Song structure

C

ColdAsh

New member
After feedback from a couple of other threads i get the idea that most people seem to think that songs should have a certain form or structure to them, eg a song should tell a story or should have a definate meaning. Is this a commonly held opinion. Is it your opinion too? I personly believe that a song doesnt have to be so structured (as it of is). One of my favourite lyricists is Billy Corgan (of the Smasging Pumpkins) and his lyrics are anything but structued. They are very obscure at times but they still have much more feeling to them than most songs. Heres an example of one of my favourite tracks of his, Mayonaise:

Fool enough to almost be it
Cool enough to not quite see it, doomed
Pick your pocket full of sorrow
And run away with me tomorrow, gone
We'll try to ease the pain, somehow
Feel the same way
No one knows where our secrets go
I'll send my heart to all my dearies
When your love is so, so dreary, dream
I'm rumoured to the straight and narrow
While the harlots of my perils scream
And I fail, but when I can, I will
Try to understand that when I can, I will
Mother weeped the years I'm missing
All the time can't be given back
Shut my mouth and strike the demons
Cursed you and your reasons
Out of hand and out of season
Out of love and out of feeling
So bad but when I can, I will
Words define the plans
But when I can, I will
Fool enough to almost be it
Cool enough to not quite see it
Told enough to always feel it
Always old I always feel it
No more promise, no more sorrow
No longer will I follow
Can anybody hear me, I just want to be me
When I can, I will
Try to understand that when I can, I will

Well i'd love to hear your opinion on the subject guys.
 
I dont think it's so much that songs SHOULD have a set form. It's just that songs that are easy to relate to are usually more widely excepted. It's more of a creativity vs. commerce issue.
 
Try writing the most sensible,logical structure you can imagine(verse,chorus, verse,chorus,bridge,whatever),then deliberately throw little twists in.
One of my favorite songs I've written consists of 2 fairly long verses,seperated by a guitar solo.It's up to you,but it doesn't hurt to see how others do it!
 
i think the verse/ chorus/ bridge is a good song format. If I were to pick some of the alltime greatest written songs...they would be written in this format.

I have always believed that if you want to REALLY see how good a guitar player is....play a 3 chord 12 bar blues progression behind him. Its such a basic well known song structure that the guitar player HAS to go somewhere on his instrument to be impressive.

the same could be said about the verse /chorus/ bridge song structure....you have to be a good writer to write a really good song in that format
just my 2 cents
peace
 
off the topic

I think a few of you didnt quite understand the topic i was trying to bring up. I was talking about the structure of the lyrics (eg what they should express) not the song structure (verese, chorus bridge pre chorus ect). What im realy trying to get at is that i belive that too many people have the opinion that a song should have a clear meaning, tell a story and have a meaning that is obvious and easy to understand. I was woundering if every agrees that this must be done or if some people find obscurity more interesting, creative and a better (or just as good) form of exprsionism?
 
If you are in a group or an Artist....sure....write what you want to write...promote it...sell it...develop a fan base....the INDIE scene....ya know?

If you are writing for commercial reasons...with the express purpose of getting your work published ...and staying within industry standards....no....

For the most part Rock musicians write their own music and lyrics....
They don't buy them....

Country,
POP,
R&B...

These are the markets for "Songwriters" who are looking to make a living at writing and not as an artist....That's just the way it is....

Of course, if you are writing just for fun....who actually cares what it is....as long as you like it....if you are not promoting it....it doesn't really matter....does it?
 
I think that most lyrics on albums (at least one's that I like) be they commercial or not, do not tell specific stories at all.....If I read through half the lyrics that came with my CDs I wouldn't be able to tell you what at least half the songs are about...not even by a long shot........I think that sometimes people put way too much emphasis on the story telling aspect of writing lyrics.....I like when the lyrics leave enough headroom for the listener to be able to create his own story.....Story songs tend to bore me....then again that's just me
 
oh....I almost forgot to put my usually psychological twist on this thread :D....Everything comes down to cognition in life, songwriting being no exception....That is the default....You can't look at anything in the world w/o looking through the eyes of your own cognition..


