A good melody tells a story. It doesn’t just help tell the story of the words; it has its own story.
(Sometimes the melody’s story is very different from the story in the words – it can function as subtext to the lyric).
Any good melody has drama. It starts somewhere, takes a journey, developments happen, tensions develop and are (usually) resolved. But the main thing is that the melody stay in motion, that it doesn’t feel finished until it is finished.
Like a shark, it has to move or die.
In any dramatic form – film, theater – you don’t resolve your story until the end. Because the resolution is the end. A melody is pretty similar (songs are also a performance art).
And the easiest (but certainly not the only) way to make a melody feel finished is to land strongly on a note that’s also the root note of the chord under it.
An example is, while your melody’s moving along, holding a big C note over a C chord (especially in the key of C!). If I do that, that melody will feel done, that story feels finished. Try it yourself.
But if that melody lands on any other note, we could still be at the end, but it will not feel as resolved. Try, over the C chord, an ‘E’ or a ‘G’ , a ‘B’ or ‘Bb’. Then the melody’s still potentially in motion, the story could go further. That tension, however slight, is what you want if you wish to keep the listener’s interest.
The mistake of the premature root in the melody, or of using too many chord roots in the melody, is something less experienced songwriters are prone to. It can, all by itself, make you sound like a less experienced songwriter!
(And I don’t mean to imply that all melodies resolve to the root, or should resolve to the root. Or that there should never be a root note in the melody except for at its end – that’s certainly not the case. The chord’s root note is just the most obvious and unmistakable ‘ending’. Many – most? – great melodies don’t end in a completely resolved way.)
Most of the time good melodies are about building and sustaining tension, and postponing resolution, in an interesting way. Telling a story.
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I noticed in songwriting workshops that when a writer presented an AABA song, often they’d go to the tonic chord and note at the end of the second A section — right before the bridge. That makes the story feel finished; it doesn’t make the listener wonder where the melody is going next. Thanks for posting this piece of technique. I keep it in mind when writing and wondered whether it’s commonly discussed among songwriters.