As much as I cherish my hard-earned B in GCSE music (1994, a fine vintage), I’m not musical. I have never had a better than rudimentary capacity for either piano or guitar, nor do I write songs, nor is my voice anything but an instrument of warfare. I've got a bit of a tin ear, don't necessarily hear small instrumental details that well. I know what keys, sharps and flats are, I know what bars are, so at least I can stay tuned in when songwriters get technical, but as much as I (as this blog demonstrates) love and think about songs above all else, I don’t often come at it from a very analytical position.
A few months ago, David Baddiel, who I’ve observed to be
inclined towards the occasional Dylan jibe on twitter, tweeted asking the
leading question of whether any Dylan songs had Middle Eights.
It’s actually quite a good question – and the answer is,
yes, some Bob Dylan songs have Middle Eights, but not all that many. The aspect
of it that was interesting to me, when I thought about it, is that many years
ago I made a category of Dylan songs I called the “pop songs” without ever
really thinking about what I meant by that, but it conforms very closely, now I
look at it, to those with recognisable “middle eights”.
A great middle eight is a sign of pop sophistication, and I
believe what Baddiel was getting at was that Dylan is not as sophisticated a
writer as some others, that his status as the great songwriter is inflated.
Well, anyway, it really got me thinking about structure in
pop songs – structure as the non-sophisticate listener experiences it, not as
the artist puts it together. It took me back to being a small child and
gradually developing an idea of what I liked in a song, and the often undeveloped instinct
we have for a song’s different parts – tune, sound, structure, lyrics,
transition, arrangement, meaning etc. What I realised is that the most
important thing to me is, and has always been, movement. I love a song that
starts me in one place and has moved me to another by the end.
Which helps me understand why I hated dance singles when
they started to arrive in great abundance in the late 80s/early 90s. I didn’t
understand dance music, didn’t get what it was for, just heard it, divorced
from its context, as 3 minutes that went nowhere lyrically, and quite often,
nowhere musically.
I think it was the structure that I hated more than the
electronica, but I’m not sure I’d fully realised that until now.
And then, when I consider that my favourite artist by a mile
is Dylan who, though he has been through many different styles in his career
and has been anything but settled, is rarely particularly eclectic across an
album, and certainly not within a song, it makes me realise that it has been
more important to me that the lyric takes me from one place to another than the
music. I'l forgive an unchanging musical backdrop, if the lyrics and the vocal performance go everywhere, but a song has to be pretty full musically if it offers absolutely nothing lyrically (I don't mean beautiful poetry, I just mean movement) ...
Of course, this is a long way from being universal, and
there are many different ways to write/hear a song. The classic pop structure may
be Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Middle Eight Verse Chorus, but we’d probably be
pretty surprised at how few songs follow that structure.
Lots of songs have just verses and a middle eight, or just
verses, or just verses and choruses, or just choruses, or just verses choruses
and guitar solos, or intro, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight,
verse, different chorus, verse, pause, guitar solo, chorus, chorus, outro, or
whatever …
What holds reasonably true is that songs need some kind of
break/transition. Dylan’s main form of break, especially early on, was the
harmonica solo. He also, obviously, took you to lots of different places with his
words in a way that few had done before or sense – with length of lines,
lengths of verses, changed refrains. His greatest period for trying to write
classic pop songs was, I’d say, in the late 60s and early 70s – from I Want You
to I Threw It All Away. He had an underrated knack for the simple. He wrote
some nice tunes and cool middle eights. He’s been folk, folk rock, rock, country,
blues, soul, gospel, showtune, hymn, and a few other things. But Brian Wilson he’s
not been.
When I was young, I was very impressed with songs which had
relatively complicated structure, like Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody
and Band on the Run. I came to find some of those type of songs a bit of a drag
if they went on too long, but loved the songs of the Super Furry Animals, which
would move you rapidly through several musical ideas within a short time. They toyed
with structure, sometimes putting their chorus at the end, or having a massive
outro, or a short section which sounded completely different from the rest of
the song.
But, importantly, SFA were also full of tunes and lyrical
ideas. For a while there, they seemed the absolute ideal band. It’s no wonder
they slowed to a standstill.
Songs can “move” in a lot of different ways. Three of the
greatest songs of all time hardly live up to what I’m saying. ‘Be My Baby’ is
just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-outro, and the words are mainly just darling,
baby, love – the movement is the 0-100mph adrenaline rush of the first few seconds
and how it keeps you there all the way through. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is just
Verse Verse Bridge Verse Outro – the great movement is that first octave leap
in the first two notes, one of the most significant single movements in the
history of song. ‘All My Friends’ is a two-note riff with a few little kinks –
but the music combined with the lyrics make you feel like it’s an epic journey.
But, yeah, that’s been the realisation for me – it’s the
movement for me that’s the most important thing – not the sound, not necessarily
the tune or the arrangement, but the movement.
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