That said:


You commented that Mr. Corgan's songs appear to have much more "feeling" than most songs....Whilst that, ofcourse is somewhat subjective, objectively you can actually make that argument.... Here's why......When you are "highly" emotional you get less logical......The more emotional a person is, the less logical and the less linear and symetrical there thought proccess becomes.....From this point of view, the "telling a story" type song writing is more abstract in terms of cognition and therefore more intellectual....When people tell a story they usually naturally dissattach themselves from their emotions somewhat even if they don't realize it.....If they didn't dissattach themselves from emotion they wouldn't be able to intellectually focus enough to arrange their ideas into that linear type "story form"..........In other words.....A story can be emotional but only to a certain extent.........in terms of cognition, an extreme example of an emotional song would be no story...no constant chord progression..no constant anything....Nothing linear...nothing symetrical........... A complete emotional and cathartic release..... That is the extreme example....


If emotional is what you are going for in your song you should ask yourself just how emotional do you want it to be.....Chances are that when emotion is the goal, your song will be more lyrically effective and successful if it is not as structured. Not that it would have to be just noises and grunting but just not as structure........Yah see, in real life, emotional logic naturally tends to manifest itself in unstructured forms......For example, when people are highly emotional they will always do "things" that are less logical; like say.....um....writing unstructured songs :D .....Or....if I was really emotional and angry and mad at someone...chances are that I might come at them screaming and yelling, verbally attacking them from all different unrelated anlges......I would probably not come at them logically with charts and graphs explaining to them why I'm upset....:D This is just the way emotional cognition works and how it affects behavior.......Now remember, from a panoramic perspective songwriting is just another behavior and it should naturally follow the same cognitive path....However, for most song writers, it doesn't...The reason that it doesn't is because these song writers have biases that interfere with the natural process of behaving....They may not like unstructured songs.....and that is an interfering bias that only helps to produce contrived art.....

If you were not to do it this way, (that is to say take a highly emotional topic and write about it in a coherent and structured fashion) you would not be true to the meaning of the song.......You might still like it better when it is structured but your reason for liking it better would have less to do with the meaning of the song than it would with your own personal biases towards structure......Biases always interfere with people and their attempts to authentically express themselves....or in other words be true to the narrative meaning content........

Think about it, If mr. corgan would have sat down and started arranging his songs into some intellectually structured and symmetrical formula he would have lost all the emotion in the process because words like "structure" and "formula" are intellectual concepts......and intellectualism is the antonym of emotion.........


The summary is that Ideally, your thought process for creating a particular piece of art should coincide and run parrallel to the meaning that you are shooting for....It should not contradict and run perpendicular to the meaning....If it does, then there are biases at work and you are just confusing your imagination and not clarifying it.....Which should be the intent of an artist...to clarify things to her/himself...not to confuse him/herself...Often times, to do this (clarifying emotional artifacts) you can not be preoccupied with worrying whether or not other people will understand your song and such......You will be busy trying to clarify it to other people and in the process of doing that you will inevitable wind up confusing and obscuring your original ideas......original ideas that somehow, ironically, might be less obscure and make more sense to you the more obscure they are......(I know that sentence sounds obscure and confusing but it will make sense..just think about it *lol*)


The bottom line is that if you want to really be an "artist" you should have some ideas about how the different cognitive processes of artistic creation operate in terms of "narrative content meaning" on the conceptual level..... If you just want to be a "rock star" and appear on TRL then forget everything I have just said and go along on your merry way :)

- nave
 
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your a psych student are you then nave? i was too....now i work in construction :)

coldash: have you heard of a band called "Yes"? there lyricist jon anderson used to write with the melody in mind trying to use syllables that enhanced the music, rather thaan sticking out in there own right..you know the old argument, about whether to write lyrics or music first, well one solution is to write them together....anyhow back on to jon anderson, most of his lyrics make no sense at all, i don't even think the guy could even speak english, but his fans used to derive there own meaning, i saw anderson in an interview laughing about the fact that his fans found meaning when all he really scribbled down was a few words with sylables that worked with the melody....

when i studied art (psych minor) tutors would constantly insist we explained the meaning behind our own pieces of work.... thing is i never used to paint with a "meaning" in mind... so i'd just ask people to analyse it and tell me what <i>they<i> thought it meant, then i'd usually tell them that they had it all wrong, slash the canvas, and run away screaming "i'll never paint again!" :D

fuck em, if they really want some deeper meaning to come from your lyrics they'll usually find it themselves.
 
Here's a perfect example of Anderson's "sylables that worked with the melody" with no meaning.

Siberian Khatru

"Blue tail, tail fly, Luther, in time
Suntower, asking, cover, lover
June cast, moon fast, as one, changes
Heart gold, lever, soul mark, mover
Christian, changer, called out, savior
Moon gate, climber, turn round, glider."

