It’s a practical and sensible songwriting convention that, in a Verse/Chorus song, the Chorus will be bigger, fuller, louder than the Verse.  The Chorus usually contains the central idea of the song, most commonly including the Title, so it makes sense to emphasize this section.  And how do we emphasize most things?  With repetition… and VOLUME.

But sometimes an idea can be emphasized by using what amounts to reverse psychology.  I’m sure we’ve all heard speakers, teachers, and actors who, when trying to make an important point, speak quietly… they get you to lean in; to make a point, they use the opposite of what listeners expect.

This device is relatively uncommon in songs, but it can be extremely effective.

The Police’s ‘Message In A Bottle’ (Sting) is a great example (here).  It builds and builds (with repetition) in the ‘I hope that someone gets my‘ section… and then we fall off a cliff, dynamically speaking, when we hit the Title – ‘Message In A Bottle‘, which is also repeated many times (Sting really appreciated repetition back then).  The contrast draws more attention to the Title than if they had gotten louder.

Nas’s ‘One Mic’ (Jones, Thompson) does something similar (here).  In the Verse his rap accelerates in complexity until it climaxes and then, instead of rising to another level, he brings it down to the haunting chant ‘All I need is One Mic, One Mic, One Mic‘.

Something else these songs have in common is that even though their dynamics drop in the Chorus, the groove continues, almost like it would in a breakdown.  So the momentum of the song isn’t lost.

The contrast allows the Chorus/Title to speak clearly, even though it’s quiet, and when the Verse comes back in kicking… the song gets a dynamic restart.

Other great examples of this underutilized technique are The Band’s ‘King Harvest Has Surely Come’ (Robertson – here) and Metallica’s ‘The Unforgiven’ (Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich – here), which takes Metallica’s signature version of  the ‘softer verse/louder chorus’ convention and reverses it.  Also, Ariane Grande’s recent hit ‘Problem’ fits this template to a ‘t’. (Grande, Martine, Kotecha, Salmanzadeh, Kelly – here).

Can you think of other songs that use this ‘reverse dynamic’ device?

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