Why do songs need structure… and why do they have the structures that they do?

I’d say song structure amounts to this: a combination of repetition and variation in the music and words that makes the listener feel like they’ve heard a ‘Song’.

As children we listen to nursery rhymes like ‘Three Blind Mice’, ‘Rockabye Baby’, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, the ‘ABCDEFG…’ song (which uses the ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ melody).  These (or, in other cultures, their equivalent) are usually the first songs that most of us hear.

They combine these basic elements of what we come to think of as ‘Songs’:

1. Easily singable melodies that contain themes that are repeated with slight variations
2. A title phrase of words and melody that’s repeated enough to clearly make it the most memorable thing in the song (and it’s usually placed at the beginning and/or end of the song or the chorus, if there is one);
3. Rhymes that make the song more musical, easier to remember, and that help imprint important phrases on our memories

Kind of like most ‘grown-up’ songs, no?

The two most common American song forms of the past 100 years are the ‘AABA’ song (the most common ‘Great American Songbook’ form, very popular before and through the 1960s), and the ‘Verse/Chorus’ form, which succeeded the ‘AABA’ as the most popular song form.  (Both of these basic forms had many popular variations and extensions.)

If we think of these forms in terms of what’s discussed above we can see that:

The ‘AABA’ form – contains the same music (the ‘A’ section, usually 8 bars long) repeated three times, with the Title embedded in the same spot each time.  The ‘A’s are broken up by the ‘B’ section, which has completely new music and words.  It’s a form that gives a nice balance of repetition and variation.

In the lyric, even though the Title (main idea) is presented and repeated in every ‘A’ section at the most important melodic spot, there’s still plenty of room for other story and development.  The ‘A’ music repeats the same way three times but has a nice break halfway through the journey (the ‘B’ section).

The Verse/Chorus song – variations of this have ruled popular song for fifty years now.  It’s more binary than the ‘AABA’ but makes sense in the same kind of (repetition/variation) way.  The Verse (sometimes abetted by a Pre-Chorus) has the same melody every time but usually has mostly new words in every Verse, allowing for exploration of the situation or story.

The Verse leads up to the Chorus.  The Chorus usually has the same music and words every time.  The Chorus is by definition the part of the song the writer wants the listener to remember most – hence the repetition.  Sometimes a Bridge is introduced later in the song, usually after two Choruses, to serve a very similar function to the ‘B’ section of an “AABA’ song – “We’ve given you the main material twice, now let’s give you a brief, pleasant break and then reprise our main idea.”

The point here is that these forms, aside from being ones that we as listeners are very familiar and comfortable with, are on another level just very efficient delivery systems for music and words that the writer(s) want to be heard as a whole to be “Songs’.  They contain enough repetition that we can latch on to it as a song, and enough variation that we hopefully don’t get too bored with it.

Different writers and listeners have different tolerance levels at either end of the spectrum – some like a lot of repetition, some prefer a looser arrangement, in the same way that we have different tastes in movies – some like predictable rom-coms and David vs. Goliath stories, some prefer less predictable stories that to them more truthfully reflect ‘real life’.

But there is a point for all of us where things can get so loose that a story doesn’t feel like a story anymore, the thread is lost… and, in the same way, where a song doesn’t feel like a song anymore.  Those moments happen when we’re not feeling the underlying structure anymore… if the skeleton’s not there, the body sags and has no shape.

The traditional structures give us a ready-made foundation to build on.  Their familiarity can add tremendous, even mythic and primal, power to a song.  Their familiarity can also easily lead to, “This again?”

Some songs will be genre pieces, walking comfortably on a well-worn paths that still have room for a few surprising turns.  Other song ideas, to find their proper life, need different, less common, forms.

As writers we somehow have to find the right structure for each song idea.  Why?  Because we want it to feel like a song.  But also very much because it is our desire to harness the mighty power that ‘Song’, at that mythic and primal level, has for all of us.