But, Luther, Christian, soul, savior appear related. But howe?
(Sorry, bad joke!)
 
Madeleine L'engle kinda wrote about this talking about poetry. The jist of what she said is this. Human beings have a definate stucture. We have a skeleton, and, it does limit us. It will only move in certain ways and will only take so much pressure, etc. But it is this very structure which gives us freedom to walk, run, dance, draw, paint, play music, etc. I think the point is, structure and freedom are interrelated. First we learn the proper structures, and then we are free to do what we want.:cool:
 
but along the same lines, its double jointed extra-toed bearded lady freaks of nature which are the most enternaining
 
speaking of cognition, is the form of an emotinally-inspired lyric still a structure, only not intended by reason, but rather manifested through the emotional transmission? I'm not saying this is so, or maybe this question doesn't make any sense, but, it seems that the 'mayonaisse' lyrics, for example, can be deeply felt, but if you try to grasp the meaning intellectually, it's very slippery.

in this sense, then there could be a form of primal songs, that isn't an intellectual product, but exists nonetheless?

okay, put the duct tape back on.
 
Very interesting question

First off......I re-read what I write all the time and sometimes I think it may come off as pompus and pretentious with all the bullshit about being an "artist." However, That is not my intention.......And I don't always apply this shit that I'm talking about to my own process...although I do try to remind myself that it's there.......It's hard to really explain these types of ideas (cognition relating to art) without going that route (the ideal "artist" route).....So I apologize if anyone takes it that way....


>>>>>>>>speaking of cognition, is the form of an emotinally-inspired lyric still a structure, only not intended by reason, but rather manifested through the emotional transmission?


This is a great question!!!!! ....... Interms of postmodern cognitive science and art what your getting at has to do with the concept of logic.....As in what is and isn't logical.....AND most cognitive scientists today are beginning to say that there is no such thing as being illogical....However, there are different types of logic....Primarily prefrontal/Intellectual logic and emotional/limbic logic.....The funny thing about this is: that according to this dichotemy the emotional logic is actually the MORE complex form of logic in that it is harder to break it down and analyze it...interesting huh?....but yes it is structure and it is logic.........


The emotional logic is akin to what they call roaschacking (sp?) and also to free association.......You roaschack when you look at a cloud and see an animal in it or an image in an ink blot......Everyone will see a different animal and a different image within the same cloud and to each person, independently, seeing that image or animal will be perfectly logical...This is limbic logic and structure at work.....Trying to figure out why that person sees that particular image is next to impossible and that is why emotional logic is much harder to understand...........Inother words emotional logic is inherently much more personal than intellectual logic.....This is because we all have different emotional backgrounds and such that would form the structure and the logic that causes us to see that particular animal....

However, if one was to analyze our emotional logic over the course of a long period of time, one would discover that there are patterns and there is structure at work in this limbic logic....For example if I were to look at 500 different clouds, chances are I would keep seeing the same things over and over again; This is because I have subconscious emotional biases that directly correlate to certain types of animals ...You, on the other hand, would have your own set of common things that you would tend to see...your own pattern of limbic logic so to speak.....So yes there is structure and there is form and logic to these emotional things....It's just that the brand of logic is much more personal because we all have different emotional backgrounds..and that is why limbic logic is so hard to comprehend........




ON the otherhand, say, for example, when we studied math in school (which is completely intellectually logical) we all studied the same damn thing and we all understand that 1 + 1 = 2........So intellectual logic is very easy to understand because it is universal and objective and not subjective......Same goes for a story based song....Stories are all universal; they all have the same components that make them easy to understand; beginning, middle and end....


So you're right Djelf....you're not going to be able to decifer much logic from the mayonaise song because it is very limbic and emotional and it's logic is much more personal to the writer of the song.........This is why I said in the above post this (to quote myself):

.>>>>>>>>.....original ideas that somehow, ironically, might be less obscure and make more sense to you the more obscure they are......(I know that sentence sounds obscure and confusing but it will make sense..just think about it *lol*)


In other words, in an emotional context, your lyrics might actually be more logical to you the less logical they are.....Ironic isn't it...



anyway....yah...dr.colossus....I did study psyche at one time....I did a double major of psyche and fine art....which I thought was an interesting combo because when you break down the art process it is entirely cognitive....
 
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Too much Psychology?

