Song Writing (2) - AABA

First let's talk about assignments 2 and 3, which were to find two verse/chorus pop songs, and to look at a song everybody loves but you hate. Then we'll look at the two lyrics you wrote and see if I can't somehow steer the topic to AABA.

Build Me Up Buttercup, your first verse/chorus pop song, is a great song to sing at the top of your voice on a long drive through boring scenery. Like a lot of pop songs it starts with the chorus instead of the verse. Do you suppose it's because that meant they only had to write two verses? Not much to say about this song. You bounce in your chair and croon along even if you don't know the words. Essentially, it's about somebody waiting for a phone call that won't come. The whole song is stuck in initial condition, my term for the part of a story that describes, how things are. The song's story has only a very slight movement from frustration to anticipation.

Somebody didn't sit down with pen and paper and write this. It's a jam session song, where a couple of musicians riffing on an idea in an afternoon, kept the bits they liked. So is Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel, your second choice. Yip Harburg, lyricist for Over the Rainbow said, “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” The thoughts you feel in these light, fun pop songs are not deep and complex, they're meant to be fun and danceable. I would have bet you could never hold a theatre audience with these kinds of numbers, and yet think of all the jukebox musicals out lately – Mama Mia, for example. Is it a reaction against the wordiness, denseness, depth of thought, unusual explorations (and songs you can't appreciate let alone learn in one hearing) of Sondeheim? Or is it because of non-English speaking tourists on Broadway? Or non theatre-goers who want something familiar? Or producers pouncing on a formula?

These are questions for another blog. Where were we?

Rent. I don't like it, either. To be fair, I'm not a fan of rock, and especially so-called rock musicals written by theatre composers. I don't know Rent, except what I know of La Boheme, and I've only heard snippets of the score, so won't comment on these lyrics except to point out they are more complicated than verse/chorus form, and they convey a lot more information than a typical pop song.

The other thing I want to say about the show Rent is that it's a phenomenon, and phenomenons break all the rules about what you think works and doesn't work. Hair, was one of those shows. So was Cats. As a creator of musicals, what can you do with these things? You can't manufacture the kind of buzz these shows had – a buzz that becomes a news story in itself, whre the theatre experience becomes less about the show and more about participating in the excitement the show generates. In the end a phenomenon teaches you very little, and in its wake is a whole generation of producers who don't realize that you can't duplicate a singularity.

Oh, that's enough! Let's get on to the fun stuff.

Previous Assignment #1 – A Bouncy Drinking Song
Improvised around a container, a mood, a color, and an action.

Oil Bin – by Caitlin Allen
I open up my oil bin an find a little gin
I drink the gin and find that I have made a little sin.

The sin makes me excited
But my love is unrequited
And still I have decided

To open up my oil bin an find a little gin
I drink the gin and find that I have made a little sin

The gin is green
It don't seem clean
I wish I could be more serene

And so I open up my oil bin an find a little gin
I drink the gin and find that I have made a little sin

I go a mountain climbing
my thoughts still not reclining
For love I am still mining
This senseless way I'm pining

So I open up my oil bin an find a little gin
I drink the gin and find that I have made a little sin.

Excellent job! Bouncy, fun, imaginative, and you did everything I asked. It gives me a chance to introduce two new topics: masculine/feminine rhyme, and scansion.

Masculine/Feminine Rhyme

Excited/unrequited/decided are feminine rhymes. So are reclining/mining/pining. (Climbing is a false rhyme with this grouping. I'm sure you discovered there are a lot fewer IM rhymes than IN.) A feminine rhymes on an interior stressed syllable of the word. The ED and the ING are unstressed add-ons to the rhyme.

Gin/sin, green/clean/serene are masculine rhymes, rhyming on the final syllable. Don't ask me the origin for the labels masculine/feminine. It's old school sexist, but there you go.

Scansion

Scansion is not just the number of syllables per line, but also the meter of the line. Your song is either in 2 or in 4. (I haven't heard it, so I'm just going by the words.) For example, it could be either:

in 2: i O-pen UP my O-il BIN and FIND a LIT-tle GIN
or
in 4: i O-pen up my O-il bin and FIND a lit-tle GIN

It doesn't scan in 3.

in 3: I drink the GIN and find THAT i have MADE a lit-TLE sin

The meter of your song, then is 2 or 4 (or 8). Now let's look at the number of syllables per line. The first verse is 7, 8, 7 (with a feminine end rhyme); the second verse is 4, 4, 8 (with a masculine end rhyme); the final verse s 7, 7, 7, 7 (with a feminine end rhyme and an extra line). In the real world, these kinds of songs don't bother to be consistent in their syllable counts from verse to verse. But it's sloppy from a song crafting point of view, and will be a lot more visible in a form like AABA.

