Simplicity is always the necessary ingredient if you need people to remember your song after they’ve heard it.
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Simplicity is a crucial element of hit songwriting. It’s why songs that live near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 are so hook-heavy. Hook-ish elements are easy for listeners to recall, and simplicity is part of the reason. But simplicity on its own isn’t usually enough. Simplicity, if you’re not careful, can bore people. So songs need to be simple enough to be remembered easily, but interesting enough to keep listeners coming back. Coldplay’s newest single, “Paradise”, from their new album Mylo Xyloto, is a great model for songwriters to study to create songs that offer the ideal balance of simplicity and imagination.
Let’s take a look at the various components of “Paradise”, and see how simplicity makes the song work so well.
MELODIES
So what do we mean when we talk about simplicity in melodic structure? The melodies “Paradise” are all strongly related, and borrow ideas from only two basic melodic ideas, one a mainly descending idea, the other arch-shaped:
Listen to Melodic Idea #1 • Listen to Melodic Idea #2
(Sound samples open in a new browser window)
The verse material comes from both motifs. The chorus “Para- para- paradise…” plays with the A-G-A fragment at the end of Motif #1. The new melodic idea that appears at the end of Verse 2 (“Life goes on, it gets so heavy…”) comes from Motif #2. The end of the verse (“In the night, the stormy night she closed her eyes…”) is a variation on Motif #1.
The melodies make great use of repeated ideas, and repetition is the key ingredient for making any song element memorable. By pulling all the melodic ideas for the song from these two fragments, your song gains a strong sense of cohesion and musical relevance.
CHORDS
Because the melodies are pentatonic (i.e., focus mainly on the notes F G A C D), harmonizing the same melodic fragments in different ways is relatively easy to do.
For example, Verse 1 is harmonized with this progression: Dm Bb F C/E, while Verse 2’s progression uses similar chords, but in a different order: Bb F/A C/G Bb Dm7 C
There are no altered chords at all: no chords that come from outside the key of F major/D minor, until the piano coda (at about 4’06”), where a G/B is heard.
Simplicity does not hurt this song at all, and given that the emotions and situations described in the lyric are relatively clear and uncomplicated, simplicity winds up being a key ingredient that makes the song work.
“Paradise” offers songwriters a few ideas for writing ballad-style songs that have hit potential:
- The various melodies of a song can all be derived from one or two melodic ideas. When ideas are related to each other in this way, it provides a kind of “glue” that holds the entire song together.
- Melodies that primarily use the notes of the pentatonic scale are easiest to harmonize, and it’s quite possible to devise different harmonizations for the same melody.
- While altered chords (chords that use sharps and flats not normally found in the chosen key) can add interesting colours to music, songs will work quite nicely by using only the chords that come from the home key.
- Inverted chords (chords with a note other than the root in the bass) can add interesting harmonic flavours to music.
- You’ll often see chord inversions in verses more than in choruses.
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Hi Gary. I’ve had a lingering question and this song in particular is a good example of what confuses me. In the chorus, The chord progression is Gmin/Bb6/Fmaj/Cmaj. The C major chord when played the first time in the chorus lets the low E string (if played on guitar) ring open as the bass note. When the chords cycle through the second time, the C chord has a G note used as the bass note. Obviously these are just inversions of the C maj chord. Since learning piano, having been been a long time guitar player, I recently wondered why it almost always sounds dissonant to allow the low E string ring open while playing a standard C chord on guitar while it sounds full and consonant to play the G note on the third fret of the sixth string, perhaps even preferable to simply muting the sixth string. Piano seems to be more flexible regarding inversions. If I knew more about piano maybe I could answer my own question. But the sound of an open c chord played on guitar with the low E ringing open does not sound good as one might imagine. Any thoughts?
Hi Charles:
The issue of notes sounding more or less dissonant on one instrument, while the same chord sounds consonant on a different instrument, may be attributable to one or both of the following: 1) The strings of a guitar produce more overtones than the string of a piano; and/or 2) the actual voicing of the chord.
For example, if you play a Cmaj7 on guitar with an E in the bass, it depends on where the major 7th actually occurs. If the B, in the particular chord voicing you’re using, is sounding with a C above it, it will sound much more dissonant than if if the C is sounding with a B above it. In other words, the interval B-C is heard to be more dissonant than C-B.
But it sounds to me as though you’re hearing an issue that relates more to the first scenario I described above, which is that you may be hearing the result of more complex overtones interacting with each other. To use a more clear example, if you play a C-E-G triad on piano, you hear a very clean C major triad. If you play those same notes on tubular bells (chimes), it will sound rather dissonant due to the interaction of the various overtones. Click here to listen to an example of what I mean.
Do you think either of those explanations applies to your question?
-Gary