Think of the sections of your song classically

Here’s something you might not know: I have an intense classical-music background!

My mom was trained as a concert pianist, and then that got derailed by her having kids, and so all of her frustrated ambitions fell squarely upon my shoulders — along with her incredible discipline.

This was both good and bad! I got a second-to-none classical education, and I know a lot about music theory and arrangement, and I have a “big picture” view of orchestration and instrumentation; those are advantages.

Also, there is a lot of stricture in an old-world classical-music education — lots of rules, lots of “this is right and this is wrong” — indeed, lots of the fundamental idea that there are right and wrong ways to do music — and I had to unlearn all of that before I could thrive in my next iteration, which took longer than you might imagine.

But one thing that I’ve realized stuck with me from that time, in a really good way, is that I tend to think of parts of songs as movements. In other words, the song isn’t the basic unit, the part is the basic unit — verse 1, chorus 1, verse 2, chorus 2, bridge, etc — those are all autonomous substructures in my mind. Related, certainly, but not the same, and without pressure to be the same.

This is very different from the way that I think a lot of people view song-based music — oftentimes the chorus is literally copied and pasted, and if it isn’t, it’s performed basically the same from chorus to chorus. Same with verses, and to some extent the same throughout the body of any given song.

What I do — and what I’m suggesting here — is to view each part of your song as being its own little world. In this view of a song, the primary relationship each part of the song has is to the part that came right before it, and the (very much) secondary relationship is to the part that comes after it.

The reason that I call my studio Department of Energy Management is that I view my main job as being to help the flow of energy in a song from moment to moment, from movement to movement. That stems directly from this classical way of thinking.

A song is a narrative journey. It takes the listener from point A to point B, leaving them somewhere different than where it found them. As people involved in making recordings, our job is to facilitate and optimize that journey. So, in this spirit, chorus 2 would necessarily be different than chorus 1 — because it’s at a different place in the journey.

This isn’t to say that songs or recordings shouldn’t have repetition; they should. But the nature of the repetition, the quality of it, can be slightly different each time it comes around. And probably should? Because otherwise what we’re implying to the listener is that nothing has changed — that they are in the same place. And that doesn’t feel particularly inspiring.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes — jamie