Sometimes quite intentionally, and other times quite unplanned, lyrics take a mystical dimension that trascends the writer. Many songs that have interesting lyrics will likely lend themselves to thousands of interpretations. Often times, the writer him/herself doesn't quite know how to understand the lyrics.

I don't think this is a bad thing but it does happen. I remember watching a John Lennon documentary where this homeless man is found sleeping in the field on Lennon's property. Lennon asks him why he was there and the man began explaining that he knew that the Beatle's song that says "Boy, you got to carry that weight for a long time" was sending a message to him and he alleged that Lennon wrote it to send a message to him.

Lennon considered this and replied "Man, I was just having a shit that day and I decided to write those lyrics..i wasn't calling out to you. i was just having a shit"...

Maybe we're applying too much psychology here? just a thought ;-)
 
Smartest thing ever said about lyrics?

"You don't actually have to be able to understand the lyrics, you've just got to feel like you could if you wanted to."


This is either one of the cleverest or stupidest things ever said about lyrics (it's such a fine line). I've seen it attributed to Chuck Plotkin, producer for Bruce Springsteen. (It still doesn't explain "Blinded by the Light").
 
Communication

That is what it is about, plain and simple. So, first question--what is that you want to say. Words are like paints. They can be as concise or abstract as you desire, but the underlying meanings or thoughts should string together somehow.

Throughout the history of songwriting, there have been some very vague lyrics that, despite their vagueness, have communicated on an emotional level. Going back to my era, I think about Whiter Shade of Pale, Come Together and a bunch of Paul Simon songs. All were hits, too!

If you want to go in this direction, I think it helps to understand both poetry and the traditional song forms, because lyrics are not short stories or poems. They are unique unto themelves. Maybe a bit of both.

Every word is a package of ideas. Depending on what you are trying to communicate, it makes sense to choose those words carefully to get your meaning across to your satisfaction. There are no rights or wrongs here, but a well crafted lyric will have a stamp of intelligence, even if its vague as to actual meaning. The right word at the right spot in a melody can dovetail with the feeling generated by the music and can augment it. The same holds true in concise, "straight " songs.

No matter what, its just as hard to write concisely as it is to write "experimentally", for lack of a better word. When Dylan was writing in the 60's, he wrote some amazingly bizzare stuff--some great and some not so great. Listen to Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row. Also check out Idiot Wind and Tangled Up in Blue from Blood on the Tracks. Not your average story telling songs, but they do tell stories of sorts, brilliantly. If you want to break the rules, listen to some who have done it and lived to tell. Dylan paved the way for Billy Corgan and thousands of others. Its good to study the history.

Hey, these are just some random thoughts--for whatever they are worth.
 
IMHO a great lyric can take any form necessary to communicate meaning to the listener. Putting a lyric into a commonly used format , like AABA or ABABCA or whatever can be useful to the writer if the form supports the lyric , but only IF it helps the listener follow along. One of my favorite lyrics is Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. The first time I heard it I was confounded by the imagery and couldn't figureout what he was talking about. After several hearings the words became familiar and I was able to put some sense to it and started to put meaning to the imagery. I think that he , or another writer could have made the story easier to track, but his choices of image and synyax made it really interesting to listen to and get better (to me) with repeated hearings. Some people at that point in music history said that he was intentionally being vague to make it sound profound. I disagree. For me the lyric is crystal clear in it's intent ,
his viewpoint is impossible to miss, and I know exactly who he is singing about. That makes it a great lyric. The form is very basic with a repeating hook chorus. If you spend an evening or two listening to classic rock radio with an analytical ear you will notice that there are so many possible forms for a song to take that is impossibe to say "how" it should be. When the muse has your ear , she will dictate form and content . The less you mess with it after she lays it out for you, the better...IMHO.
writeon...chazba
 
Talk about speed shifting the cognitive transmission and you always find someone who gets their gears stripped and their head blown!?!?!?!!!!...........

Mr Corgan was lucky enough to have someone record his stoned out freestyling. There is meaning in his lyrics, but only he knows what it really is.

In a song there are four elements that are not part of the structure and can not be written down but make or break a song. They are the performer or artist, the music, the lyrics, and the listener or audience. When the artist, the music, and the lyrics find that special place and work together to project and connect with the audience, then what really matters as far as structure or lyrics are concerned? That magic moment is what its all about. How you get there dosen't matter. Unless you just want to worry about it.

Keep the faith, the Ozlee:)
 
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