JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum Breakdown of Top 10 Country Songs

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Listeners to songs may not know what is a bridge or a second chorus or a pre chorus, all they know is if they like the song or not. If it speaks to them, they like it, How ever long it takes to tell the story, take it but if it's too long, radio may not like it because it uses up too much ad space.

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Writing to a formula may beget you a great song but may be as boring as watching paint dry. I mostly write to what comes to me as a particularly good idea at the time. When I wrote THE LOST CHAD SONG, lyrics posted on lyric board one the idea just came to me. So I would not worry too much about a particular formula of how to write songs. I do think some pop writers from the past did write to a basic formula Whatever works for you is the right way but many of the big hits weren't written to some type of formula.

Gary, I saw Larry present this information in a workshop he did for our local NSAI chapter. One of my songs was picked to compare against the template he had extrapolated from his analysis of the hits. It was about 5 minutes long and obeyed almost none of the rules! He was much too nice to make me stand in the corner for the rest of the class, LOL.

Of course, rules are there to be understood and then judiciously broken. There is another video showing how country songs of the year do break these rules. Writing a great song might not always be the same as writing a hit.

http://songwriterjunction.com/larry-beaird-on-how-songs-of-the-year-are-different/

Interesting what you say about how a bridge can be introduced when the writer despairs of finding a logical denouement. Another way I sometimes do that is to vary the end of the last chorus, so that the chorus as a whole is still familiar enough but you can end the song on a twist.

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