![]() Tell her to weave it in a sycamore wood lane. Take Scarborough Fair, where we understand from the second stanza onwards that each round is going to be built on a different message from the protagonist to his lover: Have her make me a cambric shirt. Songs like these only work if you “get” how the lyrics are being put together structurally. So as we move through the chickens and ducks and cows and pigs, the lyrics become a kind of motor, providing the momentum and drive we need, carrying us forward.īut, there’s a trick here. Anticipation creates tension, which creates structure. What’s happening is that as you finish each round, there’s a sense of anticipation in moving onto the next. ![]() It’s a kind of formula, something like what you see in poetic forms such as limericks or Japanese Haiku. This opening and closing text serves as a container, bookending the “meat” of the content each time. Lyrically, each strophe starts and ends with exactly the same text, then between that we get the body of the words talking about the different animals and the sounds they make. That is, we can use the words not just for their meaning, but as a structural device.Ī simple example is a song like Old MacDonald – OK, a children’s song, but work with me here. So we need to look elsewhere for structure, and one place to do so is in the lyrics. But in strophic form, where we only have one repeated section and nothing to contrast it with, we don’t get that. In looking at song-building, something I’ve tried to bring out is how harmonic movement within and across sections of a song creates structure and form. In short, if you want longer strophic form songs, one way is to write lots of lyrics. ![]() The sheer volume of lyrics gives these songs a longer arc in the same way the text does with a poem or a novel. Similarly, the Simon and Garfunkel version of Scarborough Fair has 10 stanzas and is over 6 minutes long. And while there’s no version with all of these, plenty of them still get over 6 or 7 minutes. In its original form, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with its repeated Hallelujahs at the end of each strophe has 80+ stanzas. Desolation Row, with its 10 rounds of the basic 12 bar block (or 24 depending on how you count it), stretches out to a magnificent 11 minutes.ĭylan’s not alone. Strophic form or not, nearly all of his songs have lots of lyrics – which then take more time to get through. After all, he didn’t get the Nobel Prize for writing two verse and a chorus songs. To see this in action we need look no further than Dylan. ![]() If we’re looking to get more material into our song and with that more length, one approach is to use lots of words. There are different ways of achieving this. But with strophic form, where harmony doesn’t really provide much of a structural framework, lyrics can step into to fulfil this structural role. If you’ve poked around this site, you’ll see that the focus is almost entirely on form and structure and the role that harmonic movement plays in that. While this is something we can’t get away from, there are some workarounds. As we saw in the first part here on strophic form, the main limitation here is that because these songs just go round and round the same chord pattern, they can get very repetitive. ![]()
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