Solving Basic Songwriting Problems Before They Start

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The fact that your music might bore someone should not be automatically taken to mean that something is wrong. Even the best music in the world will bore some people. That speaks to the diversity of musical taste that exists in the species.

But sometimes, boredom is an indicator that you’ve missed the mark. You’ll know that boredom is a problem if, even though you’re releasing new recordings and doing your fair share of concerts, you fail to build a fan base for your music.

When audiences are bored by music, it’s often not easy for them to describe exactly what is causing their boredom. All they know is that the song is uninteresting to them. While it might be difficult for them to verbalize what they’re noticing about your music, it’s important that you give serious thought to what the problem is, and come up with solutions.

Some of the standard problems with audience boredom have to do with the production end of the equation:

1. An intro that fails to pull the listener in.
2. Instrumentation that is haphazard or disorganized (i.e., doesn’t “build” in musically logical ways.)
3. General problems with the band or lead singer performance.

But audience boredom can be the product of issues that are songwriting issues, and solvable before you ever reach the recording stage. Take a look at the following list of problems. They’re subtle, and won’t immediately identify themselves as problems. But solving them as early as possible in the songwriting stage means solving them before they start.

1. PROBLEM: Not enough repetition. A listener needs repeating elements to help them more fully understand and enjoy what they’re listening to. Some elements within a song feature repetition on a large-scale, such as repeating choruses, repeating verse melodies, a return to the chorus after a bridge – that sort of thing. Repetition is an important organizing feature of melodic construction: repeating melodic cells within a verse melody, for example (think of the melody for “Good People” by Jack Johnson, and how many times you hear things repeat exactly, and how many times you hear approximate repetitions). Others feature repetition on a micro level: the snare drum always hitting on offbeats, for example. Taken together, repetition is a crucial part of making listeners interested, with repeated elements providing a kind of instant gratification.
2. PROBLEM: Too much repetition. Yes, repetition is good, but (dance genres aside) too much can be dangerous. When melodies or grooves repeat seemingly endlessly with nothing changing — and more importantly, where the repetition seems to contribute nothing to the overall strength of the song or its structure — you fail to excite your audience, and can actually do the opposite: they feel they’ve heard it all, and heard it all too often.
3. PROBLEM: A missing high point in a melody. The climactic high point in a melody is that moment that operates as its highest point, down from which it will move to its conclusion. It’s important to realize that not every good melody in the songwriting world must feature a climactic high point, but inserting one into a boring melody can be just what your song needs to bring it alive. Most sections in a song will have some highest point, but the climactic high point in a chorus usually serves as the most important one in a song.
4. PREOBLEM: A haphazard approach to melodic rhythm. Melodic rhythm is, of course, the melody that is created by the words that are being sung at any given moment. But there’s more to it than that. Specifically, the rhythms in a verse melody will use more rhythmic devices such as syncopation, and use quicker (shorter) rhythmic values. In the chorus, the rhythms of the melody should elongate and simplify. A great example is “Smooth” (Carlos Santana/Rob Thomas). Give it a listen and compare the verse and chorus rhythms.
5. PROBLEM: A missing hook. Like melodic climactic moments, not every song needs that standout fragment that we call a hook. Some songs make greater use of motif – a constantly developing melodic/rhythmic cell. But if you feel that your song is giving you nothing much to listen to and (especially) to remember, it may need a catchy hook to lead the way. Inserting a hook into a completed song may be tricky, and may require you to strip the song down to its bare bones, but you should be able to tell early on if its missing something for the audience to hang on to, and so hopefully you won’t be too deep into the songwriting process so that making changes isn’t too problematic.

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Written by Gary Ewer.
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