Pushing the Chorus - Part 1 Introduction

When you hear a song for the first time, how is it that you are able to recognize a specific part of it as "the chorus"? What is it that lets you know when the chorus of a song begins and ends?

The simplest answer is that you've been socialized to recognize the structure of a pop song. Think about how many pop songs you have heard in your life (and by pop songs, I mean anything that isn't classical, essentially). All that listening has given you expectations on how songs are supposed to be structured - and the most important part is the chorus. You don't expect the chorus to be the first thing you hear in a song (with some exception, such as when it's part of an introduction phrase). Instead, you expect the first few melodic lines to be the same thing over and over...known as the Verse. After that, a pre-chorus section might follow, or the song might go straight to the chorus. Either way, the modern listener is extremely adapted to recognizing the chorus section of a song.

Maybe you don't think that recognizing the chorus is a big deal. Indeed, the modern pop structure (verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern) might seem straight forward and obvious, but people 150 years ago would have been dumbfounded listening to modern pop structure. Why? Because it doesn't fit with the structures they were used to, such as Fugues and Sonata forms (or put simply, Classical music structures). If you ever thought that classical music was hard to follow, it's not your fault - the modern musical landscape makes it hard for most listeners to become acquainted with classical music structures. In fact, you might be surprised to know that classical music has many more restrictions and many more rules about the structure of the piece than pop songs do. Once you learn the structure of classical music, it becomes easy to follow because you know what's coming next....in the same way that we can recognize a chorus, and a verse..etc.

But songs are not just patterns of musical notes. If they were, we would be quite content looking at musical notation, instead of needing to hear them. The chorus isn't just the thing that follows the verse...it's the emotional highpoint of a song, the essence of the entire piece. We've all heard songs that have great verses...but mediocre choruses that don't hit that musical and emotional highpoint.

So how do you create a musical and emotional highpoint? Well, that's what artists have been trying to figure out for decades. But sometimes the secret isn't in the musical notes, or the structure of the song....but ingenious tricks that can be utilized in the production of the song itself. That isn't to say that these songs have bad choruses - but that the emotional highpoint is established much more prominently through these production techniques.

In the next few posts, I will be trying something new: A Series! I'll be talking about some songs that utilize really neat techniques to make a chorus sound... like a Chorus. You might be surprised at the implications! Stay tuned....