don’t sound like a classic song by the Beatles, or Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. Or why they don’t sound like the popular garbage… um, I mean... songs that they hear on the radio. Perhaps they are missing some key ingredient of the soup that is a good song. Maybe they have one or two ingredients, but there is always something missing. In this book I am trying to lay out as many of the ingredients that are used to make songs. Hopefully, if you find that you feel like the person described above, then you will be able to find something in this book that will help your songs become worth listening to. One of the best ways to write better songs is to listen to better songs. So I have also included several examinations of popular songs that I believe are well written. These are included in the “Song Profile” sections. I hope this book helps you on your way to becoming a great and wonderful songwriter, and launch you on a successful career as well! My desire is that the songwriting of the next generation will churn out a greater crop of songs than what is currently being delivered to the public. Perhaps this book will remind you of or teach you important concepts that songwriters of the past used to make songs that have become legendary. And maybe, just maybe a new “Golden Age,” of music might be created for some little kids who have yet to turn on the radio to listen for the magic that I hope will one day return to the airwaves. Willy Minnix 2019 Note: The Song Selections include a small sampling of songs that I think are helpful in illustrating some of the techniques I cover in this book. Hopefully, you will find listening to them helpful.

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Part I: Lyrics

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Lyrics & Music

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s I sit down to write this section of the book, I am pondering the advice I have heard over the years by different artists as they discuss lyric writing, and how different the advice is from older great songwriters, when compared with modern day songwriters. Many modern day songwriters will stress “avoid flowery language,” and “keep it short,” and “this isn’t poetry,” or “start with a title,” “make sure it’s catchy.” I have even heard in a modern study conducted on song lyrics that the reading level for most modern pop songs is under a 4th grade reading level, with some songs not even registering at a kindergarten reading level. While some of these concepts are useful, I’m not totally convinced these ideas are helping the body of music that is being developed today. Something must be done to combat the drivel that is being foisted upon us each week as new songs enter the charts. In order to fix the problem, we need to develop better songwriters, and in order to produce better songwriters we need to realize that it is important for a songwriter to wear two hats.

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Willy Minnix The great songwriter is both a competent composer, and a competent poet. Song is the marriage of these two elements. (If you’re the type that underlines in books, you might want to underline those last two sentences.) That is why Elton John and Bernie Taupin were able to write some of the best songs ever recorded. Elton John is an extremely talented and highly competent composer. And Bernie Taupin is an amazing poet. When you put the two parts together wonderful songs flow. There are lots of songs on the radio that have interesting music, but the lyrics are pitiful at best. And likewise there are rappers who are able to write and recite what really should be considered poetry, but by not composing melody they fall short of actually creating a song. This trend of devolving the art form of song really needs to be stopped before the art of songwriting ceases to exist. And so my thoughts for young songwriters is that sometimes, in order to go forward, it is necessary to go backwards. One of the things I notice about some of my favorite older songwriters versus modern day songwriters is the difference in the language. Most of my favorite songs are poetic and ambiguous enough to make you think about what the lyrics are saying, but most of the songs on the radio today are direct and not poetic at all, and in general they are just plain trashy smut. Gone is the romance of poetry, only to be replaced by language only prostitutes would have used in the past. Most of my favorite songs have beautiful lines and metaphors, whereas modern songs often have simple lines, simple words and profanity. My dad always told me that an intelligent person can think of other words to say other than profanity. He was probably right. Modern songs seem to lack any subtlety, and where the classic songs I love had a great deal to say, modern songs are filled with vain repetition. Furthermore, I don’t think I’m alone in this. I read an article recently (Feb, 2019) that New York University conducted a study that shows that young people prefer older music to modern music. If this is true, and from my own experience with my students, it seems to be, then something must be done to turn back this horrible trend. A study of the way songs were written in the past shows that there are more ways and techniques that can be used to write songs, and the boring repetitive trash that modern writers like Max Martin keep churning out should serve as an example of how not to write a song, rather than how to write one. Modern music seems to be devoid of poetry. Why is that? Well, when I was a kid people were still required to memorize poems in school. My class was probably one of the last grades in my area that still had poem memorization. I remember memorizing the Raven, and Jabberwocky,

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Lyrics & Music Casey at the Bat and The Village Smithy. I have four kids, and I’ve noticed my kids haven’t needed to memorize anything, let alone poetry. I feel that this is where the break between great songwriting of the past and the drivel that we are being force fed today begins. Of course there are other issues that need to be addressed, but this is where we will begin our discussion of songwriting. Poetry As Inspiration I think if you asked just about anyone who the best songwriters of all time are, many people would probably have Bob Dylan somewhere on the list. Why is Bob Dylan considered such a great songwriter? A lot of people don’t love to listen to him sing, but even people who hate his voice will say they think he writes great songs. His songs don’t seem to follow typical Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus patterns. Many of his songs are not the most musically complex songs. They sometimes don’t even follow a consistent point of view. Sometimes they seem to be visions of the Apocalypse, and other times are lullaby sweet. I think ultimately, what people derive from Dylan’s music is poetry. And a lot of people are missing poetry in their lives, and writers like Dylan are the only poetry they have. I thought about writing a section of this book called “How to write lyrics that don’t suck.” But it occurred to me that if you study the writers who write some of the best verses in the history of the English language, and you absorb the ways that they turn a phrase, or invent new ways of communicating emotion, then you will not be writing lyrics that would be better off in the trash can. Your lyrics will be fresh and inspirational, and witty and singable. Which for all of the controversy surrounding his voice, it seems no one disagrees that Bob Dylan’s lyrics are all of these good things and more. Many of Dylan’s songs are stories, they have archetypal characters and mysterious situations. They sometimes are just snippets of stories. His songs transport the listener in time and place to other countries and other realities even. Songs like “Changing of the Guard,” seem almost Tolkienesque in their other worldliness. But conventional modern wisdom will tell you to keep the story in your lyrics simple, easy to grasp, catchy, straightforward and connected to the all important Title. If Bob Dylan followed this rule then none of his songs would fit with this modern “how to write a hit song” profile. And from listening to his outtakes on the Bootleg compilations, it is obvious that Dylan typically wrote his title at the very last. It was like for him, adding the title was akin to a painter adding his signature to a painting.

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Song Profile Title:

Little Wing

Artist:

Jimi Hendrix

Songwriter(s):

Jimi Hendrix

Year Written:

1967

Song Pattern:

Verse, Verse

Notes of Interest:

Song is in 4/4 time, but there is one bar of 2/4. The chords are interesting, especially the walk down from Bm - Bbm - Am.

Why You Should Listen:

One of the most beautiful songs ever written in my opinion. The guitar work is amazing, and the simplicity of the arrangement works, because the guitar work is amazing.

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Lyrics & Music Let’s consider Elton John and Bernie Taupin. They had a hit record year after year for around 30 years. A lot of the modern way of writing songs can be traced back to their hit songs. Modern songs have a very short less than 10 second intro, they have verse, chorus, bridge structures, and they have incredibly catchy hooks for the chorus. These are all things that Elton and Bernie developed over several years of writing hit songs. But even in a 2013 article in the Daily Mail I read, Elton John was not happy with the state of the modern catalog of songs being promoted, calling modern singers “processed performers,” even calling today’s hits “Packaged Crap.” I think the music industry did a good job analyzing what made Elton and Bernie’s songs hits, and figured out a formula that seems to work, and uses some of John and Taupin’s methodology, but what it misses is that Bernie Taupin is an incredible poet, and that Elton John is a composer that doesn’t rely on the same old stock chord progressions, but constantly experiments with modes, new chord progressions, and melodic modulations that make each song unique and interesting. And he constantly delves back to his classical inspirations for further inspiration. But for this chapter, it is important to consider Taupin’s contribution to these hit songs. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, like Dylan’s, take the listener to other places and times, they introduce us to interesting characters and make us think about things that a modern song would never prompt us to consider. One of his early lyrics, a song called “Talking Old Soldiers” demonstrates this very well. In the song, we are introduce to an old soldier sitting at a bar telling a younger guy about what it’s like to lose everything and everyone he loves. In effect, he is explaining why he is there drinking every night. One of the best lines in the history of songwriting sums it up: “What do they know what it’s like to have a graveyard as a friend?” Compare that to a modern country hit I heard at Harbor Freight the other day which says “I can’t fix the world’s problems, but I can fix you a drink.” This lyric made me want to go to the sharp tools aisle and jab my eardrums out. Now, I grant you, “Talking Old Soldiers” was not one of Elton’s most popular hits, but it does demonstrate a topic that you might not hear on a modern day pop album. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear anything like this on Meghan Trainor’s last album. On Elton’s first album released in the US “Elton John” (although actually his second album), we find songs that take us all over the place. “The King Must Die,” takes us back in time to some point in English history. “First Episode at Hienton,” tells an ambiguous conversation

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Willy Minnix between lovers in a mysterious place of romance (at least mysterious for an American). “Take Me to the Pilot,” delves into the complex mysteries of God; at least that’s my take on it, maybe yours is different, and that’s what is so awesome about poetry. “Sixty Years On,” sounds like it takes us on a trip to the waning days of the Old West. I could go on, but each and every song takes us into a new world that turns the vinyl album into more of a magical portal of imagination than a pop record. I remember this album and the next two, were in my dad’s record collection, and as a kid I used to listen to these like they were bedtime stories. His next album “Tumbleweed Connection” does the same thing, except it transports us into the American wild west frontier and takes us down paths of gunfighters, gamblers, lovers and rogues. It even has a couple songs connected to the Civil War and dealing with being shot on a battlefield. Where are songs like this today? If you examine the next four albums you will find again and again, Bernie Taupin taking us on these incredible journeys of our imagination, much like Bob Dylan before him, and yet each foray into Taupin’s mind produced hit song after hit song after hit song. In the song “Hook,” by Blues Traveler we are told, “It doesn’t matter what I say, as long as I sing with inflection…” I think what John Popper is trying to say here is that with pop music you can get away with saying any old nonsense and people will flock to it. The whole song is a scathing attack on the music industry and the falling standards that had begun to take over the industry back in the 90’s. Popper is right in the fact that it does matter what is said. And by saying it doesn’t matter, he proves his point eloquently. What John Popper realizes is that songs are supposed to carry you away on your imagination to new places and far off times and connect the feelings that we all experience to the greater tradition of storytelling. And that’s what good poetry does. It tells us a story. Perhaps it tells us a story that we have to fill in the blanks and figure out what is being said on a multitude of levels, but it tells us a story nonetheless. In an interview I watched on Youtube, poet Billy Collins was asked how do you write poetry? And his answer was that you have to put in countless hours (he recommended starting with 10,000 hours) of reading poetry. I agree with him, you cannot write good poetry without reading good poetry. Collins recommends reading the big poems too. He cites Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” I would add Chaucer and Beowulf. Read Shakespeare’s sonnets. Read E.E. Cummings. Go read the ancient poems, like Ovid or Homer or Euripides. Read Pablo Neruda’s poems or T.S. Eliot, or Coleridge, or Keats or Lord Byron. Read Alfred Lord Ten-

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Lyrics & Music nyson. All of these people should have a place on your bookshelf if you want to write good lyrics. If you’re a linguist, read some of the French poets, Dylan did, and he was better for it. Read some of the great Spanish poets. Any poetry will help your lyrics improve. And don’t make the excuse of calling your favorite songwriter your favorite poet and only reading his/her stuff. I love Dylan, but I’ve read all of the above mentioned guys as well, because I believe in doing my homework. Get a feel for how language works and what makes it beautiful. And then once you’ve done your homework with the classics, go buy Bob Dylan’s book “Lyrics,” and read his songs as poetry. Recite them to your dog. Make your mom listen to your recitations of “Desolation Row.” Buy Sting’s book “Lyrics by Sting,” and read it. Buy “Elton John and Bernie Taupin: The Complete Lyrics.” Read it. Know it. Absorb it. Buy a Beatles song book and read the songs as if they were poems. I would say delving into poetry like this is the best way to start if you want to write good poetry. It can’t be done any other way. My recommendation for those of you who like homework, is to buy one of the above mentioned books, and set a certain time when you will study. Put on a good album of something that will inspire you, and spend two or three uninterrupted hours reading the poetry book and writing down the things that you think are awesome. If you can do this every day for a month, you will be well on your way to writing better lyrics. Couple this with the technical information that we are going to talk about in the rest of this chapter, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you are writing amazing stuff by the end of the year. Story Telling And Does A Song Have To Be Personal? Some songwriters write songs that seem so personal and when you listen to their songs it’s like looking through a window into their soul. All the pain and heartache is there in all it’s blunt detail. Other songwriters do the same thing, but it’s more cryptic. It’s a little more difficult to decipher what the exact details of the story are about. I think about people like Paul Simon, John Prine, Greg Brown and of course Bob Dylan. Some of their songs are deeply personal, and others appear deeply personal, but when interviewed we find out they were just made up. In my opinion, this is one of the hallmarks of a great songwriter. If we as the audience can’t tell the difference between a song about their real life and a story they just made up, then there is something they are doing that connects us emotionally to the story, and that elevates the song to the level of greatness. How do we go about doing that? I think one of the keys is to always

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Willy Minnix keep in the forefront of our minds as we write what are the common emotions that we all face. Not all of us will have to endure the exact same difficulties, but the emotions of a wide variety of difficulties are the same no matter the vast difference in particulars. Everyone has had fear, and joy. Everyone has felt pain and heartache. Loss and gain. These yin yang kind of emotions are the stock of all good stories. Really good stories even have room for a twist. Bob Dylan has several songs with an interesting twist. I’m thinking in particular of “Jet Pilot Eyes,” “The Neighborhood Bully,” and one he wrote for the Traveling Wilburys “Tweeter and the Monkey-man.” These songs tell interesting stories and keep us on our seat until the end. Some songs have a mystery to them, and we have to figure out who the characters are. I imagine when I hear a Dylan song like “Desolation Row,” that he must have been sitting in a cafe in Greenwich Village looking at the various people walking in and describing them in terms of literary characters that they must have looked like to him. I could be totally wrong about this, but if you think about it this way, the method would probably work for a budding songwriter. Sometimes a song has its roots in another song. Paul Simon took the old Child Ballad “Scarborough Fair,” and married his tune “Canticle” to it to come up with Simon and Garfunkel’s version “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.” It was an amazing bit of harmonizing and counterpoint rarely explored in modern songwriting. Not every song has to be from the 60’s or 70’s to make use of this type of technique. John Mayer on his “Born and Raised” album has a song about a guy named Walt Grace who creates a pedal powered submarine to take a trip to Japan. It’s an amazing song that brings to mind feelings of being trapped in a humdrum life, fear as to the unexpected, determination to succeed, and ultimately triumph as he made it across the ocean. It is so well written that it seems like it must be a true story, but it’s not. Elton John’s song about Levon Tostig was also so well written that people are always trying to figure out if Alvin Tostig is a real person. Turns out he never was nor was Levon nor Jesus Tostig. But the song is so relatable that people just have to believe that they were real people. The story that the song tells does not have to be personal, but the feelings that are conveyed in the song must be. They must help us dig down and ask, how would I feel in that situation? Or make us say, yes, I’ve felt that way too. That’s the beauty of songwriting. We need more than just background noise or a good beat to dance to. We need an emotional story that makes us realize we are far more than just robots.

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Lyrics & Music

Song Profile Title: Artist:

All Along the Watchtower Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix

Songwriter(s):

Bob Dylan

Year Written:

1967, 1968

Song Pattern:

Verse, Verse

Notes of Interest:

Is this song in Am or A Aeolian, or is it in the key of C and never resolves? I’ll leave this up to you to decide.

Why You Should Listen:

The ambiguous nature of the key for this song fits in with the ambiguous nature of the lyrics. The song starts in the middle of a story, we don’t know how it begins, and it ends before we figure out what the song is really about. But somehow it gives a sense of apocalyptic doom, as do a lot of Dylan’s songs.

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Willy Minnix Imagery and the Senses How do we connect with other people? This is more than a flippant question. Stop and think about the last good conversation you had with someone. Did you talk about something that was your favorite thing? Did you connect over a shared misery? Maybe you opened up about a struggle you were having. All of the things that you relate to someone in a conversation are the words that ultimately tell the story. So you have to consider, what words did you use to relate your story? Were they sensory? Did you describe the way that horrible person talked to you left a bitter taste in your mouth? Did you say that girl made you feel so light as a feather? Did you mention that you could just hear the gears turning in his mind? We use expressions like these all the time, and they help us create in our listeners a common link that they can grasp onto to help them feel what we are feeling. When we write songs we want to make someone feel like we are feeling when we write the song (or at least the feeling we think the song should express). We want the girl who hears about how another girl is struggling to dump the guy who treats her wrong, to say, “Oh yeah, I get that.” We want the guy who can’t express how he feels about a certain girl to say, “Listen to this song!” Kind of like the scene where John Cusack played the Peter Gabriel song in “Say Anything.” This is why we exist as songwriters and if we can’t accomplish this then what good are we. And that brings me back to my rant about modern music. It isn’t that modern music doesn’t sound good. Yes, it’s polished, it’s packaged, and it looks good... well sometimes, more on that in the chords chapter. But what is it saying? Country music is banal and basically just praises getting drunk every weekend. Rock music is dark and evil to a point that makes Black Sabbath seem like a Sunday School class on a rainy day. Rap Songs? Really? It’s devoid of melody, and the filth that is expressed is not even worth listening to anyway. Even Contemporary Christian music that we would expect to be preachy has lost its poetry, theology and preachiness for the most part, only to be replaced with saccharine love songs to Jesus. I mean consider this: I was sinking deep in sin, Far from the peaceful shore Very deeply stained within Sinking to rise no more But the Master of the Sea Heard my despairing cry From the waters lifted me Now safe am I.

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Lyrics & Music This is from an old camp meeting hymn called “Love Lifted Me.” Now if you didn’t know, old time Camp Meetings were the most preachy places one could possibly go in the old days. But look at the poetry that is here. We see the metaphor about the ocean, and comparing the cruel ocean of the writer’s sinful old life as opposed to a loving God who helped him. It’s a well written verse. But modern religious music sounds more like “Jesus is my boyfriend, rah rah rah!” I mean it pretty much has lost all flavor in favor for a catchy hook that sounds like something on the pop stations. But think about the imagery in this lyric. It is impossible to get the salt sea out of your ears, or the taste of brine out of your mouth, and these things haven’t even been mentioned. It’s very clever. Even songs of the day that were supposed to be vulgar were more poetic than today. Go listen to “Terraplane Blues,” by Robert Johnson. Many see the car imagery as a metaphor for sex. But if it is, it’s the most poetic metaphor for sex ever written. Maybe I’m too much of a literalist, but I never even thought that it was anything other than quite possibly the earliest car song, until I read an article claiming that it was really sexual in nature. With modern rap music one would never make that mistake. In both of these songs, whether secular or sacred, the author painted a picture for us. We need to paint pictures for our listeners. The songs we write should tell a story, but tell it in such a way that our listeners can truly immerse themselves in it. I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I was sitting in my room doing homework. From the very first line “Is this the real life,” when I heard the harmonies and the natural phasing effect they created, I was hooked. I remember looking up from my homework to the radio that was sitting across the room on my bookshelf. I stared at the radio the entire six minutes or so of the song and when it was done and the announcer was prattling on about other things, I continued to stare. What on earth was that? I remember thinking. And the very next day I went out to the local music store and bought the album and the sheet music so I could study it. I probably listened to it over and over at least 10 times that day. I remember that as vividly as if it were yesterday and it was over 25 years ago. I’ll never forget it. That’s the power of an awesome song. Don’t settle for just catchy, settle for awesome. Catchy is great and important, but catchy is just one step on the road to awesome. An awesome song will be catchy, but a catchy song might not be awesome.

