Song Structure: When It’s Right, You Don’t Notice It

Song structure is hard to define in any specific way, but songs can die when it’s missing.

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Back in 2004 I started doing research into pop music in preparation for writing “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting.” At that time, I had a number of students in my theory classes at Dalhousie University who were songwriters. They were keen to show me the songs they were working on, and I was very interested to help them. In fact, my desire to help them improve is what led to me writing my text on songwriting.

To help me organize the book, I made a list of the seven most common errors I was seeing in the songs that my students were writing. Right at the top of the list, I wrote what I considered to be the most common error: the form of the song is confusing.

The form, or structure, of a song is something that listeners don’t often take overt notice of. That’s because structure does its work from the background. It supports the more noticeable elements such as melody, lyrics and harmonies. Architects know that a building needs a solid structure. And they also know that when the structure is solid, it’s not often what you notice. Structure stays in the background, while attractive design elements grab the attention.

To many, a song’s structure refers to how you’ve organized verses and choruses. That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. Just as tall buildings rise to a point, a song needs to have a similar focal point, what we call the climactic moment. Check out this list and see if your songs are being weakened by faulty song structure.

1. Songs usually need a climactic moment. Climactic moments are easy to create when you write in a verse-chorus form, because choruses tend to naturally grab more attention. But if your song is sectional without being verse-chorus (i.e., if you’ve written a song that’s in ABC… form, where there are no choruses as such), you still need to think about where to put a climactic moment.
2. Structure is strengthened when you build energy upward. Listeners need to perceive a gradual building of energy as it leads up to the climactic moment. That building of energy can come purely from the lyric, but needs to come from something.
3. A song can have more than one climactic moment. But in cases where there are several “big moments”, there needs to be one that seems to take precedence. Buildings can have several peaks, but the one in the middle often rises higher. So too in music. A good example is “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, where the end of each refrain represents a noticeable climactic moment, but the one at the end of the final refrain is bigger than all the others.
4. The biggest climactic moment needs to be nearer the end than the beginning of a song. Listeners need to feel that even though they’ve just heard something big, something bigger is coming. It keeps them listening.
5. Repetition is a crucial part of solid song structure. Nothing strengthens a song like providing something that the audience has heard already. Too much repetition is boring, but no repetition of musical ideas leaves people feeling like they’re on a wandering journey with no goal. So in and around a song’s climactic moment, allow for the repetition of melodies and motifs.

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