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The better informed you are, the better able you are to make these choices. This means that instead of doing
something too obvious, you come up with a better idea. This is craft, this can be learned, and absorbed so that its
operation becomes intuitive. You bring it to bear before the song sets in the mould. Making changes at a later stage
can be difficult but listening to great cover versions can be a good guide to the ways in which songs can be changed.
Think of Hendrix's 'All Along The Watchtower', Joe Cocker's 'With A Little Help From My Friends', Nilsson's
'Without You', or Tori Amos' 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. Compare Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'
to the earlier version by Gladys Knight or The Beatles' 'Something' with Shirley Bassey's.
This book states, or implies, many musical rules. It is good to know them before you break them, but always
remember:
Rule 1: There are no absolute rules. A great song may break a rule.Rule 2: When rules dominate, formula results. Too much formula is the enemy of
invention.Mystery
At its core, all great music has a profoundly mysterious quality. This is especially true of great popular songs be they
pop, rock, folk, blues or soul. In large-scale works such as the symphony, there is usually an immense amount of
architectural design and much development of ideas. Popular song is almost entirely about statement there is no time
or desire or expectation of development. Most songs are between two and five minutes long. Because of its relative
harmonic simplicity (though often nowhere near as simple as "serious" music criticism assumes) and its lack of
development, popular song generally stands or falls on the level of inspiration in its initial material.
Take, for example, a chord sequence such as G D Am, G D C. How many songwriters in 1971 sat with a guitar or at
a piano playing those chords at some time or other? How many thousands actually finished songs in which those
chords appear roughly in that order? How many made it to live performance or recording? Probably hundreds yet
only Bob Dylan wrote 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door'. And if you or I sit down to write a song on that sequence
tomorrow, the mood our song captures will be different. It is as if the chords of a song are like the guy-ropes that
keep a balloon in place; they aren't the balloon itself. In the same way, Tracks Of My Tears' may consist mostly of G
C and D, but its spirit goes far beyond that. In this way, the elements of a song can be classified as more or less
central, depending on how special they are. The most individual element is the performance, then the sound of the
arrangement, then words and melody, then harmony, then rhythm, then tempo.
This facet of songwriting is worth remembering because it is encouraging. Songwriters who have been writing for a
while sometimes find it hard to write songs with simple harmonic sequences because they don't spark any ideas. As a
result, they search for more unusual or more complicated sequences. Remembering that harmony is always re-
invigorating itself reminds you that there are always great songs to be written with the simplest of means.
What Kind of Song
For the purposes of this book, we need to define the kind of song you're trying to write. Songs come in all shapes,
sizes, forms and styles, from the 12-minute extravaganza of a Meatloaf hit to the two minutes of a classic Elvis tune
from the