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Willy Minnix Compare “All About That Bass,” by Meghan Trainor with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Trainor’s song is well written and catchy, but no one will be singing it 20 years from now, except for some 35 year old cashier at Walmart, who will have it stuck in their heads from listening to it on the PA. Maybe if this book survives that long, a reader from that future generation will say, “Meghan who?” But I’m certain they will know about “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Methods of Finding and Preserving Lyrics The title of this section sounds like we’re going to be catching and dissecting small creatures, but in fact we are going to be talking about some practical methods of mining for lyrics for your songs. If you do a youtube search, I am sure you will be able to find several videos that discuss misinterpreted song lyrics. Most of these videos are pretty funny, but I am sure that everyone of us has song lyrics that we are sure say one thing, but when we look up the lyric online we realize that it says something totally different. I remember a certain Sting song called “When We Dance,” that I was sure had a line that went, “The Darker Chivalries of Fate.” And I thought, “Woah, how cool is that line? Don’t really know what it means, but I LOVE it!” But when I bought Sting’s book on his lyrics, I read that it was actually “The Dark Machineries of Fate.” Ok, so that actually makes a little more sense, but man, something about the dark chivalries just speaks to me. So why not use it in my own song? I mean, Sting won’t care, because unless he reads this book (which he certainly doesn’t need to) he won’t ever know that I was inspired by that line in his song. This serves as a launching pad for writing your own songs. How many lyrics have you misunderstood, or think of it this way, how many lyrics could you change around from your favorite songs to help you get started thinking about something you might want to say? If you read in a song a line that jumps out at you, and you want to say something similar, maybe reword it and then think of what you would say next. Sometimes when I am writing songs, and I want to capture a certain mood, I will put on a playlist or an album of songs that feel like what I want to write about. I’ll usually go somewhere quiet in my car, like the park or downtown when no one is down there, and try to invoke a feeling of what I’m trying to go for. I almost always write lyrics first when I compose songs, but that’s just me. Perhaps you work the other way around, or you do them all at once. I would advise not doing lyrics and melody all at once. Sometimes it works that way, but what I have found over the years and working around hundreds of songwrit-

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Lyrics & Music ers is that when songs are created lyrics and music together at the same time, one or both sides of the equation suffer. If you do write both at the same time, set aside time to analyze each side of the equation separately. Consider the lyrics alone. Then ponder the music. Spend the time to craft the lyrics. Spend the time to compose the music. You won’t regret it. Now there are other methods that can be used to harvest lyrics. I read an account somewhere, and for all I know it could be apocryphal, but who’s to let truth stand in the way of a good story? It goes something like this: Sheryl Crow met Bob Dylan at a social gathering and mentioned a song of Dylan’s that she particularly liked. Dylan said something along the lines of “That one? Man, that one was just one that came out of the box.” Apparently, Bob has a shoebox into which he throws lines that catch his ear scribbled down on a piece of paper. When the box is full, he starts pulling out pieces of paper and writing down a song made up of the cool lines that he collected. Another Dylan method that I think is also attributed to Sheryl Crow, possibly even in the same story as the above, or perhaps a different version of the story, is that Dylan believed at the time of the creation of this story (who knows if anyone can say definitively “what Dylan believes” since he changes his approach from time to time?), that all lines of a song should sound like they could be the first line of a song. Every single line should grab your listener’s ear and squeeze it till the juice starts to flow out of it. Ok, maybe that’s a strange metaphor, but you get the idea. Brain Juice, yum. Whether these stories are true or not, they do make a certain amount of sense. When I listen to the songs from before Dylan started doing Frank Sinatra covers, the last three albums really did sound like every line could be a first line. And especially when you listen to a song like “My Heart is in the Highlands” it sounds like this may have been his first attempt of using the box method of writing. Because not only does every other line sound like snippets of a conversation, but it also sounds like the off lines are trying to make sense of the box lines. On later albums, it seems that he smoothed out this methodology and put it to good use. Dylan has also been accused of quoting almost verbatim from books that he’s read. In fact, I believe in the book “The Dylanologists: Adventures in the land of Bob” by David Kinney, there is a discussion of a website that tracks these references from song to song. Some people got mad at Dylan for doing this, calling him a plagiarist. But they don’t

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Willy Minnix seem to understand that Dylan is merely delving back into a creation technique that has been used from time immemorial. That of remixing, if you will, the things that have gone on before, only to present them in a new way. Another of my favorite songwriting techniques, which connects to Dylan’s writing down snippets of a conversation, is Paul Simon’s use of New York style run-on sentences. Anyone who has ever lived in New York City will understand what I’m talking about here. It seems like everyone talks so fast just to get a word in edgewise around there. Paul Simon has captured this New York conversation rhythm in a great deal of his songs. Listen to “Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard,” for a light version of this, or “You Can Call Me Al,” for what I think is his most shining example of this style of writing. Well, basically the whole “Graceland” album is full of this writing style. This isn’t a technique that I have ever used in my own songs, because I’m not a native New Yorker, and even though I dearly love the City, it would come off fake if I did it. But you can think about the way people talk where you are from and the particular rhythms of their speech to reflect in your songs. Regina Spektor is another one who does this well in her songs. Of all the modern songwriters that are out there, Spektor gives me hope that melody isn’t dead. I mean, listen to “Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me)” to get an idea of how melody thrives in her music. But she also loves language, and as a multi-linguist, she loves to capture the rhythms of language in her work. Greg Brown does this as well. With his flat Iowan Midwest accent and dialect, he captures the way people talk out there so well in his songs. So many of his songs will transport you not only to the Midwest, but back in time to the 1950’s and 1960’s, and will introduce you to many of the people who worked and farmed those lands for generations. Another thing I want to make sure that gets covered is the use of ambiguity in your lyrics. You do want to tell a story, but you don’t want to include so much detail as to make the song boring. Even a song that’s trying to tell a message shouldn’t be beating people over the head with the message. To bring back Sting for a second, his line in one of the Police’s songs from the Synchronicity album about “Factories belching filth into the sky,” does far more to make one think about protecting the environment, than say Mike Love (of Beach Boys fame), who wrote a song back in the 90’s called “Summer in Paradise.” The whole song is a preachy call for anti-pollution, but Sting’s one well chosen phrase was so much more effective. The French call this le mot juste, the perfect word. Look for le mot juste and your songs will be so much the better for it.

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Lyrics & Music Another example of ambiguity in lyrics is Dylan’s “Man In The Long Black Coat,” if you didn’t know the old Child Ballad “The House Carpenter,” you might not guess that this is a retelling of that old ballad. It paints a picture, and what a picture it paints. Go give it a listen. Right now, just stop reading, and go look it up. You’ll be happy that you did. Now don’t you feel better for doing that? So if there are two important things that we can conclude from our study so far, we see that we must Read a lot, and Listen a lot. These two things will give you a wealth of writing material for years to come, if you commit to doing it every day. And so now that we have discussed the groundwork to get started in writing good lyrics. We now need to turn our attention to the technical side of writing lyrics. The Technical Stuff Inspiration is one of those things that I can point you towards, but you have to delve into those waters on your own. There are some people out there who just are not geared towards introspection and reflections. God did not make those people to be songwriters. If they tried their stuff would not have any meaning or depth. But those who are geared towards deep thinking and listening will probably find that writing songs and lyrics is a more natural activity. But regardless of how you find your inspiration, if you don’t know how to write a poem coherently, it will not translate into a good song lyric. Conventional wisdom of the day is that a song is not a poem, and a poem is not a song. I would argue that a song cannot exist without a poem at its heart. Now it is true that the repetition of choruses and fading outros and things that you would find in a song, do not necessarily translate well to poetry, and when lyrics are written out as poetry, these things are usually left out. But without a poem at the heart of a song, the song just becomes music with words. Maybe it achieves something, but how is it different from something like, say, “Wipeout” by the Surfaris. I mean you could call “Wipeout” a song, but to me it would qualify as more of a musical composition, since it really has no lyrics. Rap “songs,” to me have music and lyrics, but they are not married to each other, and thus, are not songs in my opinion either. I mean, the term itself, “Rap” comes from an older meaning “to converse.” It’s very name means it is a speaking art. Rap music may qualify as musical compositions, but if you take the rap out of the background music, and slapped it down onto another beat, there is a good chance that if

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Willy Minnix

Song Profile Title: Artist:

God Only Knows The Beach Boys

Songwriter(s):

Brian Wilson, Tony Asher

Year Written:

1966

Song Pattern:

Verse, Pre-Chorus, Verse, PreChorus, Pre-Chorus, Verse, Outro (Fugue)

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

One of the unusual things about this song is the instrumentation. It uses a selection of instruments that were not popular for pop songs at the time. It inspired the Beatles to use unusual instrumentation for many of their later albums. It was also the first pop song to make a reference to God. Not only is it one of the most beautiful songs ever written, it is not a typical hook type chorus, yet it hooks you. And the fugue at the end is awesome. 30

Lyrics & Music the second beat is catchy and interesting, then the lyrics will survive there as well. I haven’t really seen anyone experimenting with this, but I am sure it would be a fun exercise. After I wrote the first draft of this paragraph, I stumbled upon an old interview of Bob Dylan from 1985 or ‘86, in which he basically said the same thing of 80’s pop music. He felt that they lyrics were not married to the music as integrally as they ought to be. I had never seen that interview before, but it made me feel validated in my opinions. Hip-Hop is interesting in that it includes elements of Rap with elements of Song. And so I believe in that case the word “song” is a good description for some hip-hop music. Although, lyrically, we see room for improvement. A song then in my definition, is a piece of music in which a poetic element, lyrics, are married to an arrangement of music by using a melody to tie them together. A well written song, marries the two elements in such a way as to be unimaginable for the lyrics to go to any other melody, or the melody to go with any other words. And since it relies on the melody to tie it to the music, then there are connecting areas where both melody and poetry mesh. I will be discussing the melodic aspects later in this book, but for now, we should take a look at the poetic side. Rhyming and Types of Rhyme Schemes One of the things that you need to keep in mind is the use of letters of the alphabet to represent the patterns for your rhymes. A B A B, might represent a pattern where the first and third line rhyme, and the second and fourth line rhyme. Other rhyme schemes could be AA BB, or ABAC. There are so many possibilities that you should never run out of rhymes. If you are struggling to find words that rhyme, you can get yourself a rhyming dictionary or a rhyming app. But don’t forget near rhymes are ok to use as well. Of the types of rhymes that poets often employ, there are an abundance of types of rhymes that you can use when writing songs. I found an interesting article on yourdictionary.com about rhyming. I’ve included my own rhymes below, but if you want more examples, you can read the full article here: https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examplesof-rhyme.html Assonant Rhyme - Also called a slant rhyme, this is when the vowels

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Willy Minnix of the words rhyme, but the consonants do not. Examples: Tub/Hub, Shirt/Birth Consonant Rhyme - This is where the consonants rhyme, but the vowels do not rhyme. Examples: Feet/Fat, Slope/Slip Dactylic Rhyme - In this rhyme, the third syllable from the end rhymes. So you need at the least a three syllable word to create this type of rhyme. Examples: Encyclopedia/The Media. Eye Rhyme - This type of rhyme doesn’t really rhyme in the true sense of the word. It is when a poem uses words that look similar, but might not be spelled the same. In songwriting this technique has become very out of fashion, however in older forms of songwriting from the 1800’s or even in Christmas Carols you might find song examples that use this type of rhyme. Examples: Grove/Move, Plough/Trough Feminine Rhyme - Also called a Double, Triple, Multiple or Extra Syllable Rhyme. It rhymes more than one syllable of the word, but not the first syllable. Head Rhyme - This type of rhyme is also called initial rhyme, or alliteration. It uses the same initial consonant at the beginning of words. Examples: Extra/Extreme, Mile/Midas Identical Rhyme - This is a rhyme where you use the same word at the end of two different lines. This is how you use the word “orange” in a song. Example: I bought an orange/I brought you the orange. Internal Rhyme - Rhyming that happens within the lines of the poem. This is especially useful when used as the last line of a verse, or within a pre-chorus, because it often creates an interesting rhythm, and draws attention to itself, and thus to what is coming next. Examples: The goat wrote a note Light Rhyme - Rhyming a non stressed syllable with a stressed syllable. This is the opposite of a wrenched rhyme. Examples: Dog/Hedgehog, Root/My Flute Macaronic Rhyme - This is when you rhyme an English word with a non-English word. Examples: Itedakimasu/Mass, La Tete/You bet Masculine Rhyme - This is a rhyme where the final syllable of both words are stressed. Examples: Wombat/Combat, Steak Knives/Saved Lives Near Rhyme - These are sometimes referred to as Half, Oblique, Slant

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Lyrics & Music or Off Rhymes. This is a rhyme in which the words don’t quite match, but you make them work anyway. I don’t like to use these if I can avoid them, and sometimes I have rewritten whole lines of a song just to get rid of the near rhymes. Examples: Pen/Pin, Steel/Mile Perfect Rhyme - Also called an End Rhyme, this is where the last syllable of the ending sounds are exactly the same. Example: Cadillac/ Heart attack Rich Rhyme - This is using homonyms to create the rhyme. Example: Through/Threw Scarce Rhyme - This is a rhyme where there are only a few words that can rhyme with the word you are trying to rhyme. The ultimate scare rhyme would be orange. Nothing in the English language rhymes with it. But another example would be something like Towell/Trowell. Semi-rhyme - This is a rhyme in which one of the rhyming words has an extra syllable. Example: Foam/Roaming In songwriting sometimes this rhyme can be used to set up a bridge or a chorus. Especially if the last syllable of the second rhyming word could be heard as the first syllable of the first line of the chorus or bridge. Syllabic Rhyme - Also called the tail or last syllable rhyme. This is probably the most common type of rhyme. Examples: Turtle/ Battle, Fire/Pyre, Bus Stop/Car Hop Wrenched Rhyme - Rhyming a stressed with an unstressed syllable. Example: Greedy/Sea, Singing/Bling Patterns of Rhyme In the same article mentioned above, the author gave examples of rhyming patterns, when you use certain types of rhymes. Alternating rhyme - Rhyme scheme is ABAB; a.k.a. Crossed Rhyme or Interlocking Rhyme . Bob Dylan’s song “Where Teardrops Fall” from his “Oh Mercy” album, follows this rhyme scheme. Inserted or Envelope Rhyme: This rhyme follows the ABBA pattern. Intermittent rhyme: In an intermittent rhyme, every other line rhymes in an ABCBDBEB type of pattern. The pattern can be broken whenever the stanza is finished. Dylan’s song “Temporary Like Achilles,” pretty much follows this pattern. Sporadic Rhyme: Also known as an Occasional Rhyme, this is similar to an Irregular rhyme where none of the lines rhyme. In this type of

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Willy Minnix rhyme the pattern is unpredictable, and often the lines do not rhyme. I have seen this used in songwriting, but it often works best when the last line of the stanza rhymes with the last line of the next stanza. But then that kind of defeats the nature of the Occasional rhyme, but that just shows one of the differences between poetry and song. Thorn line: A Thorn Line is when the writer has set up a certain rhyme scheme, and then purposefully chosen to insert a word into the pattern that does not rhyme. Perhaps the pattern is an Alternating Rhyme, and the entire verse goes ABAB, ABAB, then it suddenly changes to ABAC. This is also a great place to make changes to the chords or melody, when doing this in a song. Some songwriters will use the Thorn Line as a way to begin a new rhyme scheme with another part of the song. Perhaps the new Scheme will be ABAC, ABAC, ABAC, etc. Structure There are types of poems, known as free-verse poetry, which follow little or no structure, may use Sporadic and Irregular Rhyme Schemes, and excessive use of Thorn Lines, we will not be covering those types of poems in this book because they do not relate well to songwriting. But there are several other types of poems that would work well for song. The above rhyme schemes are often grouped together in certain ways, to give predictable structures that have become well known types of poems. Over the past 1,000 years of English language, there have been several types of poems, and several other types that have been adopted from non-English poetry. Just about any of these structures can be and have been used to create a song. Below is a list of common poem structures, and their characteristics. Often you will find that poems are often defined by the number of lines that they have in each stanza. 2 Line Stanzas are called a couplet 3 Line Stanzas are called a triplet 4 Line Stanzas are called a quatrain 5 Line Stanzas are called a quintet and so on and so forth 8 Line Stanzas are called an octave. This is very similar to music and rhythmic notation. Other Popular Types of Poems Acrostic - An Acrostic is created by using a particular word or phrase, and then making a line for each of the letters of the word or phrase. It has as many lines as the word you choose to build the acrostic from.

