Most songs are Title-oriented, so getting as much mileage as possible out of the Title makes a big difference.  To illustrate this, I’m going to look at the lyrics of two songs – Bob Seger’s Like A Rock and Bruce Springsteen’s My Hometown.  I recommend you give the original recordings of these songs a listen.

Both Titles are strong, simple, evocative, and can potentially be approached in many different ways in the Verses.  These are qualities I like and often look for in a Title in my own songs.

Bob Seger is a very good songwriter.  I think Like A Rock is a good song… that could have been great – a missed opportunity.  In Like A Rock he wrote an excellent Chorus –

Like a rock
I was strong as I could be
Like a rock
Nothin’ ever got to me
Like a rock
I was somethin’ to see
Like a rock

His first verse sets it up:

Stood there boldly,
sweatin’ in the sun
felt like a million,
felt like number one
at height of summer,
I’d never felt that strong
Like a rock

A good idea, using a Rock as a metaphor of strength and solidity (and also using the Title to end each verse).  His next three verses say almost exactly the same thing, however.  Here’s his 5th Verse:

And I stood arrow straight
unencumbered by the weight
of all these hustlers and their schemes
I stood proud I stood tall
high above it all
I still believed in my dreams

More of the same but… Does a rock believe in dreams?  The song is starting to wander…  The next Verses do take it somewhere else, even if it’s pretty familiar territory (to be fair, it was somewhat less familiar when it was written):

Twenty years now, where’d they go?
Twenty years, I don’t know
I sit and I wonder sometimes
where they’ve gone

And sometimes late at night,
oohhh when I’m bathed in the firelight
the moon comes callin’ a ghostly way,
and I recall
I recall

But this isn’t really a strong lead-in to –

Like a rock
Standin’ arrow straight
like a rock
chargin’ from the gate
like a rock
carryin’ the weight
like a rock

Does a rock stand arrow straight?  Does a rock charge from the gate?  Even though the strength of the main idea puts the song across, this is disappointing.

I’m also surprised that Bob Seger didn’t explore the other side of a rock’s solidity, things that also stand for the human condition, particularly ‘Twenty Years’ on – that a rock changes very slowly if at all, that it’s very difficult to get past its surface, that it’s alone (I guess Paul Simon already said that it feels no pain)…  From a songwriter I respect, a lot of missed opportunities here.

Bruce Springsteen is a writer who rarely leaves any stone (or rock) unturned in  his songwriting.  In My Hometown, look how much story (and life) he gets into a straightforward AABA form:

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick
And steer as we drove through town
He’d tousle my hair and say son
Take a good look around
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

In `65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white, there was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night
In the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown
My hometown

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back
To your hometown
Your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five we got a boy
Of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said
Son take a good look around
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

Incredible storytelling!  He adds new layers of meaning to the simple Title idea in every verse. –

Verse 1 – a child’s view of the town
Verse 2 – a teenager losing that innocence
Bridge – an adult’s view in the present
Verse 3 – the narrator shows the town to his son and sees it through the boy’s eyes, with the implication that neither of them are going anywhere…

(This is also a good example of a song that was probably outlined – a very useful tool – at some point.)

Of course not every song needs this kind of detail – would I Feel Good, Funky Broadway, or Respect be improved by it?  No.  But most songs are made better by being thought through and worked through in constant reference to the Title/Chorus.

In most songs (not all), so much depends on the Title/Chorus.  And in a unified, focused song everything flows to, develops, and supports that Title/Chorus.  And the song is better for it.

Don’t miss the opportunities your Title offers to you!