When I react to a song emotionally, at some point I get interested in looking for the craft-related reasons why it’s working for me. The other day I was listening, for the nth time, to The Clash’s ‘Train In Vain (Stand By Me)’, written by Joe Strummer & MIck Jones – great song, great record… and almost 35 years old now.
Even though the song has a lot of repetition, it has a great feeling of forward motion, and doesn’t feel plodding or predictable, as so many songs do. Putting aside the driving, energetic performance, I think its momentum has a lot to do with the way the rhythms of the song avoid the downbeat.
(The downbeat is the first beat of each measure. So if you’re counting – as you would in this song – ‘1, 2, 3, 4…’ for each measure, the downbeat is the ‘1’.)
The downbeat, just like the tonic note of a chord or key, gives a feeling of rest and completion… which is great, but most of the time in a song you want to create some tension and unrest before you resolve it (again, just like you would in the notes of a melody… or any story you tell).
At least to me, rhythms that focus too much on the downbeat tend to feel turgid and ‘boxy’. And rock and pop music, much as I love it, often tends to do just that, sometimes to a fault.
In The Clash’s song, the main (guitar and bass) riff, used in most of the Verse and the entire Chorus, starts on the 8th note after ‘1’ (the downbeat) and lands on the ‘3’. While the bass and snare drums play a very straightforward ‘1-2-3and-4’, the riff stays off-balance, always leaving that opening at the downbeat which only resolves when the song goes away from the riff.
When the riff is played, each phrase of the melody starts in the middle of the bar, ‘answering’ the guitar riff. In the Verse, the melody phrase ends on the next downbeat. In the Chorus, it always ends on the ‘and’ of ‘4’ (“You didn’t stand by me… No not at all”), anticipating (but avoiding) the next downbeat.
The second part of the Verse and the Bridge are very downbeat-focused, thereby creating a great contrast. So the most memorable part of the song is the Chorus, as it should be, partly because it repeats the same lyric, but also because there the rhythm is at it’s most ‘jumping’; that is, using upbeats and anticipations, not downbeats.
In writing my own songs I sometimes find in the rhythms of a melody that I’ve relied too much on the downbeats, sometimes with tedious results. I’ve also often heard the same thing with other writers in my Songwriting workshops. By no means am I suggesting to avoid downbeats altogether. But I do think it’s a good idea to not overdo them… Keeping the rhythm, and the listener, ‘off-balance’ – avoiding predictability – is a good thing.