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Lyrics & Music Also, you are free to use any rhyme scheme that you wish to use. Songs that have used the Acrostic form were more popular in the early jazz era, with songs like “M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me)” and “L-O-V-E,” being famous examples. Haiku - 3 lines. Line 1 has 5 syllables, line 2 contains 7 and line 3 5 syllables. They don’t need to rhyme, but to adapt the structure for a song, you might want some sort of pattern. Perhaps AAB, and then follow it up with another Haiku of the AAB structure. Ballad - 4 Lines, ABAB or ABCB rhyme scheme. If you want a lot of examples of good ballads, check out the Child Ballads. Francis J. Child was the first professor of English at Harvard, and was a student of the Brothers Grimm. Many of the songs from the folk revival in the 60’s and that continue to be popular were Child Ballads, including “Scarborough Fair” by Simon and Garfunkel, “Black Jack Davy” by both Bob Dylan and the White Stripes, and “Lord Randal.” A study of the Child Ballads is a really good way of learning to tell a story in verse. Limerick - 5 lines AABBA rhyme scheme. A Limerick is an Irish poem, and contains typically funny material, but could be used as a song structure, and need not be limited to funny material. When using world poetry, it would be an interesting challenge to link up world rhythms along with the poems to create an exotic song on more than one level. Perhaps using a limerick with a slip jig rhythm would give an interesting song. Sestina - 6 Stanzas of 6 lines each. It also has a closing stanza that contains three lines. The rhyme scheme is pretty open in a Sestina. A song like this could quickly end up like some of Bob Dylan’s longer songs. Sonnet - 14 lines following an ABBA ABBA CDE CDE pattern for Italian Sonnets, or ABBA CDCD EFEF CG for Shakespearean. Some would say Shakespeare’s sonnets could be classified ABBA ABBA ABBA CD. Whichever works for you. Villanelle - 19 lines made up of ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. Line 1 is often repeated in lines 6, 12 and 18, and line 3 gets repeated in lines 9, 15 and 19. The Use of Repetition Regardless of whether you are a church going person or not, you may find this following argument to be of interest. When I was younger it was becoming a popular thing for church songs to become increasingly repetitious. Some argued that it helped “usher the worshiper into throne room of grace.” Whereas others argued, “There is no substance

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Willy Minnix to repeating the same phrase over and over,” or “That’s like a Buddhist mantra, not a Christian worship song.” Or “I miss the poetry of the old hymns.” And the other side would argue, “Yeah but, God repeated Himself in the Bible sometimes.” Anyway, for a long time there was this divide between opinions, and by the time it was sorted out, a whole new fade for writing worship songs emerged, and what’s funny to me is that you still find old people griping about the repetitiveness of “modern” worship songs, when that’s been a passe thing for almost 15 years now. Anyway, I tell you about this little Civil War within Christendom to call attention to something that I’ve been noticing in the Pop World. It seems that Pop Music has taken up the banner of vain repetition where the Christian world once reigned supreme, which is really weird, because it’s usually the Christian music scene copying from the Pop scene and not the other way around. (Most likely, however, it is rap’s influence on pop music that is bringing this about. I really don’t see modern pop musicians running around listening to 1980’s Amy Grant choruses. Although Katy Perry might still do that. That’s a tough call.) I have heard so many modern songs using a very repetitive, sometimes even one note, melody and phrases that repeat over and over ad nausem. I was listening to the radio one day, because when I’m in the car with my wife and daughter, I’m forced to, and almost every song that was played repeated the same line not just three or four times, but sometimes 12 or more times. I listened to one banal song that basically had a verse that was repetitious, followed by a chorus that was repetitious, and then for three hideous minutes, it just vacillated back and forth between both. Couldn’t the songwriter have written something else? Yes, but his method was obvious, and I like to call his method “the cut and paste approach.” This is where song sampling and looping and mixing has become a detriment to the true craft of songwriting. “Oh yeah, I like that part. Let’s just paste it here, and here, and here, oh yeah, let’s put it here and here as well.” I suppose if your objective is to mindlessly lull your listener into a stupor then this type of repetition is fine. But if you actually want to say anything worth while, then my rule of thumb is to never repeat anything more than three times, unless you are creating some type of fugue type section in a part of your song. Then whatever is repeating will need to repeat until the fugue is finished, but when you’re making a fugue, the repetition is not vain repetition, and actually serves as a structural part of the piece. We will talk more about this in the melody

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Lyrics & Music section, so don’t fret if you don’t know what a fugue is yet. You will learn. Suffice it to say, repetition can serve a purpose, but too much repetition can easily be a bad thing. Important Words vs Unimportant Words The other day, I was helping one of my students work through a song that she was writing, and she mentioned that once she developed a melody, she found that some of the words that she wrote no longer fit. This can be a very common problem when writing a song, and there are essentially two ways to deal with it. The first way is to rewrite the melody. And we can discuss that more in the chapter about melody. But sometimes, you have a melody that seems perfect. So you might want to move onto the next technique. Any serious writer will always be on the lookout for words that are extraneous. You do not need every single word that you write to be in the final product. Always look for words that repeat, or that are filler. Words like an, the, but, or even I, me or you, might not be necessary if the line makes sense without them. Perhaps you established the proper pronoun in an earlier line, do you really need to repeat him, me, you or we in the line that seems to need adjusting? On the other side of the coin, there are words that are so important, that maybe you don’t need anything else around them. Perhaps that one and only word is so potent that merely having it take up a line of its own will work. I think this could be a very powerful technique, but you need to be careful not to overuse it, because it could become cliche quickly. One final thing to consider in this section, is are there other words you could use that have a shorter syllable count? Perhaps your three syllable word might have a two syllable equivalent, and would fit the melody better. If you think through these types of issues, you will find that often you can match your words to your melody with ease.

Verses, Choruses, Pre-Choruses and Bridges Finally, we need to address a topic that poets do not need to concern themselves with, and that’s the issue of song structure. Songs have their own building blocks that poems often do not have. Most songs have either a verse or a chorus or both. Some songs called “Choruses” are simple songs that only have a catchy chorus that are sung over and over. There are a lot of camp and church songs that fit into this category. Some of these songs once had verses, but no one sings them, and so only the chorus remains.

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Willy Minnix Other songs are verse only songs. These songs tend to be Hymns and Ballads. Hymn structure songs often have four our five verses and sometimes, can have a refrain. A refrain is a line that repeats at the end of every stanza, but it is obviously a part of the verse. A well written refrain completes the hymn structure, and it would fall apart without it. A good example of this is Bob Dylan’s song “It’s All Good,” where the line “it’s all good,” is used as the refrain. The song is a humorous look at all sorts of horrible things that could happen (my favorite being the “cold blooded killer stalking the town,”), and how the popular phrase “it’s all good,” is in fact an idiotic expression. Perhaps the next form of song structure that is simple, but contains a lot of the building blocks for more complex songs is the basic Verse, Chorus structure. A great deal of blues, country, rock n’ roll, rock, and reggae songs follow the simple pattern of a verse followed by a chorus several times, and then often with the chorus repeated two or three times at the end of the song. This song structure is best served with a song that has a catchy hook. The hook, is a melodic phrase that starts the chorus, and grabs the listener’s attention. Sometimes, a song may begin with the chorus, and then follow with verses after the initial hook is established. This song structure dates back several hundred years, and one incredibly early example would be “Yankee Doodle,” from the time of the American Revolutionary War in the late 1700’s. The next level of song structure is to add a bridge. A bridge is also called the “middle 8” because in pop music it is usually 8 bars or measures long. The bridge often is a part of the song that includes some dramatic twist in the plot of the song. The music for the bridge often will reflect the drama that is included in the lyrics, and it will usually build dramatically until it launches back into the chorus. There are some songs that have a repeated pre-chorus after the verse and before the chorus. Sometimes the pre-chorus is used as a way to trick the listener into thinking the song will progress to the chorus, when it instead jumps into a bridge. It is an interesting small segment of the song that often drives home or sets up something that is more catchy to follow. A good example of a pre-chorus is in Weezer’s song “If You’re Wondering If I Want You To (I Want You To)” where the prechorus changes slightly each time it comes along, with the purpose of slightly adjusting to the changing tone of the story at each point, but to still unify the chorus with the changes in the story. Modular songwriting is a final method of song structure that we should look at before moving into the music theory portion of this book. Brian Wilson proposed a concept that I think found it’s fulfillment with

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Lyrics & Music later artists such as Yes, Alan Parsons Project, Kansas, Queen and Led Zepplin. Brian Wilson proposed that parts of songs should be interchangeable so that you could have a section that might work with several songs on an album. The various modules of song that could be written could then be swapped around to make an incredibly complex song, somewhat like a symphony, but in a song structure. I think an example of what he was thinking about was how he approached “Good Vibrations,” from the Smile album. He included snippets of some of the parts of “Good Vibrations,” on other songs on that album. I think a way that this idea was put into good use was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The only way I can think to describe the multitude of song parts is to consider it a work of modular songwriting. We will discuss more of these structural parts in the other sections of this book. But as each one of these parts relates to poetry, it is important to know a few basic things. Verses are the parts of the song that tell the story. Choruses tend to be the important hook that you want to repeat in the listeners head. The Bridge usually reflects a dramatic shift in the story, while Pre-Choruses are parts of the song that connect the chorus to the verse, especially is the verse begins to change the story to the point where the chorus might not make any sense anymore. And Modules are any other segment of the song that you might want to add to take the song in a new direction, or to bring it from a divergent direction back to an earlier part of the song.

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Willy Minnix

40

Part II: Chords and Progressions

Willy Minnix

Song Profile Title: Artist:

A Day In The Life Beatles

Songwriter(s):

Paul McCartney, John Lennon

Year Written:

1967

Song Pattern:

Verse, Verse, Verse, Part B, Part C, Verse, Outro

Notes of Interest:

What can be said about this; it’s a pop song, or is it an orchestral piece? It’s both. It begins with a hymn like structure, but then diverts into other sonically interesting modules.

Why You Should Listen:

“A Day in the Life” is an excellent example of using module songwriting technique. Here you see two separate songs, one written by John Lennon, the other by Paul McCartney, and together they join to become one of the Beatles most intriguing pieces of music. 42

Lyrics & Music

A

s a budding songwriter, you may be thinking that a discussion on songwriting should begin with melody, and for some songwriters that maybe true, but I have found that most people, when coming up with a new melody, tend to invent trite and boring melodies. If we begin with chord theory, then move to melody, I find that the melodies become more complex and interesting. So that is what we are going to do in this book. Let’s begin by looking at all of the awesome things we can do with chords, and then in the next section we will discuss melody and how to adapt it to the chords we have chosen. How Chords Are Made If you purchased this book, you obviously have a desire to write songs, but it would be presumptuous of me to assume that you know how

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Willy Minnix chords are formed or much about chord theory. In all likelihood, you might know a few chords on your chosen instrument, but might not know much about what unifies certain chords or why they work together. If you do know this, then perhaps you might want to skip this section, but even if you know, a refresher might be useful. For some reason, the human brain likes to sort and organize things. Whenever an artist decides to paint a picture do they take every single color out of the box to paint with? No, typically an artist chooses four or five colors and puts them on the pallet and then mixes other colors from the few that they chose at the start. Musicians also limit the amount of notes that we pick as well. Most of the songs that you enjoy use very few notes. If you look at a piano you see white notes and black notes. If you were to start on one note and count up until you get to the next identical note you would find that there are in fact 12 notes that a musician could use to play a song. But typically, the musician uses what are part of the major scale. If you were to play all of the white notes starting on a C, you would play C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C again. These notes make up the C major scale. You’ll also notice a certain pattern when you play them. Each pair of white notes, except for a couple exceptions, has a black note in between them. Whenever you see a black note, you know that it is a full step between the white notes. And when there isn’t a black note between the notes, you know that it’s only a half step between the notes. So this gives us a pattern. (Remember always look for patterns in music, it’ll save you a lot of time learning musical ideas). The pattern that this series of whole and half steps give us is: whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. This pattern is called the Major Scale Pattern. And if you start on any note and follow this pattern you will then be able to play a major scale. Now, why is this important to understanding chords? I’m glad you asked. When you want to figure out how to form any major chord, you need three of the notes that you find in any major scale. To figure out how to play a major chord, you have to have the first note, the third note and the fifth note from whatever scale matches the chord you’re trying to figure out. The reason you need to figure out three of the notes, is that it takes three notes to define a chord. Anything less than three notes is not a full chord, but you can have more than three notes, you just need to have at least the 1, 3 and 5 of a scale to make up a complete chord. So here’s an example. Let’s say you want to play a D major chord. In order to figure it out, you need to start on a D note, and follow the ma-

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Lyrics & Music jor scale pattern from that D note for at least five notes until you know what the 1 the 3 and the 5 notes are. Once you determine that D is the first note of the scale, F# is the second note and A is the fifth note, you can understand that a D major chord is made up of D, F# and A. With this information in hand, it is a pretty simple thing to determine all 12 of the major chords. You just start on any note, figure out the major scale pattern starting from that note, and then select the first, third and fifth note to figure out the chord. Types of Chords But I hear you asking, “Wait a minute, Willy, aren’t there other types of chords than just major chords? I mean when I look in my favorite Beatles song book I see that there are dozens of types of chords that I don’t understand.” Yes, I’m glad you brought up that point. There are actually three important chord types that you will encounter, and then some that are not so common. Of the uncommon chords, I’m only going to talk about one. So that leaves us with four chord types that we start with. After I explain these basic chord types to you, then I will explain in the next section how to make variations on these basic types. The first type of chord we already discovered is the major chord, made up of the first note, the third note and the fifth note of the scale. If we find a chord where the third note is moved down a half step (or flat) then we get a chord that is made up of 1 + b3 + 5 (b stands for flat). So this gives us a new chord called a minor chord. If you were to make chords using all of the notes of a major scale, you would find that naturally there are both major and minor chords in the scale, and that they too fall in a pattern (remember to look for patterns in music, it’ll save you time when you are learning): Major, minor, minor, Major, Major, minor, diminished and Major. So for any major scale you will have three of the chords major and three of the chords minor. We often refer to these chords by Roman Numerals: I ii iii IV V vi vii(dim) I(8va) But what about diminished? What type of chord is that? Well, a diminished chord, not an extremely common chord, but found in certain types of music more than others, is a chord where the one remains the

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Willy Minnix same, but the three is flat like a minor chord, and the five is also flat. So diminished chords are made up of 1+b3+b5. And those three types of chords are the most common chords that appear in a major scale. There is one other chord type I want to talk about, but it is very rare, unless you are into playing horror movie music, and it’s the Augmented chord. The Augmented chord is made up of the 1+3+ a #5. So in this case the first and third note are the same as a major chord, but the last note, the 5, is moved up a half step. Now that you know how to make the most popular four main types of chords. Let’s move on to ways to add variation to these chords to make them sound more interesting. Chord Variations Once you have the four main chord types, you now can begin to modify the chords to make new chords. I often tell my students (especially the ladies) that every woman has a “little black dress.” Now this little black dress will be brought out and used for weddings, funerals, dates, basically any occasion that requires her to dress up. But every woman knows that there are different ways in which she can accessorize the little black dress. I like to think of the chord variations as the accessories for the little black dress represented by the major chord. One could see the minor, diminished and augmented chords as variations on the major too, but these decorations can be used to doctor up all four of the main chord types. Below I am going to list some of the various chord modifications. Each variation is made by adding one of the other notes from the scale that isn’t included in the original chord. Name of Chord Notes Included in the Chord 2 1+2+3+5 Sus2 1+2+5 (Sus is short for suspended. One of the ways I remember it is to think that when someone is suspended from school they are not there, so you can think of the 3rd note as suspended from the class.) 4 1+3+4+5 Sus4 1+4+5 7 1+3+5+b7 (Notice that this 7 is flat, this is also called a Dominant 7) Blues Chord Maj.7 1+3+5+7 (The Major 7 includes the regular 7 note) Jazz Chord These are the main ways to modify a chord. You will notice that there are no 3 chords or 5 chords, and that is because those notes are already

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Lyrics & Music

Song Profile Title: Artist: Songwriter(s): Year Written: Song Pattern: Notes of Interest:

If You’re Wondering If I Want You To (I Want You To) Weezer Rivers Cuomo, Butch Walker 2009 V, V, P-C, C (short), V, V, P-C, Chorus (long), Bridge, C This song makes great use of the pop structure, from the catchy intro to the bridge that builds up to a climatic final chorus.

I feel like this (or maybe Why You “Stacy’s Mom”) is perhaps the Should Listen: perfect pop song. It tells a story about the cycle of a relationship, with possible multiple interpretations of the ending (do they break up, or do they keep together, it’s a toss-up in my opinion). The lyrics are clever, the melody is great, and the chords are interesting. 47

Willy Minnix included in the chord. There is also no 6 chord included here. I know that guitar players use 6 chords, but for the piano a 6 chord is more like a minor 7 inverted, which brings me to my next topic. Inverted Chords Chords do not need to be played in the order you find them. On the piano the notes fall 1 then 3 then 5. We call this position Root Position. If you change the order around you get 3 then 5 then 1. This is called 1st inversion. If you change the order around to 5 then 1 then 3, you get what we called 2nd inversion. If you add more notes you get more possible inversions. You can use inversions as broken chord to make the filler between your chords sound more interesting. Often when we add a different note in the bass in the classical way of writing this would be considered an inversion as well. But nowadays, we tend to write these chords as Slash chords. Slash chords tend to be written like G/D. What this means is the right hand plays a G chord, while the left hand plays a D note. Broken Chords Another way to play chords is to play them one note at a time in various patterns. These patterns are called Arpeggios. An arpeggio is just a fancy way of saying broken chord. These broken chords can be used as a way to exercise your finger technique, but they eventually can be used as a way to fill in the gaps between chord. A person finger picking the guitar is basically playing arpeggios. If you play the note one at a time on the piano, you would be playing arpeggios. One of the things I like to do is to play 1-3-5-8(1-8va)-5-3-1 over and over as a filler from one chord to another. The arpeggio can be modified and rearranged to create different fillers between the chord. Jazz Chords One final thing to say about chords before moving on to how they work together is about what I like to call Jazz chords. When you keep adding notes above the octave (1 - 8va) they are named 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, etc. Jazz musicians often play and use more complex chords, and one of the easiest way to memorize this is to work backward from 13.

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Lyrics & Music

Song Profile Title: Artist:

Book of Days Enya

Songwriter(s):

Enya, Roma Ryan

Year Written:

1991, 1992

Song Pattern:

Verse, B-Part, V, V, Outro

Notes of Interest:

This song has two versions one in English (1992 version) and the other in Irish Gaelic (1991 version).

