The Melody-Rhythm Relationships in "Girls Chase Boys"

Even some of the most innovative music being written today still sticks to important songwriting principles that have been in existence for decades. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle describes 11 crucial principles every songwriter needs to know. Read more..

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Ingrid Michaelson’s “Girls Chase Boys“, the first single off her soon-to-be-released album “Lights Out,” is probably going to get more attention for its gender-bending video than it is for its musical structure. But let’s let others parse the social importance of her Robert Palmer-influenced dance routines, and rather look at how the song succeeds by adhering to important principles of musical composition.

“Girls Chase Boys” is a very hooky tune – almost hypnotically addictive. Like many of today’s pop tunes, it uses the same chord progression for both the verse and the chorus:

Ab Db Fm Eb

The most distinctive feature of the song is its chorus hook: the melodic fragment that features a one-octave plunge (click to enlarge):

And though octave leaps aren’t often the kind of feature that makes a song singable (at least it’s not an ascending octave!), this hook is quite singable, and certainly very memorable.

What’s more important to the success of the song, however, are two melodic principles that have been a feature of successful pop music for at least the past 6 decades:

1. The verse melody that sits low in the singing voice, moving higher as it approaches the chorus.
2. The verse rhythms, which feature lots of syncopation (displacement of the rhythm off the beat), moving to mainly unsyncopated and simplified rhythms in the chorus that sit mainly on the beat.

Syncopation is a powerful rhythmic device for songwriters. Though it means that notes have been moved off of the beats (think of how the words “You play me now/ I play you too all happen between foot taps), it is that displacement itself that has a way of making the beat even more obvious.

And the constant verse syncopation has a way of making the largely on-the-beat treatment of lyric in the chorus feel ever-more welcome, and ever-more powerful.

As a songwriter, once you determine to stick to those two important principles of verse-chorus design, you’ll find that using the same chords for both sections is rarely a problem. The formal strength that comes from moving lower to higher, partnered with moving from syncopated to on-the-beat placement of words, helps give each section its own sense of identity, and, more importantly, creates powerful musical momentum.
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