“Last week, as an experiment, I uploaded to garageband.com a song by an independent country artist whose CD I produced. Given that there are thousands of artists on the site, I assumed that not much was likely to happen, but I was interested in learning about how garageband works. Tomorrow (March 17, 2005), that song will be featured on garageband’s home page as track of the day. This happened because in the course of a few days the song leapt from the bottom of their country charts, down around about #1800, to #35…”
The rest is at O’Reilly.
I think that in pop music structure is usually kept simple because, as with folk music, the intention is for people to be able to learn the song the first time they hear it. Some pop writers have been able to use unusual structures and still have the song flow naturally, e.g. Steely Dan. Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” is a famous example of a more through-composed (as opposed to repeating) structure. Burt Bacharach writes very unusual phrases that still sing naturally. Not sure if I’ve heard much lately, though.
Songwriter & ASCAP Nashville exec Ralph Murphy is scarily knowledgeable on typical pop song structures.
I thought your comments on simple = focus was very good.
You never mentioned structure. Structure of songs in modern pop, rock and country
never really vary from verse, chorus and middle8.
I’ve been writing songs that I believe are pushing the boundaries of these
restrictions.
Do you know of any artists yourself?