This song stunned me when Why You Should Listen: I first heard it. I had never heard anything like it. It was this galloping journey somewhere, and then suddenly it stops, takes you into the land of the fairies, spins you around a couple times and then drops you off back on the galloping journey you started with. It probably doesn’t have the same impact today as it did in 1992, but I think it’s still worth a listen. 49

Willy Minnix A 13 chord is like playing two chords at once. You can think of it a playing a I7 and a ii at the same time. If your I7 was a C7 (made up of the notes C+E+G+Bb) then ii would be a Dm (made up of the notes D+F+A). You need both hands to play both of these chords, so the left hand would play C+E+G+Bb and the right hand would play D+F+A. Together these notes make up the C13 chord. If you subtract a note from the C13, you get a C11= C+E+G+Bb+D+F. If you subtract a note from the C11 you get a C9 = C+E+G+Bb+D There is a lot more to be discussed about chords, but that information lies outside of the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, if you want to create really unique and interesting chords, you can, but most songs don’t use such complex chords. You can get some really interesting songs by using other methods without having to resort to creating more and more complex chords. And we will examine some of those techniques soon. Basic Progressions Now that we are getting the idea that chords are the fundamental building blocks of a song, it’s important to go back to our original analogy of the painter limiting his pallet to paint a picture. When the Bob Ross chose to limit his pallet, he makes a conscious choice to have his painting take on the overall look that only those colors give to the painting. When we choose to use certain chords to make up the tonality of our song, then we are creating a sonic pallet that will color our song. Chord progressions are to music what the selection of colors is to the painters pallet. And a chord progression need not be vast. Perhaps the most basic chord progressions are when you go from the I chord to the IV chord or the V chord. A song like “Feelin’ Alright” by Dave Mason and made famous by Joe Cocker simple repeats the I IV change over and over. “Born In the USA” by Bruce Springsteen is another two chord song, this one going from V to I over and over again. There are other simple two chord songs that do not include the I IV or V, an example is “Jane Says,” by Jane’s Addiction, where it goes from a G to an A which is hard to determine what key the song is actually in. Is it in the key of G going to a borrowed A major, or is it in A major going to a borrowed G major? Who knows? The next most simple chord progression uses three chords I IV and V. There are countless variations of the I IV V. Almost all blues song can be boiled down to a I IV and V, most country songs as well. Simple

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Lyrics & Music gospel songs like “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away” are all I IV V songs. I’m sue if you play around with the I IV and V you will come up with several songs you can play off the top of your head. As we progress into more advanced chord progressions, we find ourselves with the four most important chords when writing song: I, IV, V and vi. The vi is a special chord. It is called the relative minor, because it contains the same notes in it’s natural minor scale as the I chord. So, in the case of C major, C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C, are all found in A natural minor, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A. So when you want to add another chord to the mix, the vi is a perfect chord to try out. When you mix up the I IV V and vi into new progressions you get a great deal of popular chord progressions that make up a great deal of popular music. For instance, when you play a I vi IV V sequence, you are playing what is commonly called the “oldies” or the “50’s” progression. This progression is so popular that a person could easily play a whole set with just these type songs. Examples include “Earth Angel,” “Heart and Soul,” “Stand By Me,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Crocodile Rock,” and “Brave.” These are just a small sampling of song that follow this progression partially or in whole. A popular variation is I, vi, ii, V. Another popular version of this is the “pop” progression: I V vi IV. This progression was made popular by the Beatles song “Let It Be.” Other hits that use this progression include “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Closing Time,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” “Down Under,” and “Soul Sister.” This progression is still popular today and many songs only have use this progression for the entire song. Another popular variation on this progression is the so called “Sensitive Female Progression,” named by Boston Globe columnist Marc Hirsh, who has a website devoted to tracking songs with this progression. It goes vi-IV-I-V. Technically, this progression is incorrectly labeled, as since it starts with the minor vi, the first chord should be a i, and it should be in the key of i minor, instead of calling it a vi. But for the sake of ease, we will continue to refer to it as a vi. This chord progression was used in song like “One of Us,” “Building a Mystery,” “Save Tonight,” and several other songs. When looking at Hirsh’s website, it is staggering just how many songs use this progression, and the growth of its popularity seems exponential. But these are not the only variations on these four chords. Below I am going to give a list of all of the possible variations of this cluster of chords, and explain how each can be used. We will start with chord progressions that begin with the I chord.

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Willy Minnix

Song Profile Title:

Paint It Black

Artist:

The Rolling Stones

Songwriter(s):

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards

Year Written:

1966

Song Pattern:

Intro, V, V, V, V, V Outro

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

While this is a simple hymn structure, the way it is sung hides the fact that it is simply quatrains repeated thoughout the song. I first heard this song as the opening of the TV show “Tour of Duty,” and it always had a connection to the Vietnam War for me. But I was surprised to find out that it actually is based upon a “Ulysses” by James Joyce. Combing sitar, and Moroccan rhythms it gives this song a very ethnic sound, without being able to place exactly where it is supposed to take place, thus making it universal in it’s sadness. 52

Lyrics & Music 24 Variations on I, IV, V, vi Progressions that start with I I, IV, V, vi I, IV, vi, V I, V, IV, vi I, V, vi, IV I, vi, IV, V I, vi, V, IV These are the six versions when you start with I. You might notice that the first and third version sound a little unfinished, and that is because when you go from vi to I it feels a little unresolved. These types of progressions are good to use in parts of songs where you want it to feel like it is moving to another part of the song, such as a bridge section. By not bringing a feeling of resolution, you create a sense of expectation that can be used to launch into another section. The next two collection of progressions IV and V both exhibit some of the same tendencies, and can help set up this type of movement within a song as well. Progressions that start with IV IV, I, V, vi IV, I, vi, V IV, V, I, vi IV, V, vi, I IV, vi, I, V IV, vi, V, I Progressions that start with V V, I, IV, vi V, I, vi, IV V, IV, I, vi V, IV, vi, I V, vi, I, IV V, vi, IV, I Progressions that start with vi (Note: technically these would be in minor, and thus the vi should be i, but we are going to make it easy on songwriters and consider it just a vi in the starting position. Likewise, if we were to start on IV or V, technically we are in a mode that begins with those chords, but we’re making things easy to understand.) vi, I, IV, V vi, I, V, IV vi, IV, I, V vi, IV, V, I vi, V, I, IV vi, V, IV, I

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Willy Minnix These are the 24 variations that you can get when you swap around the four main chords that make up most popular songs. Below, I am writing these in a list so you can easily mix and match them if you want to create longer chord progressions.

I I, IV, V, vi I, IV, vi, V I, V, IV, vi I, V, vi, IV I, vi, IV, V I, vi, V, IV

IV IV, I, V, vi IV, I, vi, V IV, V, I, vi IV, V, vi, I IV, vi, I, V IV, vi, V, I

V V, I, IV, vi V, I, vi, IV V, IV, I, vi V, IV, vi, I V, vi, I, IV V, vi, IV, I

vi vi, I, IV, V vi, I, V, IV vi, IV, I, V vi, IV, V, I vi, V, I, IV vi, V, IV, I

Now that you can see them all in their various forms, you can mix and match the different progressions to create longer chord progressions. Perhaps you want to mix and match I3 with V5 and then finish off with vi6. This would give you a long chord progression that might fit your song. So, this system should give you tons of variety when it comes to writing chord progressions, but what if it isn’t enough for you? Well, then keep reading because I’m going to explain a few other things you can do to these progressions to make your songs even more complex and interesting. Descending Bass Lines I’ve heard it attributed to Paul McCartney, but it could be fictitious, that if you want to have a hit, you need a falling bass line. And it is true that songs like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Hit the Road Jack,” “The Weight,” “Piano Man,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Dear Prudence,” all have a bass line that moves scale wise down from the tonic down through the scale to the fifth chord. This means that we can use chord inversions and slash chords to keep the chords a bit more simple. A slash chord is the modern way of describing what used to be called a chord inversion. Now modern musicians tend to think in terms of chords that can be used both for piano and guitar, so a slash chord means that you play one chord in the right hand, and then play the note after the slash in your left hand. C/E means the right hand plays a C chord, while the left hand plays an E noted in the bass. This used to be called an inverted C chord in first inversion. But now we think of the inversion happening in the right hand, and the slash happening in the left hand. An inversion is when you move the notes around in order, so a C chord could be played C-E-G, or it could be played E-G-C, or G-C-E. This would be Root position, First Inversion and Second Inversion. If you add more notes you get more inversions. But this way of understand-

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Lyrics & Music ing the chord doesn’t work too well for guitarists, so slash chord symbology was invented. Now if you want a C chord but you want a D in the bass, you would write C/D. (As an aside note, playing through your inversions is a great practice tool, and a really good filler arpeggio for including in a softer portion of your song.) So how does this relate to descending bass lines? I’m glad you asked. If you are in C and you want to walk down to a G major, but you don’t want to just go from C to G, you could go C to G/B (B note in the bass), to Am, to C/G (notice I haven’t gone directly to the G chord), to F, then to C/E, then to G/D then to G. This would give you a nice descending bass line, but still use the basic four chords that are popular. The opposite of this would be an ascending bass line, which although not used as much, is a really good way of playing a bridge, to give more of a lift for the chorus, especially if you are planning on modulating the chorus up a couple notes for the final go round. More on modulation later, but for now, you can work on coming up with a cool descending bass line section for your songs. Chord Substitutions One of the first things you can do to change up your chords is to realize that you can substitute some chords for other chords. One of the most common chord progressions, the oldies progression, I, vi, IV, V, can often be played I, vi, ii, V, where the ii replaces the IV. Let’s consider this in the key of C. The chords for the oldies progression are C, Am, F and G. If we play the substitution version, we get C, Am, Dm and G. Why can we replace the F with a Dm? Well, when you consider the notes that make up F and Dm, you will see that F is made up of F+A+C, and Dm is made up of D+F+A, you see that two of the notes are the same in both F and Dm. So where you have two notes that are the same you can replace the chords for another chord with two of the same notes. So at its most basic, you can swap C for Am and vice versa, F for Dm and G for Em. When we get further along and you learn how to add more chords, you can use this same principle to substitute those chords too. Now, how does this apply to what we have talked about above? Well, if you look at the chord progression we created at the end of the section on the four chords, we can examine new ways to tweak it. So here is the collection of I3, V5, vi6: I, V, IV, vi, V, vi, I, IV, vi, V, IV, I Let’s say you get tired of hearing the IV repeat so much. Maybe you

55

Willy Minnix change the pattern to: I, V, ii, vi, V, vi, I, IV, vi, V, ii, I Or maybe you feel that now you have too many V’s. So let’s change it to: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, vi, V, ii, I Not a great deal of change, but it certainly sounds different. What would happen if you inserted other chords, or changed more chords around? Well, keep reading, let’s find out. Falling Chords Another thing that you might find when you begin to change chords around is something I call falling chords or rising chords. For our purposes, falling chords are chords that move from the major to the minor, and rising chords are chords that move from the minor to the major. So one thing you can do that really tugs at a person’s heart is to fall from the IV major to the iv minor. This is perhaps the most common falling chord movement that is in popular music, however you also can find V major to the v minor. And if you want to change key, going from the I major to the i minor is a really great way to launch into a new key. In addition to falling chords, you can also raise chords, if you have a minor vi, you can pop on up to a major VI, or if you have a minor ii, you can insert a major II, likewise minor iii can go up to major III. These are not as easy to use, and there are some rules that make them easier to use, and I will cover this in the next section on borrowed chords. But until we get there, let’s consider our chord progression. This is how we started: I, V, IV, vi, V, vi, I, IV, vi, V, IV, I This is what we ended up with: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, vi, V, ii, I So now let’s add a falling IV in there: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, iv, vi, V, ii, I Perhaps the iv followed by the vi is a bit odd to you, so you substitute the vi for a I: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, iv, I, V, ii, I Now we have a brand new, and arguably more interesting chord progression with only very little changes. Borrowing Chords Already we’ve learned a great deal about how to tweak up a chord progression, but now we’re going to learn the coup-de-gras on how to re-

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Lyrics & Music

Song Profile Title: Artist:

Bohemian Rhapsody Queen

Songwriter(s): Freddie Mercury Year Written:

1975

Song Pattern:

Rhapsody (episodic work with many virtuosic sections)

Notes of Interest:

The story of this song follows the Hero’s Journey (according to musicologist Andy Kneis), and brings the hero back transformed and changed. I might differ, as it sounds like he returns broken, almost an anitheoric journey.

This song has it all, just about Why You Should Listen: everything I cover in this book is included in this song, and probably a lot more that I only barely hit on. Check it out, but then go look at Rhapsodies written in the 1800’s to make a comparison. 57

Willy Minnix ally broaden up your chord progressions and make them sound more thought out and interesting. There are a couple rules that you can follow if you want to add more chords into your progressions. You can borrow chords from related keys and it will spice up your progression. Already we have borrowed i, vi, v by falling from the majors, and II, III and VI from raising from the minors. Three rules that make this make sense is that you can borrow: V of V or II IV of V or bVII V of vi or III What does this mean? Well, if you borrow the fifth chord out of the scale from the scale of the fifth chord in the I scale, you will end up with a major II. So for instance, if you are in the key of C and you borrow the fifth chord from the key of G, you get a D major. So the D major is the II chord from the key of C. Now, one of the rules that you might want to follow when using this is to always go to V or from V when you are going to throw in the II chord. One thing to note when looking at the above rules, is when you borrow the V of vi, you are basically borrowing the V of the vi’s harmonic minor scale. If you were to borrow the V of vi’s natural minor scale (which matches the notes of the I major scale) you get the same iii. But here you basically get a major III. Let’s look at our tweaked progression and see how we could change it: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, vi, V, ii, I Let’s throw in a major II before one of our V’s: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, I, IV, vi, II, V, ii, I. This would be interesting because you have a II and a ii close to each other. This is the type of thing that Elton John might have done back in the 80’s. Let’s take this progression and thrown in a borrowed III from the vi of I: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, III, I, IV, vi, II, V, ii, I If you want to get bluesy, borrow the bVII from VI and get this: I, V, ii, vi, iii, vi, III, vi, IV, bVII, vi, II, V, ii, I You may be a bit lost at this point if you are having trouble with the Roman Numerals, so let me give you this in the key of C: C// G// Dm// Am// Em// Am// E// Am// F// Bb// Am// D// G// Dm// C

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Lyrics & Music This type of progression might seem a bit complex if you just play two beats per chord, but if you start inventing a melody to go over it, then it becomes much more interesting. Now when you play through it you’ll notice that I changed one of the I’s to a vi, because you want to go to vi after III. Also, you might see that it doesn’t feel like it has resolved very well, and we will address that when we get to the section on Cadences. But before we get there, we want to talk a little bit about other chords that you can borrow as well. Sometimes you might want to borrow a chord modally from a related mode. When we get to the chapter on Melody we are going to talk more in depth about modes but until then, let’s hit a couple other chords you can borrow. A couple chords that are sometimes borrowed and thrown into the major key you start with might be a bVI or a bIII, sometimes you might even see a bII. Wait a minute! I can hear you screaming at me, doesn’t that mean that you can basically borrow any chord you want and throw it in? Yes, basically you can borrow just about any chord you want and throw it into any key. However, when you do it, if you don’t do it right, it will drag you into a new key. And that’s ok, if that’s what you want to do, but if you don’t know how to get back to the original key, then you might be lost. We will talk more about how to fix these issues when we get to key changes and modulations in a couple sections. One last thing I want to say about borrowing chords is about borrowing a chord that doesn’t lead to where it’s “supposed to” lead. An example of this is the Pacabel’s Canon progression that is used for a lot of pop songs. It goes I V vi III IV I IV V. The reason we can get away with using the major III is because we are coming from the chord it is borrowed from, the minor vi. It also leads us to the very next chord a major IV which is just moving up chromatically from one chord to the next. So here we see a great example of a borrowed chord, and what’s nice is it could actually work backwards just as well as it works forwards. Cadences One of the things you may have noticed with the chord progression we ended up with, is that it doesn’t seem to end very well. If we are concerned with making our song sections end with endings that make sense then we want to use something called cadences. Cadences are ways to end your section to make it feel like you’ve either achieved a sense of completion, or it makes you feel like you want to move on to another section.

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Willy Minnix Some cadences are as follows: V to I = Authentic (True) Cadence - This cadence is your most basic and common. It makes you feel like you have finished. IV to I = Plagal Cadence - This cadence also is a basic common cadence and makes the song or section feel finished. It’s popular in gospel and blues music to end songs. Also known as the “Amen” cadence. vi to I = Minor Plagal Cadence - Similar to the plagal cadence but in my opinion doesn’t give as strong a sense of completion. V to vi = False Cadence type I - Could also be V, IV, vi - This makes you feel like you are going to end the section or song, but then you throw them a loop and go to the minor vi which makes you want to play some more. I to vi = I like to call this False Cadence type II - This also feels like you’re messing with the listener and not giving them a real ending. vi to VI = Picardy Third. This as an ending is a very uplifting happy ending, but some people feel like it is a little too classical sounding when used at the end of a song. Sometimes people sneak it into a change from a verse to a chorus. It’s also a great way to change from a minor key to a major key. vi V IV III - Andalusian Cadence - This is actually more of a chord progression than a cadence, and we will discuss it in greater detail when we get to writing songs in minor keys. Modulation and Key Changes So now that we’ve learned the basics of how to write a song and how to modify the chords that we choose to make that song, what if we want to make it more interesting by changing to different keys at certain parts of the song? Some musicians avoid key changes like the plague, and yet there are others who seem to constantly change keys but we hardly ever notice. Brian Wilson is like this. Sometimes he changes keys and it is done so seamlessly that it almost doesn’t seem like a key change at all. And by the time you figure out that he’s changed keys, he’s back in the original key. In my opinion, this is THE way to modulate. But there are other ways, and they are awesome as well, but maybe not quite as awesome! This topic could be a book all on its own. I cannot spend the time here really delving into this topic, but I will give a couple of my favorite ways to modulate to new keys, and hopefully it will be enough to get you started and you can experiment on your own. One of the most basic ways to change keys is to just go up a half or a whole step. Going up by half step is called chromatic modulation. You could go up or down chromatically. The problem I have with chro-

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Lyrics & Music matic modulation is it tends to sound like cheesy late 1960’s and 1970’s country gospel music. Every time you get to a new chorus you bump it up a half step, at least three times until you have it so high that you can’t sing it any more. Or it sounds like late 1980’s early 90’s power ballads, where you ratchet up the chorus a half step to really drive home the message of the song (even if the song lyrics don’t deserve to be driven home). But it is a way to modulate, and the full step modulation is basically the same. Another way to modulate from one key to the next in a pretty easy way is to use what is called a pivot chord. Let’s say you are playing in the key of C and you have a Dm which is also found in the key of F. If you wanted to modulate from the key of C you could play a passage that you have designed to end on the Dm, and then connect it to a passage that includes a Dm in the key of F. Maybe the chord progression in C goes C, Am, F, G, so you play it through one time and then switch the F to a Dm the second time through. So let’s say in F the same chord progression goes F, Dm, Bb, C, you can use the Dm as a pivot chord by playing the full progression like this: C// Am// F// G// C// Am// Dm// Bb// C// F// Dm// Bb// C// F//. By the time you get through playing that progression of chords, you will be firmly in the key of F. Another way to modulate from one key to another is what I like to call a sus4 cadence. When you want to modulate to a new key, sometimes, if you can figure out what the fifth chord of that key is, you can play a sus4 version of that chord, and then the major version of that chord it will launch you into the I of the new key. Here’s an example. Let’s take our previous example and build upon it. C// Am// F// G// Dsus4 D// G// Em// C// D// G. As you can probably tell, this is a bit abrupt, but you can decorate it up a little more before establishing the new key of G. Maybe go Dsus4// D// Em// D// G, or something along those lines. Modulating modally is a good way to change keys too. Perhaps you want to go from major to minor or vice versa. If you use a falling chord or a rising chord and launch into a new progression in the new key it can be useful. Here are a couple examples: C// Am// F// G// C// Cm// Eb// Bb// Cm. Or vice versa Cm// Eb// Bb// Cm// C// Am// F// G// C. I want to take a minute to talk about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and how he modulates. His methods of modulation seem to follow no logical rules, but when you dig deeper you find that he does indeed have a method to his madness.

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Song Profile Title:

American Pie

Artist:

Don McLean

Songwriter(s):

Don McLean

Year Written:

1971

Song Pattern:

V, V’, P-C, C, repeat

Notes of Interest:

“American Pie” is a poetic look at the history of American pop culture. The song fluctuates between major and minor phrases in a way that brings the listener from happy moments to sad moments that are described in the song.