Previous Assignment #4 – New Lyrics to Mr. Frostee
Improvised around an occupation.

The occupation you were given was Architect

A House for Sis – by Caitlin Allen (to the music of Mr. Frostee)

I made a blueprint to plan a house my sis was gonna lie in,
'Specially since she has a spouse whose wishes she did give in
Tile bathroom floor
Some strange décor
A double door
She wanted more
I made a blue print and planned a house my sis never did live in
I bought her instead a pretty blouse with a fancy olive sequin.

Excellent work! You managed to tell a little story with a twist ending. I was surprised by the four OR rhymes in the bridge. When you listen to the musical grammar of that section, several possibilities present themselves:
. a couplet (blue toilet seats, some strange decor/a fancy mirror, she wanted more)
. alternating (blue toilet seats/some strange decor/red satin sheets/she wanted more)
. pairs (blue toilet seats/red satin sheets/some strange decor/she wanted more)
. your choice – a quad rhyme

I like your choice best.

I don't want to talk much about scansion here because the sample recording I gave you was indistinct and cuts off too soon. My fault. I want to point out though that this little melody is not verse/chorus. It's a simple AABA.

AABA

AABA is the song form polished by Tin Pan Alley's golden age of song writers. The letters refer to musical chunks. Since I brought up Yip Harburg, let's look at Over the Rainbow.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow"
music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

FIRST “A” SECTION
Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.

SECOND “A” SECTION
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

“B” SECTION
Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

THIRD “A” SECTION
Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can't I?

WRAP UP
If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

This is AABA. Each A is musically identical. Think about the days when written music was done by hand, and the pain it would be to write every single note of the song instead of putting a mark on the page that meant “go back and do it again.” This is where the songwriter's consistent scansion helps the poor copyist, so he doesn't have to add ghost notes (called pick-up notes) that apply in some stanzas and not in others. It also helps the singer to learn the melody and the musician sight-reading the score.

In this particular song, the A sections are shorter than the B section. In some songs (like Mr. Frostee) it's the other way around. The B section is often referred to as the bridge, “bridging” the A sections; also the “release”, which breaks the pattern of the A's. Notice also that the title of Over the Rainbow is found in the first line of each A. In some songs it happens in the last line of the A, like it does in Someone to Watch Over Me:

There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he
Turns out to be
Someone who'll watch over me.

These repeating phrases, wherever they appear in the song, become the title whether you want that to be the title or not. It's what is remembered on first listening, and often referred to as the “hook” of the song.

I have a lot more to say, but I really should get on with your assignments.

1.Fix the scansion of Oil Bin. Choose whether you want masculine or feminine rhyme, and choose the number of beats per line and stick to it for every verse.
EXTRA CREDIT – sometimes it's fun with a drinking song to have an expanding pattern. It's harder, but if you want to you can have a triple rhyme in the first verse, a quad in the second, and do a whopping 5 rhyme in the last verse.
2.Give me the name of a Beatle song that's in AABA form. (Hint: look at the ballads.) Tell me the A's and the B.
3.Rearrange the verses and the chorus of Elenor Rigby so that it's an AABA song.
4.Keeping to our Beatle theme, find four Beatle songs that are very different from each other. This is our improv bit. Once you've selected the songs I'll tell you what to do with them.
5.I want you to gather a list from your friends:
things that mystify you
things that annoy you
your favorite cliché

Good luck!

JIM

MAKING A MUSICAL FROM THE GROUND UP - SONG WRITING (1)

The Participation Song

Do you remember the first time you heard that old campground classic, Found a Peanut? I'll bet you don't. I'll bet you feel like you were born already knowing that song. It's a meme, a sound virus that lives in the software of your brain, and it will fulfill it's purpose by planting itself in the brains of your children some fateful car trip in the future as you infect them with its easy-to-learn form and simple, repetitive melody.

The melody is stolen from My Darlin' Clementine. which is an AAA form song, the A referring to the melody chunk which repeats. It's also a verse/chorus song, which means that every other melody chunk has completely new words, followed by a lyric chunk you've heard before.

Verse:
In a cavern, in a canyon
excavating for a mine,
lived a miner, forty-niner,
and his daughter Clementine.

Chorus:
Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'
oh my darlin', Clementine,
You are lost and gone forever,
dreadful sorrow, Clementine.

Verse:
Light she was, and like a sparrow...

Chorus:
Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'...

It's called a verse/chorus song because everyone joins in at the repeated chunk. If you never heard the song before, you could still sing the chorus every time it came around. The new information is in the verse.

