Songwriting Tip - Try a Bridge

by Robert Childs

Beginning songwriters can sometimes make a song more interesting by adding a Bridge. The bridge can change the mood and direction of a song for a few bars before returning to the main melody line and theme.

A well known example of a song with a bridge is The Beatles I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Notice how the bridge (beginning "And when I touch you I feel happy inside ....") briefly changes the mood of the song.

Further reading: Sheila Davis The Craft of Lyricwriting (Writers Digest) 1987

Robert Childs SCALA NEWS # 41 September/October 1994

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I’ve helped organise 10 Songwriters Events to date [1998], 5 FOOMs plus Safe Sex, Clare Arts Festival and SA: A Sense of Place Song Competitions. I’ve only judged in one song competition - a Declan Affley some years ago - and frankly I’d sooner organise than judge! Judging’s just too hard!

Over the years though I’ve discussed selections with a number of judges so I think I’ve got a reasonably good feel for what most judges are looking for in song competitions.

Most competitions have a very uneven standard of entry from many points of view. There are absolute beginners who’ve never performed to anyone, rubbing shoulders with people who have had many years of songwriting experience performing to thousands. There are earnest people who try hard every year with not much success competing against people who study the techniques and structures of songs and songwriting. There are people who write great songs who can’t perform them and people who are excellent performers with banal and clichéd songs. There are good lyricists let down by their tunes and people with inventive tunes who fall down on their lyrics - sometimes I want to introduce these groups to each other. This unevenness cannot always be solved by classifications like amateur and professional

So how do judges sift through all these apparent disparities in performance, experience and (let’s face it) ability? In general terms judges are looking for ORIGINALITY (well we are talking Original music aren’t we?). Most judges avoid clichéd songs. The clichés can be both in the lyrics and the music. Some people may find it surprising that judges will find music clichéd but I’ve noticed it more and more over the years. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write a song within a genre to catch judges’ attention especially if the song’s lyric themes, imagery and melody/chording are not exploring new areas. I’ve heard many very well crafted songs that stay safely within a blues, jazz, rock or folk genre. Often they’re beautiful examples of their type but … frankly, they’ve already been written many thousand times before!

This is not to say that judges want songs that follow extremely different melody, rhythm, or chord lines or that are lyrically bizarre (and perhaps ignore all rules of metre, structure or sense). Songwriter, Sean Mangan, who won the Songwriters Event in 1988, once wrote his thoughts on songwriting on the back of a beer coaster for me. I treasure that beer coaster! He feels that part of the craft of songwriting is combining the familiar with the unfamiliar. There has to be enough in a song that’s familiar to an audience that it can identify with. The trick is to include the unfamiliar - those elements of a song that (in Rob Woodard’s words) "engage the heart and mind of the listener". This can be original subject matter or original treatment of familiar subject matter, musical innovation in the rhythm, melody or chording or in a number of other subtle measures.

You should realise that to adequately explore the ‘unfamiliar’ you have to have an understanding of the ‘familiar’. That means you need to understand song structure, you need to have a love of language and so on (Good spelling and grammar is also a definite advantage!). If you’re going to break the rules you need to know what the rules are in the first place. That probably means writing a lot of stuff that is not original, that has been written thousands of times before, that is banal, trite and clichéd. That’s what I consider serving your apprenticeship in songwriting. You’re learning about the craft, you’re copying or deriving using your favourite role model songwriters or genres.

The trick is to know when it’s time to extend yourself. Some people practise "safe songwriting" for so long and have received approval of audiences for so long that they forget to be truly creative by being original. Maybe that’s the real value of song competitions like FOOM. Perhaps it will lead some songwriters to seek to learn more about songwriting (and especially lyricwriting). Perhaps those people whose names keep cropping up in this year’s FOOM results (and in previous year’s for that matter) might expect stiffer competition in future!

© Copyright Robert Childs 1998

Originally published in SCALA NEWS # 64 (July/August 1998) as So What do Judges Want?

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"I kinda just wanted to be a song-writer, y'know... I think that's the hardest thing - to write a song - a song that, y'know, when people hear it, they go: 'Woo! I know what that guy was feelin' when he wrote that..."
Bobby, 'The Wedding Singer'

I'll begin with an admission. I'm afraid that I am not much of a musician, neither reading musical notation nor knowing more than a few basic guitar and mouth harp chords. But I write songs! Hmmm - a contradiction? In several aspects, yes; in others, as I'll try to show in this article, not necessarily.

I suppose, looking back to earliest memories, I've been lucky to have always possessed a love for words - their patterns on a page, their rhymes, rhythms, cadences, flow... Writing stories and poems at primary and high school was a pleasure, a 'non-work' part of English. When, in teen years, I listened to Top-40 radio, with its ever-shifting and developing range of 'pop' styles, sung words and their tunes were added to the written idiom for me. Influences on my (later) songwriting were many. They include: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, John Prine, Jackson Browne, Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney, John Fogerty, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Animals...

Of these, Dylan was (and is) at the very top. And there's the rub. For Bob Dylan, never learning to read music, only an average guitarist (in those first years), and maybe what we might label a 'tonally challenged' singer STILL came out with bold, original, striking songs, strung on simple tunes. For him, lyrics were paramount, and - I firmly maintain - still are. Contrast this with a composer like Paul McCartney, who is referred to as being suspicious of a song where emphasis is placed on the lyric. Why? Because words, according to McCartney, might distract the listener from the song's tune! Here lies another rub: do melody and lyric compete for the listener's attention? I'm not too sure that they do, or need to; but I am sure - for the present at least - that I'm content with a no-fuss, non-complex melody for my words to ride on. "But that's just the way that I am..."