Why You Should Listen:

I think most musicians would agree that this, like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” is one of the best written songs in the whole catalogue of pop music. The anthem like quality of the chorus is one that will certainly remain important for decades yet to come. 62

Lyrics & Music One summer I decided to analyze all of the songs Brian Wilson wrote that were included in my copy of “The Little Black Song book The Beach Boys.” What I found was that Brian Wilson was willing to jump from one key to another pretty much any other key, but after analyzing so many songs, I realize that there were some rules that he followed, whether he realized it or not. If Brian Wilson was writing a song that started in the key of C for example, where he would launch immediately into any of the following keys: C#, D or Dm, E or Em, F, G, Cm, Am or A, B and Bb. I feel like he also could easily figure out how to modulate to C#m, Fm, Gm, Eb and Ab with ease by going through one of the previous keys. What I noticed about Brian Wilson’s method of modulation is that he often uses a more jazz style cadence the ii to V (or even ii to vii) of the new key as a way to establish the new tonality. So here’s an example. Let’s go back to that simple Oldies Progression, C, Am, F, G. Let’s say Brian Wilson suddenly wants to launch into A major. He might do something like this: C, Am, F, G, C, Bm, E, A. And then suddenly he makes a snippet in the key of A major. The reason I say he makes a snippet in A is that the other crazy thing about Brian Wilson is that he would pop into a new key, and then keep moving on. Sometimes he’d go back to the old key, and sometimes he’d move on to another key. Another way he might do this is same thing is to go like this: C, Am, F, G, C, Bm, G#m, A. This is using that vii to get to the new key. Here the vii functions as a leading tone into the new key. So when you combine Brian Wilson’s methods with old fashioned modulation techniques like using the circle of 5ths. You really can jump around anywhere to get to a new key. When you use the circle of 5ths, you progress from one key to the next by going to the keys that have the most chords in common with the starting key. Basically, if you look at the key of C, and you want to modulate you can go clockwise around the circle of 5ths, to the next key a fifth away from C, and you modulate to the key of G. If you want, you could modulate to G’s relative minor Em, but basically you went five notes away from C, and the new key with the most related chords is the key of G. If you keep going clockwise around the circle of 5ths, you will eventually get back to C. This could take a while, and that’s what is kinda cool about Brian Wilson’s method, because it allows you to leap around wherever you want to. Or conversely, you can go backwards (counter-clockwise) around the

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Willy Minnix circle of fifths, which would actually be going in a circle of 4ths. And when you do this, you find that F is the next closest key with chords that are closely related to C. You could keep going backwards around the circle and you would eventually end up back to C again. And like the above, if you wanted to you could modulate to the minor version of the Major, so in this case you could go to Dm instead of F. Then if you wanted to modulate further, you could keep going and go to Bb or Gm. So if you want to write in a minor key, I suppose we should take a look at how to write songs in minor keys. Writing Songs In Minor Keys Writing songs in minor keys presents a bit of a problem for some songwriters because people often get confused about minor keys. The problem is that there are different scales that we call “minor.” There is the natural minor, the harmonic minor, the melodic minor, the pentatonic minor, and then there are scales that seem minor, like the Dorian mode or the Phrygian mode, or the Hungarian minor, or Gypsy scale, or the Egyptian and Chinese pentatonic minor, and so on and so forth. These are all interesting and great, but basically the three main minor scales (aren’t you happy I didn’t say the “three major minor scales?”) you need to learn about are the natural minor (also called the Aeolian mode), the harmonic minor and the melodic minor. When you are playing the natural minor you are basically playing all of the notes that are included in the relative major. So if you want to play in A natural minor, you would play all of the notes of the C major scale. The harmonic minor is essentially the same, except it includes a different note, the sharp seven. This sharp seven gives a stronger fifth chord because instead of being a minor v, you get a major V, and that strongly leads back to the minor i. Why is this? Well, it all comes back to leading tones. I will discuss this more fully in the melody section, but something needs to be said here. A leading tone is any tone that strongly leads you to another note. When you play the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, G when you get to the G, you could stop there and probably not go insane. But if you were to play A, B, C, D, E, F and then a G#, if you don’t go on to play the next A you will indeed go insane. It reminds me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he’s playing the xylophone and Daffy Duck wired explosives to the last note of the scale, but Bugs keeps playing the wrong note. Finally, Daffy can’t take it anymore, runs out in a rage and plays the final note, “It goes like this you dolt!” And then at the very last moment realizes his mistake when it was too late,

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Lyrics & Music hits the wired up note and blows up. That’s a leading tone. Well, when you have that G# included in the chord you want to play, it creates a powerful desire to resolve to the minor i. But sometimes composers liked being able to have that natural G in there because when you’re not headed for the minor i, sometimes a G natural sounds better. So they came up with a third type of minor scale: the melodic minor. The melodic minor is a scale that includes both a sharp 6 and a sharp 7 on the way up, but coming back down it changes back to a flat 6 and 7. So what does this mean for the chords we use for songwriting? Well, what it means is that when we are writing in minor keys we get a few other chords than we have in major. So to make it simple, in minor you can basically figure that these are chords you can use when you are playing in minor keys: i, (iidim or ii), (III or III+), (iv or IV), (v or V), (VI or #vidim), (VII or #viidim) Now remember, these chords are no longer the chords for the major scale, so let’s consider the key of C, i is not referring to C anymore, it would be Am, or what we were referring to as vi. Don’t let this confuse you. If you really need to see this in major then it would look like this: vi, (viidim or vii), (I or I+), (ii or II), (iii or III), IV or #ivdim) and finally, (V or #vdim). Anyway, this isn’t technically the right way to look at it, but if it helps then use it. Extended Cadences A cadence need not be just two chords. It can in fact extend over a few chords, although in my opinion any more than three chords feels more like a chord progression to me. There are some jazzy cadences that people like the Beatles used, where it uses a variation on the ii. One popular version is the ii V I, or the ii IV I. Another variation on this is to substitute the minor ii for a major II and get: II V I, or II IV I. These should give you an idea, but you can mess around and come up with your own by mixing and matching chords that seem to feel like you’ve bought the section to an end. Popular minor Cadences Well, we’ve already covered the Sensitive Female Progression (vi, IV, I, V), and I mentioned that this wasn’t technically correct. Now you should know that it should actually be (i, VI, III, VII), and all of the

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Willy Minnix other minor variations should follow this pattern too. But whatever works for you is fine. There are other popular minor chord progressions that you could use too. So if you do a cursory search for popular minor chord progressions on Google, you will find these: i, VI, VII (vi, IV, V in major I) i, iv, VII (vi, ii, V) i, iv, v (vi, ii, iii - this is natural minor or Aeolian) i, VI, III, VII (vi, II, I, V) ii, v, i (vii, iii, i) i, VI, VII (vi, IV, V - this is the same progression as All Along the Watchtower, is it Aeolian or is it major? Who knows?) There is another popular minor chord progression called the Andalusian Cadence (although I wouldn’t really consider it a cadence as much as a chord progression) which goes i VII VI V (vi, V, IV, III). This is a really popular cadence used by Ray Charles, the Eagles, and a ton of Spanish/Flamenco guitar writers. It’s a really cool progression if you want a little bit of spice to your minor chord progressions. Another version is the i, bVII, VI, V (vi, bV, IV, III). And according to wikipedia, Pink Floyd did it this way on “Comfortably Numb”: i , bVII, bVI, iv, i (vi, bV, bIV, ii, vi), and it’s considered a variation on the Andalusian Cadence. In traditional Flamenco guitar, different keys which use this cadence/progression are called by different names. If it’s in E minor it would be referred to as por granaína. If you play it in B minor it’s called por medio. If you play it in C# minor it’s called por arriba, and if you play it in F# minor it’s called por rondeña. All of these Spanish terms are ways to let the guitarist know where to put the capo on the guitar. But essentially they are all the same progression. Recap So, my hope is that by now you can start with a basic chord progression of three or four chords, and by using any of the techniques described above in this chapter, you can modify those simple progressions to create more complex and interesting progressions. Once you have an interesting progression, it is important to begin adding melody to that progression. I want you to know that the method that I am teaching in this book is contrary to how it is typically taught in the classical method of writing. Often a classical composer would write a melody, and then the melody would be used to dictate how the chords are created around it. That’s why when you look at a hymnal and analyze the chords therein, it looks like the composer decided to use every possible

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Lyrics & Music chord he could think of, when in reality you only need three chords to play “Amazing Grace!” This method that I am showing you is more of an approach on how to write songs if you are goofing around on your instrument and what to make it sound more complex and interesting. Furthermore, it is geared for the musician who is not a college music theory student, and probably never will be. You know who you are! I believe now that you have all of these cool chords swirling around in your head that if we take a moment in the next chapter to explore some of the classical techniques for writing melody it will combine with this information about chords, and give you a sound understanding about how to mingle the to make a powerfully written song.

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Lyrics & Music

Part III: Melody

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Willy Minnix

Song Profile Title: Artist:

I Hung My Head Sting, Johnny Cash

Songwriter(s):

Sting

Year Written:

1996

Song Pattern:

A section B section with repeat Refrain throughout

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This song is almost hymn like in it’s structure, and is one of my favorite songs by Sting. I love the compound 9/8 rhythm (which is a traditional Irish rhythm, but with non-traditional accents). Johnny Cash’s 4/4 time version doesn’t hold up as well in my opinion. Not only is this story well told as a poetic cowboy masterpiece, it has a melody that climbs and falls which though it doesn’t have a standard “hook,” works as a hook device to grab the listener’s attention and hold on until the very end of the song. 70

Lyrics & Music

I

magine having a conversation with a person who looks relatively normal, you no what, let’s make them moderately attractive. They seem well kept. They are in good shape. You’ve heard they have an interesting job, and probably are very intelligent and funny. But when they open up their mouth to speak, every single thing they say is in this weird monotone voice that never alters in pitch or changes dynamics at all. I don’t know about you, but I would have a very hard time holding a conversation with a person like that. After a while it would start to drive me crazy. How to Create A Melody One of the things that I have noticed while flipping through the radio lately, is that almost all of the top 40 songs are very monotone when it comes to melodies. I heard Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, and almost the entire thing was monotonal. It of course had flashes of melody, but for the most part it was just rapping to a tone. But Taylor Swift isn’t alone,

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Willy Minnix so many of today’s songs are burdened with a lack of melody that anyone who likes to whistle a tune is hopelessly devoid of tunes to whistle. As I stated earlier in this book, I do not consider a Rap composition to be a song, because it is not the marriage of music with lyric in the same way that a song is. And likewise, I almost can’t consider some of these modern compositions songs either, because they are almost tuneless as well. What redeems Swift’s album, is the fact that she does have catchy melodic choruses (hooks) that when juxtaposed against the monotone of her verses, grab the listener and capture their attention. But when you consider the fact that she (and her co-writers if she has any) are pitting ANY melody against a non melody, then whatever they sing will be guaranteed to be catchy. It’s a brilliant strategy, but sadly it does not produce anything complete. It’s like having someone mumbling for eight bars and then bursting out with the most beautiful melody ever heard. It would be catchy, but incomplete. But even in the midst of her choruses, I’ve noticed that a great deal of the chorus has monotonal sections. It’s becoming as one Youtuber put it, “the zeitgeist of the modern age for songwriting.” He loved it. I hate it. To me it just shows a lack of craftsmanship. It’s kind of like the whole unfinished wood furniture thing. Why do I want an bookshelf that looks like it was hewn out of a tree? I want a bookshelf that is sanded and polished, and stained. I want it to look like a craftsman has been working on it. And likewise, if you compare anything from “1989” (the album, not the year) to anything on “Revolver,” by the Beatles, you will find a stunning difference in the craftsmanship. Does this mean that there is no place for simplicity in melody, and in song writing in general? No, I hope that my opinions on songwriting do not discourage young writers from writing pop standards, or dance tunes, or rap music, or bubble-gum pop songs, or country songs. But the market is flooded with this type of simplistic song. And the ART of songwriting seems to be dying. One of the sad realities of the music business is that in the last 5 or 10 years the music companies have been losing ground to internet outlets, and are basically bleeding money. So they do not have the budget that they once had to allow an artist the chance to develop and grow. It is much cheaper for them to ditch a new artist before they get a chance to grow and become a Sting or a Brian Wilson, in favor for some other new comer who writes simplistic stuff that they know will sell to their teenage audience.

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Lyrics & Music I don’t know if we can look to the big companies to solve this problem any time in the near future. I do know that a great deal of my students have informed me that in order to get a break from the simplistic songs, they have turned to sites like Spotify and Pandora in order to find new musicians who are writing complex melodies and songs. So while there will always be a place for simplistic songs, I hope that this book encourages people to dig past that level of songwriting, and progress onto a deeper level. So how does one create a melody? I’m glad you asked. There are several ways, but of the many different ways to write a melody it seems that two are the most common for the great songwriters. Either they “hear” a melody in their head, the way Brian Wilson, or Bach or Mozart did, or else they stumble upon the melody based on the chords that they pick. If you are not a Brian Wilson or a Bach, then the second method is probably the easiest for you, which is why we spent a whole chapter before this going over chord theory. If you are a Brian Wilson or a Bach, then you really don’t need this book, do you? Before I go much further into the development of melody, I would like to just mention that a computer could randomly generate a melody, or you could assign notes to some dice and randomly roll up a melody. And then you could apply some of the techniques that you will learn later in this chapter to tweak it into something interesting. However, what I have found with a lot of my students is once they have a selection of chords that they find interesting, then melodies start to form around the chords pretty readily. When you have a chord that contains three or four notes, then you have three or four options for a starting note for your melody. A melody can begin as easily as trying to play those three or four notes in a variety of orders, until you find one that you enjoy listening to and singing. Go ahead and give it a try. Play the notes of any chord you want, as complex as you want, and then pick one of those notes as a starting note. Sing it over the chord, and then move to another note in the chord. Eventually, if you are a creative type person at all, a melody will begin to take shape. When you move to a second chord, now you have a whole new batch of notes to pick from, and it pushes the melody into a new direction. This is essentially the easiest way to create a simple melody, or even a complex melody if your chord choices are complex enough. If you are lucky enough to have a melody pop into your head out of the blue one day. Then the same method used in reverse can help you find chords. Figure out how to play the melody on the piano or whatever your preferred instrument is, and then ask yourself, which chords have

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Willy Minnix these notes in them, and of the various chords I could play, which one sounds the best? Go through each note of the melody until you have figured out all the chord changes you need to accompany that melody. But let’s say you have writer’s block and you know you need to write a song. What are you to do? One thing that you could try is to begin with a melody that already exists and alter it. Let’s say you need a melody. Why not start with “Amazing Grace,” and flip it backwards. Or maybe start in the middle, pick a note that is not the tonic, and make it the tonic, and then develop the melody from there. Maybe you could decide to write counterpoint (more on that later), over the melody, and then use that as your main melody. Build your chords around that. Here’s an idea. What if you take a snippet from 10 of your favorite guitar riffs/piano riffs, or from your favorite melodies of other songs, and mash them up and see what happens? Maybe you will create something interesting. You could be like Mozart, and get a canary. He would listen to the bird chirping, and then craft melodies that matched what the bird chirped. These are all just some basic ideas to mine for a good melody. I’m sure there are a thousand ways in which you could find the onus of a melody, but even at that, it is often quite necessary to tweak the melody in order to make it interesting. In the techniques that follow, we are going to explore a variety of ways to change a melody around, but you also have to keep in mind that sometimes when you change the melody, you might need to tweak the chords that you chose. So, though I wrote the chord chapter first, and stressed how a beautiful selection of chords can define your melody, sometimes in the process of crafting the melody, the chords may need to be adjusted. By the time you get to this stage, you may find that the chord only needs to be modified, and thus perhaps where you originally thought a C7 was the right chord, you might want to explore how a C9 sounds since you now find yourself singing a D in the melody. Just keep this in mind if you find that you get a little stuck trying to decide between an awesome melody, and an awesome chord change. Maybe you don’t need to choose between them, maybe you just need to tweak. Melodic Phrases It’s important when you are working on your melodies that they do not become run on sentences. I like the idea of starting with lyrics before creating a melody, because it automatically chops up the melody into phrases. But if the muse strikes you and you happen to have a great melody pop into your head one day, don’t forget about this critical part

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Lyrics & Music

Song Profile Title:

Vincent Black Lightning (1952)

Artist:

Richard Thompson

Songwriter(s):

Richard Thompson

Year Written:

1991

Song Pattern:

A part, B part repeats

Notes of Interest:

Not only is a Vincent Black Lightning a cool bike, it became the center for a really great story. So great in fact, that Time magazine elected this song as one of the 100 best songs of all time in 2011.

The story is critical here. The romance between a young thug named James and the daring and beautiful Red Molly. Why You Should Listen: James wins Molly’s heart on a ride through the country on the bike. Molly and James are also names which pop up in the English and Scottish Child Ballads, linking this song to the much older traditions. 75

Willy Minnix of writing a melody. The melody should be phrased well. That is not to say that it cannot be long or complicated. As long as it is phrased well it will work. Think of writing a melody like writing a sentence. A sentence can become long and complicated, (notice the comma I just added and the “but” that follows) but you need dividers to break the sentence up into meaningful chunks that can be digested by the reader. The same holds true for melodies. These are also often the places where the singer will need to take a breath for air. So if you are not a singer, but are writing songs for someone, you might consider their breathing habits when singing, so as not to make them pass out on stage! Basics of Scales and How they Relate to Melody When you sit down to truly understand melody, it always leads back to understanding how scales work. I always like to refer to scales as color pallets. You have all of the notes that an instrument can play, and some instruments (like guitars) can play notes in between the regular 12 notes, by bending. So how does one limit what notes they are going to use? That’s where scales come in. There are a wide variety of scales. In the chord chapter we discussed how a major scale has the pattern of whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step, to determine what notes are included in that scale. We also talked about how if you stack up those notes you get the chords that can be used in that scale. Well, the same theory applies to any scale you want to use. Let’s take the natural minor scale for a moment. If you know what the minor scale pattern is (whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step) then you can easily figure out what notes you want to use, and what chords are easily formed using that scale. This is why I teach my students the type of scale patterns instead of teaching them to memorize a scale at a time. If you approach scales as one scale at a time, then it takes forever to learn all of your scales. If you learn to understand scales as a pattern that repeats again starting on a new note, then the entire process becomes much easier, allowing the student to learn far more in the same amount of time. For example, in a traditional way of learning music, a student might learn the C scale first, then the G scale and the D scale will be introduced to teach the concept of sharps. Then the F scale will be introduced to introduce the concepts of flats. And so on and so forth. In that amount of time, a student could be taught the major scale pattern, and learn all four of those scales in one shot. Then the natural minor pattern could be introduced, followed by the harmonic and melodic minors, and then the Dorian mode could be introduced. All in the same amount of time it took a traditional student the time to learn four major scales.

