The Benefit of Composing Songs From the Chorus Backwards

By working backwards on a song, you’re identifying goals first, which makes songwriting a lot easier.
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Since songs move in one direction only, it seems logical to write the song that way: from beginning to end. You compose a verse, follow it with a chorus, then repeat that a couple of times. At that point, you stand back and take a good listen and decide what more, if anything, the song needs. But hopefully by now you’ve realized that writing a song from beginning to end does not always work. In fact, you have a better chance of controlling the forward momentum of your music if you start with the chorus first, and then figure out how to get there.

Think of it this way: let’s say you’re planning a vacation trip. You don’t know yet where you want to go, but you know that somehow, you want to have a mountaintop be the climax of your trip. So you start from home, and start looking for a mountain.

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Of course, this is a silly way to plan a trip. If you really need a mountain to be the pinnacle of your trip, it’s best to identify the mountain first, and then figure out how to get there.

A song’s “spark” is most often found in the chorus. Even a bridge, which often strives to build energy though complex chord progressions, melodic range and intensifying lyrics, uses the chorus as its energetic release. So it really is all about the chorus.

Since a chorus is a song’s “mountaintop”, it acts as a kind of musical destination. It makes sense to work on your chorus first, and then compose the verse — the vehicle that gets you there. Here are some tips:

1. Identify the basic range of your chorus melody, then create a verse melody that sits mainly lower.
2. Identify the tonic (key) chord of your chorus. You’ll want to then create verse progressions that use that chord as its home chord, but avoid overuse of it.
3. Identify the basic emotion of the chorus lyric, then create a verse lyric that tells the audience how those emotions developed.
4. Decide what the basic instrumentation of your chorus will be, then thin it out a bit for your verse accompaniment. This isn’t so much a songwriting tip as it is an instrumental one, but how your instrumentation develops does make a strong impact on how songs are perceived by the listener.
5. Determine the basic rhythmic make-up of your chorus lyric, then create a verse lyric that’s just a bit more rhythmically active. Keep in mind that chorus lyrics tend to use slightly longer values than verses. This goes hand-in-hand with the duty of a chorus to be more emotional than the verse, and that’s easier to do with longer note values.

As you work backwards to create your song, don’t forget to keep testing your music out by trying it forwards. That, of course, is the final test.

By working backwards, you’ll essentially identifying goals first, and then developing a way to meet those goals.

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