When sitting down to write a song, I think harmony and melody are often at the forefront of one’s mind. Musicians love to talk about harmony (the vertical component) and melody (the horizontal component) as two sides of the same coin. That “coin,” of course, is the domain of pitch.

But yet in much popular music, pitch seems to play less of a central role in the structure of a song than the role pitch plays in classical music. Take for example rap music. In a lot of rap music, there is typically no discernable vocal melody since the vocalist is speaking more than singing, and the underlying harmony is often static throughout the entire song. So our interest in the music, therefore, must be activated by another domain.

Beck’s breakthrough hit “Loser” provides what I think is a good example of how variety in a domain other than pitch can sustain our interest during the course of a song. In “Loser,” Beck uses just a small assortment of repetitive samples. But throughout the tune, the combination of these samples is constantly changing - the instrumentation is always reshuffled in new and different ways.

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Warning: this post will be discussing face-melting guitar solos, so please don’t read any further unless you are OK with the melting of your face. Heed your potential future forecasted in the album cover below:

I have to admit that I was recently jamming along with Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (from their album Machine Head). I probably haven’t jammed along to that song since I was 15, so my memory of the song was a little faded. On casual listening, I always assumed the form of “Smoke on the Water” to be basically a pair of verse/chorus parts, followed by a solo over the verse/chorus part, with a final verse/chorus and riffs inserted in the middle. In other words:

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I talked about organicism in a recent post about the Beatles, but I thought I’d return to the subject again. In the Beatles tune (”With a Little Help From My Friends”), the chorus could be seen as constructed from the chords of the verse simply transposed down a whole step. Of course, there are other ways of achieving organicism within a song.

Take for example the track “Long Time Gone” as recorded by the Dixie Chicks off their album Home from 2002. I should preface the analysis by mentioning that “Long Time Gone” was not written by the Dixie Chicks, however. The song was composed by Darrell Scott, who is a professional songwriter in Nashville. I think the organicism that exists within “Long Time Gone” is a testament to its professional-level quality of songwriting.

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Amy Winehouse seems to be everywhere these days with her hit “Rehab” off her Back to Black album. I saw her play on the MTV movie awards and now she’s on the cover of Rolling Stone. I admit I like the song; it’s catchy. But does anyone agree with me that it’s a little repetitive?

A little more than half way into “Rehab” I start to get bored. The same chorus, albeit a catchy one, keeps reappearing without much if any variation. The B section keeps coming back unchanged as well. To show this lack of development, here’s a quick sketch of the form of the song (CH = chorus, B = B section):

CH - B - CH - B - CH(1/2) - B - CH

Admittedly, when the chorus comes back that third time, it is cut in half. But my boredom begins exactly on the downbeat of this chorus, so by the time the song slightly alters this third chorus by shortening it, I have already started to lose interest. Even though it’s a great chorus, I think listeners start to get tired of something the third time they hear it; we crave variation as much as we crave unity, and there isn’t enough of it here.

So my questions is: what could she have done differently to improve on the structure of the song? In trying to answer this question, I thought it would be good to take a look at some girl groups from the 1960s since they are often cited as sources for Amy Winehouse’s music.

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In my previous post, I talked a bit about the Beatles tune “With A Little Help From My Friends,” and I would like to follow up on that post with a look at yet another song by the Fab Four, their early hit from 1965 entitled “Help.” The constructions of these two songs actually share some interesting similarities, which I hope to show in this post.



The structure of the song “Help” is very straightforward. The song has only two main parts: a verse and a chorus. The song alternates between verse and chorus three times, and that’s pretty much the basic form of the tune. The third verse characteristically has the instrumentation stripped down to add some variety and a break. But otherwise, the song is basically just these two short sections.
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Did anybody see the finale to American Idol last night? I’ll admit I saw part of it. It’s not a show I watch, but my Netflix had run out, and I stumbled upon the finale and figured it was maybe worth watching. Anyway, there was this cheesy medley of Beatles songs near the end. I’m not sure why some producer thought America really wanted a Beatles medley, but all the old Idol winners came together to sing on those old tunes.

I was struck by how badly a good song can sound when it’s run through the generic production values of the mainstream music industry. Then again, there were worse songs played that evening, so I guess the Beatles tunes were not so bad. But a lot of why I like the original songs by the Beatles (and why I think a lot of people like them) is because of the performances and arrangements, which are a little bit more subtle than their incarnation on American Idol.

I thought I would take a look at one Beatles song, in particular the song “With A Little Help From My Friends” from the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and also look at what I think is a pretty good cover of the song (as opposed to those covers last night) by Joe Cocker from his 1969 album With A Little Help From My Friends.



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I mentioned in a previous post how most music tends towards phrase structures in groupings of two, four, eight, etc. Verses and choruses that are built on some sort of pattern in groups of three, on the other hand, are fairly rare. That is, unless you are listening to music by the Pixies.

The Pixies have a neat little trick that they used throughout their career on a number of albums. The trick is that they build chord progressions in groupings of three instead of the standard two, four, etc. The triple groupings help give the Pixies a very unique and fresh musical signature.

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My first post to the blogosphere! Since this blog was inspired by my good friend Christian Patterson, who runs his own fancy blog about photography, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a special song called “The Christian Life.”

“The Christian Life” was writted by Ira and Charlie Louvin and first appeared on their album Satan is Real in 1959. The song is a fairly traditional tune about one’s love for Jesus and staying on the righteous path. A few years later, the Byrds did a version of the song on their 1968 album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”

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