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Lyrics & Music So when you are approaching melody, think about the vast variety of scales that are out there. There are the various modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian, Ionian), two of which you should already know as major and minor. Then there are the various pentatonic scales. And there are several other scales out there for you to learn as well. But let’s take a look at the pentatonic scales and the modes, as they will probably be your best source for mining for song material. Modalism As I am writing this book, there is a song that’s popular on the Top 40 Contemporary Christian stations (stations that I tend to avoid like the plague, but my wife makes me listen to from time to time) that I think is a well written song, as opposed to most of the poorly written stuff you find on those stations. It is a song by a singer named Lauren Daigle. I do not know if she wrote the song, or if someone else wrote it for her, or with her, but the song is called “Look Up Child.” What I like about the song is that it clearly has an R&B influence, but there is also this African (it sounds maybe Gambian or Nigerian to me, not like Paul Simon’s Southern African tinged “Graceland” album) influence in the backup vocals, and then halfway through the song it goes into a bridge that sounds like it could have directly come from a Scottish bagpipe tune. It even adopts the lilt that a lot of highland songs have, and is rooted in a major pentatonic scale that flows with the chords of the song. It is such an interesting conglomeration of styles, but it doesn’t sound forced or manipulated in any way. The melody is just a natural outpouring of a writer who has obviously listened to A LOT of music. This is where modalism comes into your songs. You do not need to stay in one mode. Instead you can meander in and out of modes as you create your song. Maybe you meander from the verse to the bridge in different modes, or perhaps your verse is complex enough that you can afford to weave from one mode into another. If you have never studied them, I highly recommend that you begin a thorough investigation of the Child Ballads. The Child Ballads were a collection of English and Scottish folk songs collected by Harvard Professor Francis J. Child in the late 1800’s. Inspired by the work that the Brothers Grimm were doing with folktales, he decided to collect folk songs. Child did not include a lot of the music with the songs, though he was a competent singer and performer himself, but years later in the 1950’s, a professor at Berkeley in California, Bertrand Harris Bronson, collected the tunes of several versions of each ballad. One of the things

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Lyrics & Music that Bronson included in volume 2 of his collection is a study on the use of pentatonic scales and how they relate to modes. I am including a graphic of my take on Bronson’s study on the previous page. Bronson concluded that when you are playing a piece of music using a melody that is pentatonic (using only five notes) in nature, you have the option of choosing chords that occur in any of three of the common modes. For instance, let’s say you are playing a melody that is made up of the notes C, D, E, G and A. These five notes could be part of the C major scale, also known as the C Ionian mode. But these notes are also found within C Lydian and C Mixolydian. Now, going over all of the scale patterns for the modes is a bit out of the scope of this book, especially since they are so easy to find on the internet these days, but the point I’m trying to make, is once you know what chords work with C Lydian or C Mixolydian, it is an easy matter of using a simple pentatonic melody over any or all three of these modes, without really needing to do any true modulating from one mode to the other. If you combine mode mixing using a pentatonic melody, then it is also easy to pivot into a related key, and use the same method there. Let’s say you have your simple C, D, E, G and A melody, these notes are also found in A Aeolian. So you could switch to the Aeolian mode as well in the key of A (same as A natural minor) and then modulate to the pentatonic notes that work with Aeolian, and then pivot between Aeolian, Phrygian and Dorian. Your melodies could become truly complex, and so could your chord changes. For a pop song, too much modulation within a verse or chorus could become tiring, but it seemed to work for Brian Wilson, so who knows? Maybe you could put it to good use as well. Melody Development Mozart was a master of taking a simple melody, and modifying it to become something unique and special. He did this with the tune to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or in the French “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.” If you look up his 12 variations, you can get a good idea of some of the ways a melody can go from simple to complex in a matter of minutes. When I am teaching this to my students, I like to break these techniques down into five simple things to do to alter a melody. Add Ascension - this means you can make the melody go up from where it started. This can lead to an “ascending melody” where the melody rises and rises up producing a climatic effect.

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Willy Minnix Add Descenion - this means you can make the melody drop from where it started. This can lead to a “falling melody.” Falling melodies are found in some of the most popular songs of all time, and are especially prone to blues and R&B songs. Think of Alicia Keys’ song “Falling.” Add Contrary Motion - Whatever your melody is doing, add the opposite motion to it. If your melody was originally going up, but you don’t like it, change it to make it go down, and vice versa. Add Oblique Motion - This is like contrary motion, except it includes the original instead of changing the original. So it lengthens the melody by adding the opposite movement. If the melody is originally going up, let it keep going up, but then bring it back down, or vice versa. Add Reverse Motion - This is where you reverse the melody, so if it went C, E, D, G, flip it around and make it go G, D, E, C. Any of these five techniques can be combined with each other in various ways to really expand a melody and make it unique and interesting. If you ever get stuck with writer’s block, these techniques can be a great way to help you break out of the rut you are in. There are also versions of these techniques when working with harmony as well. Modulating Melodies Another technique that you can experiment with is modulation. You do not have to stay in the same key with your melody. And if you decided to start with a melody, instead of a chord progression, then it is far easier to modulate your melody, and then discover which chords work with the modulating melody. If you want to experiment with melody modulation, I would suggest starting with these experiments first: Circle of Fifths - Try working around the circle of fifths and bring your melody along for the ride. Modal Modulation - Try going from major to minor, or from minor to major, or try dropping into a mode that contains the same root note. For example go from C major to C Dorian. Chromatic Modulation - Try chromatically stepping up or down from your starting key. If you started with C major, then step up to C#, or D major. Or step down to B or Bb major. Ambiguous Modulation - Pick several keys that are closely related C,

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Lyrics & Music Am, Dm, F, G for example, and then modulate back and forth between each key. People will have a hard time trying to figure out what key you’re in. If you do it right it will sound mysterious and cool. If you do it wrong, it will sound like you’re an idiot and don’t know what you’re doing. How to Write A Modern Pop Song Now that we’ve talked about all the ways that will make your melody develop and become awesome. Let’s talk about how to make your melody suck and sound like everything else out there on the pop radio stations. There are a few things that modern songwriters are doing that aren’t totally garbage, and you may want to add some of them into your songs to add a modern flavor. I will warn you that these things are already overdone, and to me probably should be left out, but I understand that you want to write a hit song, so perhaps if you can use some of the following techniques as flavoring to a song that is using some of the above techniques, then maybe it will turn out for the best. Four Chords - I probably do not need to mention this, but any melody that is based around the I, IV, vi, and V, will fit with a modern aesthetic. Another thing about modern songs, is that they typically limit the number of chords they use to only six, because apparently modern pop icons cannot play more than six chords. Or maybe with all of the dancing modern artists do, they just don’t have the time for any other chords. Simple Monotonal Melody - As we mentioned at the beginning of this book, songs are written at a fourth grade reading level or less. So pretend you are writing for sex-crazed kindergarteners and you will do well. Since your lyrics are so simplistic, might as well make the melody simplistic as well, so their tiny little pathetic minds can process the info. Less than 10 second Intro - Modern songwriters want people to recognize the song within two seconds. The catchy intro is king, and I believes derived from the way Elton John wrote beautiful intros to all of his songs, but with modern songs they have devolved from being something artistic into just being ear candy to start the song. Millennial Whoop - You might want to add a “Millennial Whoop” or two, or heck, why not make a whole chorus using this trite little melodic lick. Apparently a musician named Patrick Metzger noticed the overuse of this technique and dubbed it the “Millennial Whoop,” but it is basically going from the fifth note of the scale to the third and then back up to the fifth. This has been going on since classical music, but

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Willy Minnix for some reason this little addition to any melody will make it sound modern. As a side note, little things like this are things to look for when trying to imitate a style. Take for example an older singer, Sam Cooke had his certain little flourish that he added to a lot of his melodies. Think of “Woooooah, you send me.” He used that in a lot of his songs, and it was kind of his trademark. If you listen to a lot of the way New Wave singers sang, you can hear certain things that they did that made their sound so distinct. These distinctives are not necessarily a bad thing, because they give your songs an instant connection to other music that people like, but they will date your music and eventually when these melodic additions fall out of fashion may make your music seem a bit corny. Someone who has always done a certain amount of imitation (and done it well) in his songs is Billy Joel. He knows how to create an image of a certain type of music with just a catchphrase that is typical of the type of song he is performing. Whether it’s recreating the sound of Frankie Valli in “Uptown Girl” or providing a flare of Puerto Rican jazz in “Don’t Ask Me Why,” or getting a taste of Little Italy in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” he just knows what little phrase to add to the melody to make it capture something that invokes a feeling or an image of a certain place or time, and he does it so well that you almost don’t notice, but are instantly transported back to wherever it is he wants to take you. Learn from Billy, if you want to do this right, because in the wrong hands, it can sound really bad and cheesy, but if you feel drawn to this type of thing, he is a good person to learn it from. Regina Spektor does this too, and does it well, and she is very reminiscent of Billy Joel in the way she does it. 4 Bar Theory - There is a theory that I saw on a couple different youtube videos, that seems to be popular with rappers, which states that every four bars your song should have something interesting for the listener. I actually have no problem with this idea. I think that if you include something that builds the song up every four bars it will help the song. However, it doesn’t have to be from a production standpoint that something new and interesting comes in every four bars. What modern songwriters have forgotten that the masters and composers of previous eras understood is that melody can develop and change and the melody itself can be the thing which changes every four bars or so to draw the listener into experience the song. Millennial Rhythm - A lot of modern songs also have a special rhythm that first seemed to appear in pop music in “Here Comes the Sun,” by the Beatles, although there seems to be something Mozart or Haydn-

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Lyrics & Music ish about it to me. The rhythm is 4 sets of triplets followed by 4 sixteenth notes. I first heard that this was becoming a popular trend when one of my favorite youtubers Jake Lizzio from Signals Music Studio, discussed it in one of his videos. (BTW, if you don’t know Jake’s videos, then you really should. He’s a cool young guy who makes great music theory videos, and is constantly experimenting with new ideas, check him out.) This “unnamed rhythm” as Jake calls it, is basically the rhythm that George Harrison plays on the melodic part of “Here Comes the Sun,” but it can also be heard in songs by countless other artists, and Lizzio compares it to the Bo Diddley beat. I’ve decided to call it the “Millennial Rhythm,” since it seems a lot of modern songs are latching onto it, and it fits well with the “Millennial Whoop.” Chorus Start Time - Modern songs tend to jump to the chorus more quickly than songs in the past did. They like to get to the chorus within the first 30 seconds of the song. Any longer than that and millennials will start sucking on their thumbs, change the channel and go off looking for a safety zone. The thinking behind this I believe is flawed. It presupposes that everything that came before the chorus is rubbish and should be rushed through to get to the good part. But if you compose each section of your song as if it should catch the listener’s ear, then it’s all the “good part.” This is why “Bohemian Rhapsody” is awesome. Because each and every part of the song is the “hook.” This is why people still like listening to a song like “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word,” because each part of the song is awesome and melodically amazing. A song does not have to rush to the chorus, in fact delaying the chorus may be perfect way to build up tension that can finally be released in the chorus. These are a few of the things that typify modern pop songs, but there are other techniques that you can explore that will add interest to your music. Splitting Melody Between Multiple Singers Something that I do not hear very often in modern music (perhaps because modern songs rely so heavily on a star, and not a music group) is the idea of splitting the melody between several different singers. You hear this a lot in musicals, but in pop music, it was not done a lot until Brian Wilson started writing songs like this for the Beach Boys. He considered each singers main strong areas, and let the melody move from one singer to the next. Almost as if it was one singer with a tremendously wide vocal range, but it was three or more singers. The Eagles did some of this on their songs, and so did Queen, although

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Wonderful Everclear

Songwriter(s): Art Alexakis, Greg Eklund, Craig Montoya Year Written:

2000

Song Pattern:

A, A, A, B, C, D repeat with outro

Notes of Interest:

Told from the perspective of a child, “Wonderful” deals with the subject of divorce. It uses a slightly altering verse and additional instrumentation as a build up to the prechorus (B) and then into a nursery rhyme-like hook.

I think this song is well worth giving a listen because it capWhy You Should Listen: tures the complex life of a child caught in a divorce. The bridge section (D) is especially powerful as it features the child blasting the parents for putting the child through the divorce. 84

Lyrics & Music it was mostly Freddie Mercury singing on different recorded tracks. Sting does this somewhat too with some of his own backup vocals, and Annie Lennox did this on a couple songs from the Diva album. You also hear this somewhat in the songs of Crosby, Stills and Nash, but mostly you just hear harmony. But the purist version of this technique is probably the Beach Boys. I think it would be really cool if a pop band came along and started doing a modern take on this technique. But this discussion of a split melody line, leads us to the next consideration which is using harmony, and how it intertwines with the melody. Another variation on this could be call and response singing that has been popular in R&B music and Gospel music for over a hundred years. The basics of call and response singing is the main singer sings a phrase, and the choir or backup singers sing a response to this phrase. The perfect example of this is “Hit the Road Jack,” by Ray Charles. It is a dialogue between the main singer and the other singers. One has to ask, where does the melody stop, and the harmony begin? Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just trades off from one singer to another. This type of singing, incidentally dates all the way back to the book of Psalms circa 1400 BC, when the priest would sing a line and the congregation would respond with a set phrase. How Harmony Affects Melody This could be a book in and of itself. At its most basic level, any instrumentation behind a melody could be considered harmony, but that definition is a little too broad for this book, and so we will define harmony as it relates to other singers singing along with the melody line. This leaves out call and response type singing that is popular in a lot of R&B songs, but which vaguely falls under the division of melody as mentioned above, but in some complex cases interchanges with harmony singing. If you were to examine a simple hymn book, you would see sheet music that many confuse with piano sheet music. What you are actually looking at is a song written in four part harmony. The bass clef notes are the notes that the bass and the tenor singers sing. While the treble clef contains the notes that the soprano and alto singers sing. This is why if you were to plot out all of the chord changes that happen in a typical hymn, you would find that by assigning chords to each of the changes the singers sing, you would end up with far more chords than you need to actually play the song. A song like “Amazing Grace,” for example can be simply played with three chords. But if you look at the hymn book music for the same song, you would find maybe up to ten

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Willy Minnix chords in the song. This is because the harmony stacks up and creates chords as well. Perhaps you are a very basic musician, and this is blowing your mind. I find that the easiest way to think of it for me is to think of the chords I am playing on my instrument as the main chords of the song. And the notes that are added in the voices that are singing as spices I’m adding to the soup of the song. They are there for flavor and decoration, so I don’t think about them much when I’m playing my instrument. I just think of the basic chords. But when I turn my attention to the harmony singers, I then start to think about the function of some of the notes that they are singing. Is my tenor singer passing from an F chord to a C chord, and retaining the F for a moment? Then technically he’s singing a Csus4 for a moment. Maybe the Alto is passing from an A note in that F up to a Bb before landing on a C. Then the Csus4 just became a C7sus4. So having an understanding of the way chords work, is going to be a great help when trying to compose harmony parts. Fortunately, in popular music, harmony is a bit more simplistic than it is in a hymn book, unless of course you’re Brian Wilson, and that’s a whole other topic. But in most modern music, harmony is used as a way to punctuate the melody. It pops in for a couple bars and then drops out again. Maybe it’s used to build up parts of the song that should be considered more important. Sometimes (not as much in modern music, but more so in the past) it’s used to include more story information that isn’t included in the main melody line. - Whatever it’s purpose in the songs you write, coming up with harmonies should not be too difficult from a writing perspective. - Determine why you need harmony. - Figure out where it should go, - Examine your basic chords and finally, - Determine what notes the harmony singers should sing. Now that we’ve talked about basic harmony, let’s talk about Brian Wilson’s use of harmony. We have already talked about Brian’s bizarre use of chord changes, his melodies that skip from one singer in the band to another with mesmerizing fluidity, now add on top of that how when the melody leaves one singer, that singer doesn’t stop singing, but drops or raises into a harmony part, or even extend into becoming a harmony part. I think “Good Vibrations” is a good example of this. The chorus is built up not only on a key modulation through the entire chorus, but is built up by stacking up various parts that at one moment seem to be the main melody, but then is replaces as it is repeated by a

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Lyrics & Music new melody, then that is replaced while it is repeated by another new melody, etc. This my friends is where harmony diverts and becomes something which Bach would have recognized as counterpoint. Understanding Counterpoint Counterpoint is the technique of writing polyphony. Polyphony is when you have more than one melody that interweaves with each other. Polyphony can be simple with just two melodies. It kind of reminds me of watching an Arnis practitioner weaving swords around. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Yes, you do. Remember in the Phantom Menace when Darth Maul got his double lightsaber chopped in half, and then he instantly starts spinning both lightsabers around equally well? That’s counterpoint. Which hand was more important the right hand or the left hand? Well sadly for Darth Maul, he got chopped in half a few minutes later, so it really didn’t matter, but in the case of counterpoint, both melodies are equally important. Polyphony can also be complex with three four or more melodies spinning around to amaze and delight the listener. You do not hear this much in pop music as it relates to vocal lines. You do get a taste of this with instrumental sections, a stellar example that comes to mind is the end of “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominoes. In fact, most of the time when you see Eric Clapton playing with any guitar player that is equally as awesome as him, you start to hear some of this mind dazzling awesomeness. Some people have said that this is really not technically counterpoint because it is off the cuff and spontaneous polyphony, similar to Dixieland Jazz. And this may be true, but in a lot of ways once the recording has been created, regardless of the technique used to create it, the result compares with other pieces that were created using the traditional contrapuntal methods. Yet, even with this sometimes popping up in the music portions of recordings, you don’t hear it a lot with singers in modern music. Perhaps one reason you do not hear it with singers is that it creates a confusing mess that unless created with a controlled method produces a cacophony of noise instead of inspirational music. You do hear this somewhat in show tunes and musicals, but since this book is more geared for writing songs for pop music, we will try to limit our study to songs that have charted on the pop charts. One example, be it an old one, is Simon and Garfunkel’s version of the old Child Ballad “Scarborough Faire.” Paul Simon wrote a song called “Canticle,” and he married it to the Child Ballad, and came up with “Scarborough Faire/Canticle.”

