The Anatomy of a Song

People ask all the time how to write a song.  To a songwriter, it’s hard to describe because it’s somewhat like breathing. Every musician does it differently. Some artists, like Elton John, who don’t write lyrics, receive the words from people Bernie Taupin, and then Elton composes melody to what Bernie hands him.

For me, the spark of a new song seems to come from nowhere. Then, with some work, you develop it further until it’s a full-blown melody. From there, you find the hook, or the thing that grabs your ear and keeps your attention.  Of course, you need to create a “middle eight” - the eight bars of the song than makes it different enough to keep the song from being monotonous. 

At that point, the music suggests the title. And by then, the melody dictates a style – country, a ballad, rock, etc. What’s nice about being a producer in addition to being the writer is that you can figure out the style in the writing process. Sometimes this can be a contentious battle between producers and writers.  The artist thinks the song should be one style and the producer hears something else.

The last step of writing the music is deciding on the structure: is it going to be a two verses and a chorus, or a verse, a chorus, a verse, a solo? Songs require structure or they are just an endless string of melodic notes.  Finally this is the time when the lyrics start to come to fit the title, structure and phrasing of the song.

Sometimes a song has to be re-written during the recording process. In a recent recording session, we went to record a song and discovered that it was missing an “entry”.  Every song needs a beginning, middle, and an end, or it becomes repetitious. Although we thought the song was complete for years, it became apparent while recording that it needed additional work.

That’s the way the Dreamer’s Brigade music usually gets written!