Well, if I'm primarily a lyricist, just what do I look for in LIVING song lyrics, both in others' songs and in my own attempts at lyric writing? Firstly, and most importantly for me is having something to say in a song. I'm not necessarily talking 'didacticism' or having a pointed 'message'. (Brendan Behan once said: "If you want to send a message, get a postman"!) I am talking of depth, substance, close observation of people and of life, using words that have been deliberated over in their choosing, and which will last...I cannot really believe that early Lennon/McCartney lines such as: "Love love me do/You know I love you/I'll always be true..." will ever be anything but unashamed 'pop' - ie, transient - in the overall sum of things. Compare an early Dylan love lyric in 'Girl From the North Country: "Please see for me that her hair hangs long/That it rolls and flows all down her breast." This is a much more vivid and intimate image than the Beatles' bland, clichéd effort.

Which brings me to another important aspect for songwriters: originality as opposed to cliché. A witty observer once commented that "Bob Dylan looks at a cliché like a butcher eyeing a chicken"! In more prosaic terms, Dylan slaughters sloppy language, and turns overused and outworn phrases on their heads. DO, I beg you, fellow songsmiths, eschew clichés, hackneyed phrases and lazy image making. I try to, for example in describing a shipwreck in "The 'Loch Ard' Tragedy, 1878": 'Remorselessly swirling, the ocean poured in/As crewmen unlashed the boats/ But could anything live in that rush and that roar/With the hand of the sea at their throats?" Giving the sea a persona, as if it is some sort of living monster is far more effective, I feel, than simply stating: 'The ship sank in a storm'.

Of course, hand in hand with the best phrases and images goes some sort of structure or pattern for your lyrics. Here, your melody takes a major role (assuming you are working around a tune as part of the song). For ideally, you will be aiming to match tune and lyric as a seamless unit. In an early draft of "The 'Loch Ard' Tragedy", I tried to cram too many syllables per bar in some sections; thus, when singing it I found myself gabbling to make the lyrics fit the metre. Not too good - hence rewrites and editing to get it better!

Apropos such care with scanning, there is obviously the general form of a song. Will it be verse/chorus, verse/chorus etc; or the classic a/a/b/a; or will there be simple verses with a refrain at the end of each verse, or...? I could go on. Again, Dylan offers a pointer or two, in this case perhaps what NOT to be content with. For many of his early songs were simply a succession of verses, often in couplet form. 'Song to Woody' is one such. Later, as he developed, Dylan employed more complex and interesting structures - bridges, guitar breaks etc. Being so much under the early Dylan's influence, I subconsciously wrote many of my songs on similar lines, not realising the wide array of options for some time. But there is NO one ideal pattern to stick to in deciding your song's best structure, except matching the style to your purpose, and aiming to grab and hold your hearer's attention in so doing.

This leads me to the 'hook'. I clearly recall Sean Mangan's sage advice/warning in a SCALA NEWS about being wary of hooks in a song as much as those in advertising. Nevertheless, I think a catchy phrase should always be considered in engaging your listener. A word hook as much as a jaunty riff will do exactly that. Just as Paul McCartney would use (uses) his considerable melodic skills to catch his audience, so a lyricist should work very hard to make her/his song jump out at the listener. One small example from my own stuff is the refrain 'The mad Mike Brander blues', from the song of the same title. The two M's and two B's alliterating is catchy, flows well, and rounds off each verse in what I hope is an ear-grabbing fashion.

I'd suggest that you work equally hard on your rhyme-scheme in most of your songs. There are exceptions to this, such as Paul Kelly's epic 'Other People's Houses' and 'Nothing on My Mind', which don't rhyme, but are very successful songs all the same. In general though , the rhyme pattern of a song helps hold your listener, as he/she will quickly learn to anticipate an internal or end-rhyme if you set the pattern first thing. One of Dylan's classics is to rhyme 'outrageous' with 'contagious' in his "Isis" of 1976! Yes, a rhyming dictionary may be of great assistance, but even scribbling down all possible rhymes you can think of can help. DO NOT get lazy and use the first or second rhyming word that pops into your head - unless it's absolutely perfect for the best possible sense in your lyric...!

One thing I learned in the 1998 FOOM (Lyrics) Competition was to keep the person/tense in a song consistent. I'd entered a song, "The Photograph", written about my Father's wartime experiences in the RAAF. Most of the song looks back, building memories of Dad's flying and his coping with the stresses of fighting, all in past tense. Then, in the seventh verse, I slipped into present tense. I didn't think this mattered all that greatly, but the two judges (separately) picked up the flaw. I was grateful for their observation; the song is now consistent in tense!

There are other pointers to consider in making your lyrics live, certainly. Here I have merely mentioned those which are most important for me as a songwriter. But having said all this, recognise that all songwriting 'rules' are there to be broken if you feel that the song justifies it. After all, isn't a great song always preferable to a great 'formula'?!

Oh yes, I have put in my request for a Christmas pressie (am writing this article in late December, '98). It's the highly recommended book by Sheila Davis, 'The Craft of Lyric Writing'. Maybe I'll get a chance to review this in a future SCALA NEWS - that is, if I'm not too busy putting its contents into practice!

© Copyright Geoff Hastwell 1999

Reproduced from SCALA News # 67 (January/February 1999)