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Willy Minnix I’ve seen videos where people use the technique of counterpoint to write nice harmony lines. But there is a distinction with true counterpoint technique. When you have finished writing a polyphonic section using counterpoint, that individual line or each of the individual lines could stand alone as their own melody. If what you end up with is just a nicer harmony, then you really haven’t completed the counterpoint work. This is why I like to point to the Paul Simon example. Each of these songs could exist separately. I was working sound for a festival in New York one year, and the band Antigone Rising, an all girl alt-country band, was playing. I honestly cannot remember the songs they were doing, but I was dumbfounded by the end of their set when they began to incorporate the choruses from a couple of the songs that they had previously performed in the set list into the final song they were singing. So one singer would continue singing whatever the song was, and then the next would rise above her vocal with the chorus of one of the earlier songs, and then the third singer would come in with the chorus of yet another song, and then all three songs intertwined over the chords that I assume were common to each of the songs. This is one of the nice things about a lot of songs using the same four chords, but they are the only band I’ve ever heard that did something like that. It was awesome. And I wish I could find a youtube link to send you to, but I could not find one, and it was well over ten years ago when I worked with them. But I’ll never forget it. And to me this is what makes counterpoint so awesome. Each part of the polyphonic system is unique and special, but together it creates something that is far greater than the whole. And counterpoint is not that difficult to do, it is just a matter of sitting down and examining the melody of the base tune, and then writing new tunes that weave in and out of the base tune, and that also work with the chords that go along with the base tune. In the above two examples, the base tune even has different words than the accompanying tunes. If you wanted to, you could keep the same lyrics, and create completely different melodies. In the early days of the Baroque era, this was commonly done with certain prayers, for songs written for masses. The lyrics may have been the same, but each melody was a completely different tune for the same set of lyrics. A modern method of writing counterpoint could be done using a computer, where you type in the melody into the midi score. Or you could even record yourself singing the melody with the chosen chords, and then record a completely different version using the same chords. Then figure out how to combine them together. These techniques will

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Lyrics & Music cause you to break some of the traditional rules of counterpoint, such as voice crossing, but it will be a fun exercise nonetheless. I hope that you give this method a try. If I have not explained in the greatest detail how to write counterpoint, it is only because I don’t want you to be bogged down in the many rules that traditional counterpoint has developed. If you want to learn to do it the right way, get Johann Joseph Fux’s book “The Study of Counterpoint,” aka “Gradus ad Parnassum.” It is and has been the go to book for counterpoint forever, and I’m sure you can pick up a copy for next to nothing.

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Song Profile Title:

You Can Call Me Al

Artist:

Paul Simon

Songwriter(s):

Paul Simon

Year Written:

1986

Song Pattern:

V, C, with a musical “na na” section as a bridge.

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This song is a perfect description of Paul Simon’s NYC rapid-fire dialogue, even though it is a monologue! “Al” features a simple I IV V, rhythm for most of the song, but it includes a great deal of African inspired rhythms and even the great Ladysmith Black Mombazo singing in the background. The instrumentation was not typical of a pop song when it came out in 1986, but it quickly became one of Simon’s most popular songs. 90

Part IV - Rhythm

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Lyrics & Music

W

hatever you do in life, you cannot escape rhythm. There is the rhythm of your heart beat, or the rhythm of your breathing. There is a rhythm to driving in traffic, a rhythm to the ocean tides. There is a rhythm to walking, to chewing food, and even to brushing your teeth. All of these activities are part of the rhythm of life all around us. Sometimes rhythm is dead on, like a clock keeping time. Sometimes the rhythm is sloppy, or what we musicians call syncopated. Sometimes the rhythm anticipates the beat, as in Reggae music. But whatever the rhythm of the music you are trying to play, you need to have a basic understanding of some of the things you can do with rhythm, as it regards songwiting. So in this section we are going to go over some basics of rhythm, and then go into some more advanced concepts of

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Willy Minnix how you can use rhythmic changes to enhance the songs you write. Basics of Understanding Rhythm Rhythm is a complex subject, and many books have been written about it. I don’t want to go over every aspect of rhythm, but I do want to cover a few concepts that will help you as a songwriter get started on exploring rhythm when it comes to writing songs. Most rhythms can be broken down into seven fairly simple rhythms that can be combined to make a whole host of other rhythms. I am including a diagram of the basic rhythms. This should help you if you need to sight read rhythms. But for those who do not know much about how rhythm is notated, let me give you a quick rundown. Whole Notes get four bests, half notes get 2 beats, quarter notes get 1 beat, eighth notes get half a beat, and sixteenth notes get a quarter of a beat. Whole notes do not have a stem. Half notes look like a whole note with a stem. Quarter notes have a stem, and the note is colored in. Eighth notes, have a stem and a flag. And sixteenth notes have a stem and two flags. Most songs deal with rhythm in a simple way, they have a time signature at the beginning of the piece that informs the reader how many beats should be included within each measure of the song. The measure is the distance between bar lines on a piece of sheet music. Any number of beats could be included within two bar lines, but the most common are four beats and three beats. Often the quarter note is used to determine what the beat is. Because some note has to govern the beat, the quarter note is the simplest. So when you see 4/4 time, the top number tells you there are four beats between each barline. The bottom number tells you that the quarter note gets the beat, because the 4 represents the quarter note. Another popular time signature is 3/4, and as you can tell the top number says there are three beats in the measure, while the bottom number tells you it’s the quarter note that gets the beat. So you will find 3 quarter notes, or the equivalent value of notes, between the bar lines. Things get more interesting when you start to combine various rhythms within the barlines to make rhythms other than just four quarter notes in a row, or three quarter notes in a row. So if you are in 4/4 time, you could have a quarter note, two eighth notes and a half note together. The quarter note equals 1 beat. The eighth notes both equal half a beat, so together they equal 1 beat also, and the half note equals 2 beats, so together they all equal four beats. Any number of notes can be mixed and matched, as long as in the end they equal 1 beat.

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Willy Minnix Now sometimes when you mix and match notes, they don’t equal exactly 4 beats. Sometimes they may go a little long, or at least the sound you want to hear goes a little long and bleeds over into the next measure. In order to fix that problem we have what are called ties. Ties are little curved lines that connect notes across a bar line. When you see them, you don’t have to play the note a second time, you just let it keep playing until the next note that isn’t tied comes along. So if you tie two quarter notes across a bar line they have the same value as a half note, but they look like two quarter notes with a tie connecting them. There’s another problem you might run into, and it’s when you have not enough beats to fill up a measure. In that instance we have what are called dotted notes, which let you get a little bit more out of a note than you normally would get. Whenever you see a dot following a note, it means that the note you are looking at is a little longer than its normal value. To be specific, the note now has the same value that the note is worth + half of the value that the note is worth. So a dotted half note is worth the original 2 beats, but it also get half of 2 added to it. So 2 plus half of 2 = 3 beats. A quarter note gets 1 plus half of 1 if it has a dot. So it is worth 1½ beats. And so on and so forth. One last thing you might run into is the need to cram more notes into a measure than the other methods will allow, and this is where tuplets come in. The most common tuplet is a triplet. A triplet is where you get three beats in the place of two. The most common that you will see is an eighth note triplet. This will look like three eighth notes put together with a little 3 over the top. This means you play three beats in the space where you would normally only play 2. There are other tuplets as well, but you don’t see them much in popular music. Now you know all of the basics of rhythm. The following chart should make sense to you. I have divided the seven basic beats into measures demonstrating each beat. I put the basic beat into sixteenth notes so you could see the beat repeat four times per measure. Patterns 1-6 demonstrate the six most basic rhythms, and pattern 7 shows triplets. Patterns 8 and 9 shows what it would look like if you subdivided the beat one time, and also what the beat looks like by itself. Rick Beato created a great video that goes over a lot of this, you can find it by searching his name and rhythm on YouTube. My chart on page 95 is loosely based on his video. Syncopating and Anticipating Rhythms I mentioned briefly that some styles of music uses syncopated and anticipated rhythms. Syncopated rhythms are rhythms that have a beat

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Song Profile Title: Artist: Songwriter(s): Year Written: Song Pattern:

Notes of Interest:

Steam Peter Gabriel Peter Gabriel 1992 Verse and Chorus, but with variations throughout and a Bridge. I find this song to be one of my favorite Peter Gabriel songs, perhaps it is because it was produced by Daniel Lanois who is one of my favorite produces, having produced Bob Dylan’s “Oh Mercy” album.

“Steam” captures the feeling of an industrial blast factory, which makes the changing naWhy You ture of the verse structure work Should Listen: for the song. It also builds up to the catchy hook, like steam being let out of an engine. It shows that dance music can actually have something to say. 97

Willy Minnix that lag behind just a little bit. Good examples of syncopated rhythms trace back all the way to the early days of jazz and ragtime. Ragtime piano music is a really good example of the earliest forms of syncopated rhythm. As you listen to the music you get a sense of feeling of loping along. The music almost feels like it has a slight limp to it, I think is the best way to describe it. You can see it in blues music, later jazz music, rock and roll of the 50’s all the way up to modern pop music. Syncopated beats are so popular that many people think that the syncopation is the actual beat. The opposite of this style of rhythm, is anticipated rhythms. While syncopated rhythms are intensely popular, anticipated rhythms are not quite as popular, but you will hear them from time to time. Reggae music demonstrates anticipated rhythms a lot, as does Puerto Rican and Cuban Jazz. A lot of Caribbean rhythms have an anticipation to them. Sometimes in Middle Eastern and African rhythms you will find anticipated rhythms as well. World Rhythms for Songs Some composers get bored with the basic 3/4 and 4/4 rhythms and like to explore rhythms that are found in other cultures. This is a deep well, but to give you a starting point Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album is heavily influenced by African Rhythms, and his “Rhythm of the Saints” album uses a lot of South American rhythms. Peter Gabriel back in the late 80’s and early 90’s was really into using world rhythms, as was Sting. Sting is also interested in compound rhythms (more on that later), as well as incorporating traditional Irish and Scottish rhythms into some of his recordings. A good example would be the “If On A Winter’s Night” album. The list of people who are influenced by the rhythms of the world is truly endless, and I’m sure a google search would yield abundant fruit if you were to pursue it. Time Changes within Songs Some composers, such as the Beatles, were apt to change from 3/4 to 4/4 within the same song. Some would use 5/4 or 4/4 + 3/4+ 2/4 and mix and match their rhythms to give the songs a strange lopiness. All you need is love is a shining example of mixing rhythms to make compound rhythms. Sometimes you will notice that a song book editor will take a complex world rhythm, such as an Irish slip jig rhythm and try to simplify it by writing the song with a changing time signature throughout. I do not ap-

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Crazy Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson

Songwriter(s):

Willie Nelson

Year Written:

1961

Song Pattern:

Verse, Verse’, repeated

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

“Crazy” is basically a jazz ballad, that was performed with a country twang. The structure of the song is basically hymnlike, but with a modulation in the third verse. Willie Nelson was heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt, the French Gypsy jazz guitarist. The use of the diminished chords to move upwards is very typical of Django’s playing. Willie keeps moving into different keys, raising the song to new levels with each passing verse. 99

Willy Minnix preciate when they do this. I feel that it unnecessarily makes the sheet music more complicated than if you just learned the complex rhythm. There is a great deal more to be said about rhythm, but most of that relates to specific instruments, and as a songwriter you should be spending time learning as much theory pertaining to your instrument(s) as you can. What I have covered here should be enough to get you started applying rhythmic changes to your music. If you experiment with time changes, and world rhythms, I am sure you will find it adds a layer of complexity to your songs that will be immediately noticeable. Using the Computer to Adjust Rhythms If you want to mess around with various and different rhythms, the nice thing is with most DAWs you can adjust and manipulate rhythms ad nauseum. Also there are pre-programmed rhythms out there that you can download and mess with. I highly recommend that you dig in and practice creating a basic line of rhythms that you can write your songs over top. Or write your song, and then mess around with altering some of the rhythmic elements using the computer to create new and exciting ways to present it.

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Part V Arrangement

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M

odern songs rely heavily on producers to arrange the song in order for it to fit with a modern aesthetic. Songs today have a very specific time frame, usually aided by layout in DAW recording programs. In this time frame you will have specific places where the intro takes place, where the verse gives way to the pre-chorus, and then within the first 30 seconds the chorus pops up. There is an entire science dedicated to producing this type of song, and a few hours spent on youtube can give you all of the answers you need if want to produce crap like what’s heard on the radio these days. Some of these ideas can be useful in making your song sound appealing, but I think they are becoming a hindrance to good songwriting. I believe that it is still a worthwhile idea to consider arrangement when you are writing your song. But in my opinion, a great song can be stripped back to the sim-

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Song Profile Title:

Layla

Artist:

Derek and the Dominoes

Songwriter(s):

Eric Clapton, Jim Gordon

Year Written:

1971

Song Pattern:

V, C, V, C, V, C, Piano Outro

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

There are two popular versions of this song, the original Derek and the Dominoes version, and the Eric Clapton Unplugged version. I feel like the Unplugged version cannot even hold a candle to the original. The piano coda is what grabbed me. I remember buying the vinyl D&D album from a garage sale, coming home and putting it on the record player immediately. When I heard those soaring guitars give way to that amazing piano at the end, I nearly died. It was awesome. 104

Lyrics & Music plest arrangement of just one instrument and a good vocalist. A crummy song, can be dressed up with all sorts of arrangement magic, and may come off as catchy for a while, but ultimately won’t last very long. So let’s take a look at some of the key ingredients of arrangement and how they can decorate your song once you have finished your masterpiece. The Art and Science of Writing A Cool Intro (and Outro) One of the first songs I ever remember hearing was “Your Song” by Elton John. My dad had that record, and I would ask him to play it over and over again. Years later, Elton John came out with a boxed set of a lot of his hit songs, including some of the demos of hit songs including “Your Song.” I was so surprised when I heard the demo, that the intro that I have loved since I was a little kid, didn’t exist! Now, it’s the only demo that I remember of Elton’s so I can’t make a case for it always being this way, but it does make me wonder if Elton writes his intros after he writes his songs. If so this is something to consider if you have finished a song that you think sounds pretty good, but might be missing something, perhaps it just needs a clever into and your song will be complete. One thing that modern music has going for it is it has boiled down a catchy intro into a science. In classical parlance, an intro is called the Capa of the song. Whereas what we usually call an outro is referred to as a Coda. These parts of songs were given great consideration in the period of the great composers, and you can really tell, because so many of the capas jump out at us, and they are the parts that we remember when we hum or whistle a classical tune. Sometimes just mentioning the name of a great composer makes the capa part of one of their pieces pop into your head. In modern times, an intro must be less than 10 seconds. In the 70’s when Elton was writing his intros they typically would be between 10 and 15 seconds. A popular method of intoing a song (of which I am sure Elton learned in music school) is to take the first line of a song and the last line of a song and play them together to make an intro. Elton seems to have taken this approach but expanded it to be a much more melodic piece of the song. You can see from the chord structures of a lot of his intros that they do follow the first and last portions of the song well, but the melodies of his intros are often unique, and do not match the melody that he has written for the voice to sing. It is his way of letting his great piano playing ability shine for a moment before he lets the vocals take over.

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Willy Minnix I believe that some modern writers are pushing to make intros even shorter. I have heard mention of grabbing the listener in the first 2 seconds of the song. And I understand that when you are competing for airwave attention space, this is important. But it saddens me that a part of the song that could be incredibly beautiful has been relegated to a mere 2 seconds. I think it goes back to my argument about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and how every single part of the song should be the hook. If the intro is the hook, then it will grab the listeners ear. Likewise if it gives way to a verse that is amazing and sticks in your ear, then it too will grab the listeners ear, and so on with the chorus and the bridge. All of these parts of the song can be amazing and can make the listener want to hear the song over and over again. One thing that hasn’t diminished, over the years, and maybe have even gotten longer is the coda, or the outro section of songs. I heard a song on the radio the other day, that seemed to be two minutes of outro. A classic example of where this can work is “Hey Jude,” the Beatles keep the “na na na nanana na... Hey Jude” part going forever, and everyone loves it. But for a lot of songs this doesn’t work. I think in order for it to really work you need one or two things to really pull it off. First, you need an extremely catchy melody that doesn’t seem to resolve quite right, so to start it back up again just seems the natural thing to do. And secondly, interesting arrangement of instrument changes, vocal changes, backup singers changing parts, etc., all of these things will lead to making the long outro tolerable. But an outro that is computerized where it’s just the same thing looping over and over is enough to make you want to jump out of a window. Dynamics A songs dynamic range is something that should be considered in the arrangement stage. The dynamics in a nutshell is how loud and soft the song gets at various points throughout. It is quite common for a song to start out softer and gradually build to an exciting climax in the chorus. This is so common that it’s almost taken for granted. But sometimes a lot of interesting things can happen when you vary the dynamics during the bridge. Perhaps you build up for the first chorus, but when you launch into the bridge, everything drops out, gradually building up to hammer the listener with the final chorus. Maybe you shift that final chorus up a half step or a full step in modulation so that it feels like a triumphant lifting. But then again, maybe if it’s a sad song, you drop the volume again and

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Lyrics & Music again, maybe even modulating down a half step at the end to really drive home the desperation that the song is talking about. Also keep in mind that the dynamic range does not have to be the same from verse to verse. One verse might have a mellow dynamic range, while the second verse has a really upbeat feel as it comes off of the first chorus. Likewise for other sections of the song that repeat. Maybe the pre-chorus the first time has a certain feel, but the second time around, the pre-chorus gets elongated to delay the actual chorus, and add some tension. It’s your song, you can arrange it anyway you want, which means you are free to try out several different arrangements until you find the one that’s perfect. Never forget that a songs dynamic range is what helps it be more listenable. I was talking to my wife (a consummate North Easterner) about who is the better songwriter Elton John or Billy Joel. I was surprised that she picked Elton John. Her reasoning was all based on the dynamic ranges of their recorded songs. She said that although she likes Billy Joel songs individually if they come on the radio, if you listen to a bunch of his songs back to back, you feel like you’re getting hit in the head with a hammer (her description, not mine). I never thought of it this way, because I love both of them. But when I went back and listened to a bunch of Billy Joel songs I saw what she meant. Billy’s dynamic range is often pumped up, because he seems to write songs that will be great when they are performed live. It seems to me that Elton approaches the songs more from a perspective of the recording studio as a way of capturing a piece of art. I’m not sure if any of this is true, but it is worth considering when you talk about dynamics. Dynamics are vastly affected by use of compression as well. Too much compression and everything starts to just bleed together. This can be ok, if you’re going for a wall of sound type of thing, but if you want to hear a great dynamic shift, maybe it will backfire. So if you are a thoughtful composer, and have thought through all of your dynamic changes, make sure you are working with an audio engineer who shares your aesthetic, otherwise you might be very disappointed in how the final recording turns out. Instrumentation Closely related to dynamic change is instrumentation. The choice of instruments you pick can make a difference. There was a song that came out a few years ago, and was used on a commercial. It was called “New Soul,” by an Israeli singer named Yael Naim. The song caught my attention because it had a tuba in it. You don’t hear tuba very often in

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Willy Minnix a pop song, not that you really need to hear tuba very often in a pop song, but it was quirky enough, coupled with Yael’s Israeli accent, that the song struck a chord with people. I think there is nothing wrong with experimenting with new and fresh instrumentation. I believe one of the things that led to the whole Mumford and Sons, Lumineers, type bands getting popular a while back was the change in instrumentation compared to what had been happening immediately before. It was like a miniature folk revival without the folk songs. The sad fact that most of the material Mumford produced after his initial break sounded all the same, probably led to the rapid decline in popularity. It was a great ear catching schtick for a while though. Don’t be afraid to experiment. You never know what might make the song sound amazing. I mean, who can imagine a version of “Good Vibrations” without the screaming theremin at the end? It just wouldn’t be the same song. Vocal Arrangement We briefly discussed vocal arrangement in the chapter on melody when we spoke about harmony. However, there is more to be said about good vocal arrangement. Right now the stock method of arranging vocals is to have a main vocal throughout the song, with intermittent harmony vocals scattered throughout to punctuate parts of the song. Other vocal techniques that are interesting and that have been used in the past include but are not limited to: Using special effects on the lead vocal, such as turning all the mids and lows down and the highs up to make an old radio sound Double tracking the lead vocal Triple tracking the lead vocal Playing voices backwards (this is really weird and spooky on lines with words, but is awesome with harmony vocals, especially if reverb is added and then when it’s flipped around the reverb comes at the beginning and not at the end) Running backing vocals through phasers and other effects Running the lead through phasers and distortion