It's a participation song because... well, what else is it good for? It's meant to get the group coyote-ing the chorus. In the old days of the wandering-minstrel-I, the tavern would fill up with eager fans dying to hear a new story. and the minstrel would oblige them, and keep them engaged, by giving them a repeating chorus. These days, even AABA (more on that later) or more complicated structures can be participatory if everyone in the room knows them. Think of Jada's song fests. Most of those old songs didn't start out to be participatory, but after hearing them a hundred times, it's fun to sing them in a group because everyone knows them, mostly.

A participation song like Found a Peanut doles out new information so slowly that only children can stand to sing it. Instead of a whole new verse with a repeating chorus, the new information is in the first line. So the kid who has never heard the song either stops singing for the first line, or mumbles, because after he's heard it he can sing the whole rest of the chunk.

Participation songs are deadly to an audience there to listen rather than to kareoke. The only saving grace with Found a Peanut is that it is a circular story, although it takes ten minutes to tell this little tale:

Found a peanut
Cracked it open
It was Rotten
Ate it anyway
Got a stomach ache
Called the doctor
Penicillin
Operation
Died anyway
Went to heaven
wouldn't take me
went the other way
didn't want me
Was a dream
Then I woke up
Found a peanut

Oh my god! Sixteen choruses! Is the irony of the ending really worth it? Well... it pays off better than 100 choruses of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, another participation song whose only new information is a single digit. Only evil children intent on grinding an adult's patience down to their last nerve would sing down to the last bottle. Is it engaging to an audience? No. Don't write this kind of song for a musical. Duh.

The verse/chorus song is another matter, especially where the verse is different musically than the chorus. Technically,that kind of song is really ABAB, the letters referring to musical chunks that repeat. 99% of all pop songs today are in this form or a slight variation of it. One of the reasons for this form's popularity, is the desire of the song writer to have her audience learn the song and sing it after only a couple hearings (as opposed to learning it right off the bat). Repetition helps the learning process.

And the reason I bothered talking about boring old participation song form is that sometimes there is too much information in a song. Sometimes, repetition is good. It's all because the brain processes music as sound, and when you add words to music the brain gets confused. It processes the words as sound, too. Then it realizes its mistake, and sends the words to the other part of the brain where language is decoded. This inserts a time delay. You hear the sounds and THEN you extract meaning. If the lyrics are clear, and their meaning is logical, no problem. The delay is slight. If the lyrics require special decoding to extract the
meaning, then the delay is longer and pretty soon the music, and the other words attached to it have already moved on and the brain has to skip that chunk just to get back in sync. Information is lost. Meaning is lost.

Ted and I hardly used intense repetition. But in Abyssinia, when we needed a big number for the chorus, I gave him a verse, and then a chorus which only said:

What are you doin', brother?
I'm pickin' up the pieces.
What are you doin', brother?
I'm pickin' the pieces up.

Then we repeated the same four lines and that made up the chorus. This form was not in our usual style, but we went with it. And Ted came up with a C section that was nothing but repetition!

Pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces up!
Pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces, pickin' the pieces up!

This started with the basses added, then repeated with the tenors added, then repeated with the altos added, then repeated with the second sopranos added, then repeated with the first sopranos added, then FINALLY a return to the original chorus. Six two-line repetitions. No new information. That was ballsy. Click here to listen.

Only a good composer could pull that off, and make the build both logical and emotional, and Ted is a good composer.

ASSIGNMENT

Ok, enough lecture. Here's what I want you to do. I told you that we're going to improv a show, and that's exactly what I want you to do. Grab some index cards and corner a friend. Put an X on one of the cards and ask your friend to write down on that card:
a container

Put an O on one of the cards and ask for an occupation.

On the other cards, have them write down:

a mood
a color
an action

1. Don't look at the cards yet. Go back to your room, or a private area. Put aside the O card. Hold the X card and the other three cards. Now, imagine yourself filling in for Wayne Brady on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”, and your bit is to improvise a bouncy drinking song. You have to do three verses with a repeating chorus. Each chorus is about the container suggested on the X card, so start off with a chorus. Repeat a lot so you can remember it. Don't look at the other three cards until just before you do each verse.

Go for it! Remember it and write it down. Or use your camera to record it so you can write it down later. Improv it. Don't worry about how good or bad it is, you can clean it up a little bit when you write it down.

2. Give me the names of two songs you like that are verse/chorus. Tell me which part of the song is the verse, and which the chorus.

3. Give me the name of a song you hate, but everybody else loves. It can be any form or style. We'll give it a good examination next time.

4. This has nothing to do with what I've talked about, but everything to do with what I want to teach you. Take the O card. Write lyrics for the Ice Cream Truck (Mr. Softee) melody and incorporate the suggestion on the card. Do your best. Do NOT make it about ice cream. Click here for song

Next session: Introduction to AABA

JIM