Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Take Me To The Bridge


We've lost a lot of the art and craft of the pop song these days. Listening to some old shit tonight, I have been thinking about the form of the song, and what we don't often hear now.

A typical tin pan alley song can usually be analyzed as AABA, where A is the verse, and B is the bridge. More current pop songs have a verse and a chorus that repeat, and occasionally, if the songwriter is a little ambitious, he/she might throw in an extra part, let's call it an interlude, to break up the monotomy. Stevie Wonder is a genius at this, and he was always my inspiration to go the extra mile and write one little extra eight bar part that only happens once in the song. Lennon and McCartney were using this too. It has nothing to do with the AABA form. It comes in after the verse and chorus/hook have been stated at least twice. But it's so effective! Because usually, this interlude comes out of the blue, and is a complete harmonic change from the rest of the song. Then you go back straight to the hook, the chorus, and after this interlude, the hook is strengthened further from having this brief respite from the form you have previously already repeated twice. But I don't hear this much anymore. Granted, I don't hear many tunes these days where the harmony in the chorus is different from the verse, but the interlude is long gone.

And in a more basic sense, think about one of James Brown's tunes, where he hollers to the band to take him to the bridge. Almost always, they just go up a fourth to the sub-dominant, and play a variation of the basic groove of the tune, maybe with a different horn line. And it always adds excitement to the tune, not only for the change, but when they return to the basic grove of the song, it's that much fresher for having gone somewhere else for a bit.

It's a great way to beef up a song, try it.

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