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Good Vibrations The Beach Boys

Songwriter(s):

Brian Wilson, Mike Love

Year Written:

1966

Song Pattern:

Modular

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This is an example of Brian Wilson’s first attempt at modular songwriting, and it actually drove him crazy. The good news is modern software can help anyone take up modular songwriting by cutting and pasting. “Good Vibrations” used over 1,000 cuts of tape to piece it together. The fugal-esque ending is worth the whole song, but every part of it from Carl Wilson’s angelic voice, to the theremin wailing at the end of the song, to the unusual instrumentation, ties together to make one of the most amazing songs ever recorded. 109

Willy Minnix Drowning out the lead vocal with a powerful chorus of voices Supporting the lead vocal with a powerful chorus of voices Trading off lead from one voice to another Having a double tracked vocal where one voice speaks and the other sings Ping-pong panning the vocal from one side of the mix to another. Adding digital delay to the vocal to create backing vocals from the repeats of the main vocal Have a high voice and a low voice double track the lead line Have harmony vocals punch in on certain words that are important (this could be used to make a sentence or message of its own if the right words are emphasized) These are just some ideas off the top of my head that I have heard on popular songs over the years. There are thousands of ways to make your vocals sound unique and interesting. Again do not be afraid to experiment. Hmmm. now that I think about it, several of these effects were used on “The Prophet’s Song” by Queen on their “Night at the Opera” album. Check it out. It’ll do you good. Brian Wilson’s Modular Songwriting Concept I saw an interview with Brian Wilson and in it he discussed his idea of recording portions of songs, and then using them as modules which could be moved around from song to song. Unfortunately for Brian, computers did not exist at the time which could allow him to cut and paste, but now we have just the technology, but no one seems to be using his method of modular composition to create pieces in the way he described. Yes, we use loops that can be inserted in portions of songs, but we rarely write a piece that might be Verse 1 of one song on the album, and then later the exact same recorded passage comes in as the Chorus of another song, and then appears again later as a Bridge, or a PreChorus. The nice thing about computers, is that this idea can easily be implemented, and each section can easily be slightly changed around from song to song or section to section to create slightly different versions of

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Lyrics & Music the module each time it is heard. I think this idea is awesome, and I am longing for someone to pick it up and run with it. Maybe that person will be you! Experimentations Vs. Methodology Some songwriters just want to experiment, and feel that using any form of method will limit or kill their creativity, but sometimes they get so bogged down in experimentation that an album can be delayed indefinitely. Whereas other songwriters, they have a certain method that they use all the time, and in extreme cases can lead to staleness. I think it is ok if you have a certain method to writing your songs, but I believe that experimentation is the key to keeping the methodology from getting stale, and the methodology is the impetus that can bring a wild experimenter back on track when they are heading out to space with David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix. When arranging songs, feel free to have some playtime to try out new ideas. Especially if you feel like you are getting stuck in a rut, or hitting a brick wall. Breaking out of the box to mess with a new effect, play with a new vocal technique, or try out a new gadget that is in the studio might be just the thing your song needs. But keep in mind that time is usually money, and if you have a pretty well defined song in your mind from the minute you finish writing, it will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

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Willy Minnix Using A Computer to Arrange Songs As I mentioned above, there are great possibilities when using a computer with a DAW to write and arrange songs. I do not personally like writing my lyrics on a computer or tablet. I like the feel of the pen on the paper, and when it is all said and done, I like to add my chords onto the paper. Once that process is complete, I will often date the song and sign my name. But really the song isn’t completed until it is arranged and recorded. The computer becomes a great help at that point. Especially if you want to force your song into a more modern mold. It is easy to set up intro sections, verse and chorus sections, and the bridge sections all on the DAW, so you can adjust your song parts to fit into a more standard format. The computer is also useful for including drum tracks, and other instruments that perhaps you do not play. And the computer can help you make sure your timing is good by locking your rhythm to a steady beat. All of this is good, but be careful not to let the computer take away your individual creativity as a songwriter.

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing Aerosmith

Songwriter(s):

Diane Warren

Year Written:

1998

Song Pattern:

V, V, C, V, B, C

Notes of Interest:

Diane Warren was the pop song queen of the late 80’s and 90’s. It was like you couldn’t go to a movie or turn on the radio without hearing one of her powerful ballads.

“I don’t Want to Miss A Thing,” is one of the quintessential Why You Should Listen: love ballads. The structure is straight forward, verse, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, as you would expect from a power ballad, But the way it just builds and builds, and the melody and chords, it all melds into a heart-tugging perfect song. 113

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Feelin’ Alight Joe Cocker

Songwriter(s):

Dave Mason

Year Written:

1968

Song Pattern:

Verse, Chorus (repeated)

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This song only uses basically just 2 chords. It’s pretty amazing what a Cuban rhythm and bluesy piano can accomplish to create a hook. Speaking of the hook, the other thing about the song that blows me away, is that the hook is not the melody that is sung. In my opinion, the hook is actually the hypnotic piano line. Compare Traffic’s version to Cocker’s version. Traffic’s version is sub-par, but when you first hear the opening piano licks of Cocker’s version the whole thing just comes alive. 114

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Appendix Analysis of Great Songs

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What makes a great song great? Attributes for grading: Based on the five areas that we covered in this book, I tried to narrow down three aspects for each category to rate the songs that have been included in the song profile sections of this book. The list I am giving is not really in any order from greatest to least, just in order of what popped into my head. It should give you an idea of how I came to my conclusions about each song, and will help you as you compare your songs to some of these, my all time favorites. Lyrics Cleverness - Is there a good pivot or turn that catches your attention and makes you stop and think, or laugh, or cry? Do the lyrics grab you personally? Poetry - The Beauty of the Lyric. Is the lyric told in a way that elevates it above the basics of conversation, and turn it into a thing of beauty. Conversely, is the song sung in a way that seems conversational, but on a closer look you see the well crafted poetry that makes up the conversation.



Storytelling - How well does the song tell the story? Is the song telling a story? And if so can you follow what it’s saying? It’s ok if the story is vague, but is it a mess, or does it tell the story well?

Chords Simple Progressions Done Well - It’s ok to use the four main chords, but are they laid out in a way that is interesting, and not just repeating what everyone else is doing?

Interesting Changes - Are the chords just repeating or do they go through an interesting development. Is there a change in key, or borrowing that is unexpected but some how elevates the listener? Complexity of Chords - It doesn’t always take astoundingly complex chords to make a good song, but a 116



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well placed complex chord at just the right moment might make or break the sound that makes the song awe some?

Melody Singability - Is the melody singable? If you played the melody by itself on a piano would it still sound good, or would it fall apart? Hook Catchiness - Modern songs have this in abundance, but just having a catchy hook does not make a great song, but it helps. Also has the hook progressed past the stage of being a good hook, into being an anthem? The Journey - Does the Melody develop and take you on a journey, or does it remain static throughout the song?





Rhythm Rhythmic Interest - What is it about the rhythm that is interesting in the song? Is it part of the drums and pecussion, or is there rhythmic interest in the overall groove of the song, or the melody? Uses of Odd Rhythms - Are there any odd rhythms that jump out at you? Is there a change in timing at certain points in the song? Uses of World Rhythms - Are there various world rhythms included in the song that set it apart from other songs? If so, what rhythms are being used? Arrangement Into/Outro/Solos - Does the song have a beautiful intro? Is the outro interesting to listen to? Fullness/Completeness - Does the song sound complete? Does it feel like it is missing something? Best use of an Overwhelming Number of Instruments - Is this song a “Layla” or a “Sgt. Pepper’s?” Does it handle the instrumentation well?

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Don’t Look Back In Anger Oasis

Songwriter(s):

Noel Gallagher

Year Written:

1996

Song Pattern: Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, repeated I think this, along with “Stacy’s Mom,” “If You’re Wondering If I Want You To (I Want You To), are among the triumvirate of the best pop-songs ever written. It includes a lot of the tricks that made the Beatles sound like the Beatles, including the falling fourth chord, and the “Imagine” piano intro. While it’s structure is simple, it is a great example of using borrowed chords to fill in a basic chord progression. It borrows heavily (like “Hook” from blues traveler) from Pacabel’s canon in D, but it expands on the Canon progression by including Beatle type digressions into other chords. 118

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Song Profile Nobody Else Title: Artist: Songwriter(s): Year Written: Song Pattern: Notes of Interest:

Los Lonely Boys Kevin Wommack 2004 V, P-C, V, P-C, C, Solo, repeat Henry Garza’s guitar on this song is the funkiest, coolest and spankiest guitar you will probably ever hear in your life. Stop what you are doing and go listen to it NOW!

This song is an alternate take on the oldies progression, but when it goes into the solo, it Why You toys around with almost estabShould Listen: lishing the V as the new tonic, but then teases a bit and goes back to the I as the tonic. It teases again making you feel like you might be modulating to V, but then goes back to I and it feels like a key change without really changing key. 119

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word Elton John

Songwriter(s):

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Year Written:

1976

Song Pattern:

V, V, C, C, V

Notes of Interest:

This song should win an award for the most chords in a song, at around 7 or 8 chords, not including the sus4 sus2 modifiers that Elton John likes to include in a lot of his chords. If you add those you get up to around 21 to 24 chords. It’s crazy.

Why You Melody is just awesome. Not Should Listen: only is the vocal melody awesome, the intro melody is beautiful and simple. The solo melody is great on an accordion, the strings provide awesome accompaniment. It’s just an amazing song. 120

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Hook Blues Traveler

Songwriter(s):

John Popper

Year Written:

1995

Song Pattern:

V, C, repeated with one double time verse

Notes of Interest:

Popper wrote this song as a kind of protest to his record company, proving to them that writing a catchy popular song is easy. And lo and behold, it was one of their biggest hits.

The song is based around the chord progression for Pacabel’s Why You Canon in D Major, like “Don’t Should Listen: Look Back In Anger” by Oasis. But the funky guitar work, and of course Popper’s mind meltingly awesome harmonica solo makes this a song that you definitely have to listen to. 121

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Song Profile Title:

To Make You Feel My Love

Artist:

Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Adele

Songwriter(s):

Bob Dylan

Year Written:

1997

Song Pattern:

Hymn Structure (all verses)

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

Billy Joel’s version actually was released one month before Bob Dylan’s version. What makes this song so interesting to me is the use of the falling fifth and fourth chords. I have seen a lot of chord charts for this song on the internet, but a lot of them get it wrong. The song goes from I to V, then to the minor v, then to the IV, and then to the minor iv. It’s a beautiful falling melody and chord progression that tugs at the heart, proving that Dylan is not only a master lyricist, but a great chord composer as well. 122

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Don’t Worry Baby The Beach Boys

Songwriter(s):

Brian Wilson, Roger Christian

Year Written:

1964

Song Pattern:

V, P-C, C, repeated

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

I heard Brian Wilson in an interview talking about being inspired by the Ronnette’s song “Be My Baby” and the Shangra-la’s “Leader of the Pack,” when he wrote this song. What is great about this song, is that unlike most pop songs of the time, Wilson completely changes keys for the chorus. He begins in the key of E, and then moves everything up two steps to the key of F# for the chorus, using the borrowed VI7 as a pivot chord to launch into the new key. 123

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

My Girl Temptations

Songwriter(s):

Smokey Robinson and Ronald White

Year Written:

1964

Song Pattern:

V, Refrain, repeated with key change in solo

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

It’s amazing that “My Girl,” and “Don’t Worry Baby” came out in the same year. Very different in style, they are both iconic songs that have stood the test of time. This song has a great bass line, guitar line and melody, a three stringed braid of awesomeness. It also features a great whole step up key change that happens during the solo. It uses the VI to change keys, just like “Don’t Worry Baby” does. 124

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

When We Was Fab George Harrison

Songwriter(s):

George Harrison and Jeff Lynne

Year Written:

1987

Song Pattern:

V, Refrain, Bridge (Slightly Modular)

Notes of Interest:

This song was the first song to reunite the Beatles, sans John Lennon, with Ringo Starr playing drums, and Paul McCartney appearing in the video as a walrus.

Why You Should Listen: This song basically combines all of the things that made the Beatles later music so great. The melody is very Beatel-ish, the instrumentation, and the chord progressions all combine to create a fond look back at what the Beatles were. 125

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Hold Me Fleetwood Mac

Songwriter(s):

Christine McVie, Robbie Patton

Year Written:

1982

Song Pattern:

V, V, C, V, V, C

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This song goes to show that a band that doesn’t get along can still record a great song. At the time of recording the band members of Fleetwood Mac were on the verge of breaking up, and the band actually reformed shortly after this album. And even though the structure is simple, the various parts that each person performed, from Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar solo, to the vocals to Christine McVie’s awesome piano are well worth the time to check this song out. 126

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

A Whiter Shade of Pale Procol Harum

Songwriter(s):

Gary Brooker, Keith Reid, Matthew Fisher

Year Written:

1967

Song Pattern:

V, C, V, C

Notes of Interest:

This is a pop song that has a heavy classical influence. Comparison’s have been made between the organ and J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String.”

This song has such amazing lyrics, with a whole wide range Why You Should Listen: of interpretation. But despite the simple structure, it draws upon the rich heritage of classical music, demonstrating an understanding of counterpoint technique, but yet, displays a solid foundation in a love for blues and R&B. The momentum of the song is in the perpetual nature of the lower notes. 127

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Every Time You Go Away Hall and Oates, Paul Young

Songwriter(s):

Daryl Hall

Year Written:

1980

Song Pattern:

V, C, Repeated

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

This song was never released as a single by Hall and Oates, but Paul Young brought it to prominence, but in my opinion his recording lacked the soul of the original. Aside from the rising and falling melody line, the way the song builds by adding additional instruments, makes the song retain the listener’s interest. G.E. Smith’s guitar work also sets him up as one of the most unsung guitar players in rock and roll history.

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

A Kiss To Build A Dream On Louis Armstrong

Songwriter(s):

Bert Kalmer, Harry Ruby, Oscar Hammerstein II

Year Written:

1935, 1951

Song Pattern:

Verse, Refrain, Bridge

Notes of Interest:

Originally written for a Marx Brothers movie in 1935, but unused, it was rewritten and retitled in 1951.

The chords in this song repreWhy You Should Listen: sent a great use of borrowed and diminished chords. The bridge of the song is particularly interesting as it modulates from the tonic key into, the minor version of the tonic. It uses the V7sus2 chord as a pivot to get back into the major key. 129

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Your Song Elton John

Songwriter(s):

Elton John, Bernie Taupin

Year Written:

1969, Released 1970

Song Pattern:

V, V, C, V, V, C

Notes of Interest:

Why You Should Listen:

Three Dog Night released a version of this song, 9 months before Elton John’s version was released. And it follows the demo version that appeared years later on the “To Be Continued...” boxed set. Your Song is not a complicated structure, but it does have a bit of a complex chorus. One of the strongest parts of the song is the build-up to the last line of the final chords. Also the descending bass line is catchy. Add to that the beautiful melody, and it’s set up to be a pop hit. 130

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Song Profile Title: Artist:

Changing of the Guards Bob Dylan, Patti Smith

Songwriter(s):

Bob Dylan

Year Written:

1978

Song Pattern:

Verses with Refrain (Hymn structure)

Notes of Interest:

This song gradually speeds up on Dylan’s recording which fits with the apocalyptic feel of the lyrics.

Dylan’s version is almost ruined by the horrible arrangeWhy You Should Listen: ment of the backup singers, however, the chord progression of this song, and how it preserves the resolution to the I chord until the end of each verse is magic. In my opinion I heard more melody in Dylan’s version, than Patti Smith’s, but her version I feel is a better arrangement w/o the over-used backup singers. 131

Willy Minnix

Song Profile Title: Artist:

Carry On My Wayward Son Kansas

Songwriter(s):

Kerry Livgren

Year Written:

1976

Song Pattern:

C, solo, V, C, solo, V, C, extended solo, Bridge, C, extended solo,

Notes of Interest:

“Carry On My Wayward Son” was listed as one of VH1’s Greatest Hard Rock Songs list. It is certainly a heavy song, but follows an orchestral/modular idea of writing a song, as it includes many modules which are stated and then developed throughout the course of the song.

The vocals are tight, the Why You Should Listen: melody is great, and all of the instrumentation blend together to create a great song. 132

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Other Songs Worth Examining Angel, Jimi Hendrix Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, Bob Dylan Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan Desolation Row, Bob Dylan All You Need Is Love, Beatles My Best Friends Girl, The Cars Stacy’s Mom, Fountains of Wayne Richie and Ruben, Fountains of Wayne Mexican Wine, Fountains of Wayne Ruby Tuesday, Rolling Stones We Will Rock You, Queen Walt Grace’s Submarine Test January 1967, John Mayer Talking Old Soldiers, Elton John It’s Probably Me, Sting Be My Baby, The Ronettes I Only Want To Be With You, Dusty Springfield Candy, The Silver Seas There She Goes, The Las Everything I Do I Do For You, Bryan Adams Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd Hey Jude, Beatles Penny Lane, The Beatles Werewolves of London, Warren Zevon Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu, Huey Piano Smith Healing In His Wings, Stephen Altrogge Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton Sacrifice, Elton John Ballad of a Well Known Gun, Elton John I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That, Elton John I Don’t Need No Doctor, Ray Charles Drift Away, Dobie Gray Respect, Aretha Franklin Free Fallin’, Tom Petty It Really Doesn’t Matter At All, ELO Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard, Paul Simon 133

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Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After The War, Paul Simon Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me), Regina Spektor That’s All, Genesis In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel Tempted, Squeeze As Long As You Follow, Fleetwood Mac Mean Old World, Eric Clapton and Duane Almann Something Like Olivia, John Mayer No Albis, Eric Clapton All of Me, Bessie Smith What A Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong Your Cheatin’ Heart, Hank Williams

This list is by no means complete. However, it does represent a full and complete list of songs that represent the techniques that I am covering in this book. If you listen to these songs, I am sure that it will give you a great start on writing songs that are beautiful, interesting and worth recording.

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About the Author: Willy Minnix is the author of over 10 books on a wide variety of topics, but his best selling series is the “Mandolin Dead Man’s Tuning,” books where he covers how to play mandolin in alternate tunings. He has performed all over the United States, with songs used in film and on radio and television, and has composed background music for web advertisements. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his wife and four children, and continues to teach, perform and speak at events. He has been a guest reader and researcher at Harvard, and has been asked to speak at the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) several times for their entrepreneur events. He graduated from Earlham College in 1997 with a degree in music, and continues to pass on what information he can to numerous students both online and from his home studio. 135