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In both teaching songwriting as well as talking with fellow writers, I often hear, “Such and such a song defies conventions and is a major hit, yet mine, which does something similar gets rejected! What gives?”
It's a difficult issue to address, and the reasons why songs that “break the rules” are successful are numerous – which I'll get into here.
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There aren't many people left that don't have smartphones of some type (myself included), and those that don't have one of these hyper-connected pocket computers tend to get looked at with a certain amount of skepticism and even scorn.
I was having a discussion with a fellow songwriter recently about how our writing has changed since the advent of these miraculous devices, and we both agreed that it certainly has a downside, especially for these three key reasons.
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This article originally appeared on Soundfly.
Songs are almost always built from sections that will feel very familiar, and yet they still have the power to bring us delightful surprises. How songs are put together has varied over the decades, based on taste, culture, and innovation, but there are some fairly standard musical segments in a song that contain their own specific functions. While the order will vary here and there, the scaffolding itself is easy identifiable.
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Repetition, repetition, repetition – it's the key to learning, and also the key to success in songwriting. In order for something to get stuck in somebody's head, it not only has to be catchy, but they also have to hear it again and again.
Sometimes it can be tempting to change up the chorus lyrics each time — but here are three important reasons you shouldn't.
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There are exceptions, of course, but there are very few hit songs that are too smart for their own good. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean too smart for the average listener. Unless you're going for a specific crowd – political songs, college coffee house songs, songs written to display an intimate knowledge of the nuances of music theory, etc. — music that's "too smart" is probably not going to be broadly popular.
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