There is a lot of music in this world.
A LOT of music.
In fact, I could tell Amazon Alexa to play a random name. Chances are, someone by that name has a CD to stream.
If not, someone with a similar name does, and she’s on it faster than pimples on a teenager.
Some artists, despite their songs streaming on Amazon Music across the planet, are missing the basic elements of a verse.
Make sure your verses do the below, and you’ve already crafted a strong verse other songwriters wish they knew how.
Repeat after me…
My verse will:
1. Set up the chorus.
The primary job of a verse is to set up the chorus so it makes sense and carries emotion.
The chorus is more “in your head” or an abstract “you got me under your spell” type of lyric.
The verse tells the details to set up the chorus.
Example:
My fridge is filled with spoiled food I can’t seem to eat
My pillow has no dents I just can’t seem to sleep
Tried to drink my morning coffee
Guess have spooned it salty
It’s like something’s coming over me
[Chorus]
You got me under your spell
I love it
You got me under your spell
I wouldn’t have it any other way
And if my head began to question
My heart would never tell
You got me under your spell
2. Draw listener in with imagery.
This is easy-peasy.
Which is easier to picture?
“I made her mad big time.”
Or…
“She whipped her Winnie the Pooh coffee cup and it burst into a thousand pieces.
One, there’s nothing to project on the listener’s big screen, blackness. The other you see it happening in living color.
We can get even more descriptive than that, but you get the picture.
It’s all about the picture.
3. Build one single emotion.
A common mistake songwriters can make is trying to get too many emotions in the song.
Trying to say too much at once.
Cheating songs have been around since Moses had peach fuzz.
Let’s say you wrote a song about apologizing for cheating on your lover. Which is why she wound up and hurled her Winnie the Pooh cup at you.
keep it there.
You don’t have to go deep in to the love or lust emotion which built up to it.
That’s another song.
You want to focus on one main emotion and have all else support it.
She’s angry. We see that when she whipped the cup at you.
And if she didn’t, it wouldn’t be believable.
But, that is for another time.
4. Catch the listeners attention from the start.
Let’s go back to our Winnie the Pooh line. If you started your song with:
“She’s really mad and I don’t blame her
I’ve really done it this time”
We’re drawn in with some curiosity. But we don’t know how w mad.
But if you started:
“She smashed her Winnie the Pooh coffee mug across the living room floor
I started asking “Baby what did I…?
But when I saw those streaming tears of hers
My heart done told me why”
We don’t know what the singer did, but it obviously wasn’t good.
We’ll have to keep listening to find out.
That’s a way to draw them in.
5. Have a consistent rhyme pattern.
This one is simple.
A rhyme pattern is exactly what it sounds like. A set of lines which have a pattern to their rhyme.
We won’t get into that here. Just know, whatever rhyme pattern you start in verse one, make the rest of the verses the same.
If you don’t, a listener will pick up on your mistake. They might not be able to pick it out if asked, but they’ll know something is wrong with your song.
6. Answer the who, what, why, when, where, and sometimes how.
The sooner you can get out a few of these, the sooner your listener has a perspective.
In our example we know:
Who: Two apparent lovers.
What: She’s mad as all get out.
Where: Living room.
We’ve got three of the six to get us started.
If we found a way to mention chards of glass glistened in the sunset, we’d know roughly when.
7. Establish and maintain perspective: I, we, you.
Oooooooh this is a biggie.
If you start a song from a third person perspective, Stick with it. Don’t switch to a first-person perspective later in the song.
In our little flying Winnie the Pooh coffee mug example, we started with “she.”
We wouldn’t want the chorus to start with…
“But honey I can explain…”
Where before we were telling a story to a listener, now we’re talking to our lover.
Not what you want to do.
Start with these in your verses and you’ll be in good shape.