The Cons of Inconsistency

One of the big secrets to writing effective pop music is consistency. In fact, I believe this is one of the MOST important skills an aspiring songwriter can master, but still one of the most overlooked.

By consistency I mean that certain elements of your song need to remain relatively stable as in order to give the impression of a cohesive whole. In general, your tone, theme, mood, subject matter, voice and point of view should all stay within a certain "range" and any wild musical or lyrical shifts ought to be the result of carefully considered design as opposed to haphazard chance.

How many times have you been on youtube and listened to an original song with lyrics all over the map? How many times have you listened to a new song that was pleasant enough but it feels oddly bipolar or schizophrenic (and not in a good way)? How about songs that start off with solid, concrete imagery, then lapse into the realm of the abstract, before finally turning into a jumble of clichés? Many of these problems can be traced to a lack of consistency.

Here are some of the more important types of consistency to keep in mind while writing "pop" songs.

1) Consistency between lyrics and music.

All else being equal, you want your music to roughly match the feel of your lyrics. You might have some great words you're just DYING to use, but don't assume you can just randomly graft them onto the first catchy melody you come up with. If your melody sounds like a sweet lullaby, combining it with a political dissertation on war in the Middle East won't work 99 out of 100 times. Listen to your music. What's it saying? Listen to your lyrics. What music expresses the emotion therein?

With this in mind, I am fully aware of the way a writer might use tools like irony to pair a happy melody with a sad lyric, and vice versa. Or perhaps a writer could employ mechanical beats to provide dynamic contrast or undercut a particularly passionate lyric. These types of maneuvers require a particularly deft touch, however, and most of the time they play off the consistency our ears expect.

2) Consistency of Pronoun Use

Unless you're deliberately obscuring your lyrics for some artistic reason, you want to be clear on who did what to whom, and where and when it happened. Too often I read lyrics and I can't figure out what the hell's going on because the pronouns are either shifting or unclear to begin with. Did "he" run off with "her" brother? Or are "you" running off with "him" because some OTHER "she" betrayed "us" both? Just like normal writing, you want your pronouns to be clear and consistent.

3) Consistency of Tense

Hoo boy. Here's another common trap that writers fall into: The song starts off in the present ("He's driving all night, looking for his girl..."), then shifts to the past at some point ("Then he FOUND her in that diner..."), then back to the present for a second verse, and then suddenly we're in the past again! Unless you're HG Wells, you want to avoid all the funky time travelling, especially when describing a specific event at a specific point in time. If the song's events are in the past, keep them in the past. If they're happening in the present, keep it in the present.

Of course, there are songs that start out describing the past ("I went out searching") before moving into the present to describe something that's happening now ("…but NOW I have you"). However, it's still vital that you keep the tenses consistent with the song's narrative time line, and any switch in tense should be clear and logical.

4) Consistency of Voice.

Whatever voice you start the song with, that's the one you want to carry throughout (unless you have a thematic reason for switching). So, for example, if your "voice" is happy, conversational, and uses "everyday" language, don't abruptly switch over to angry, professorial or pretentious language in your chorus. This seems like obvious stuff, but too often people get tripped up trying to make a line work where it plainly doesn't, just because they're enamored with a particular phrase. Writers need to learn to sacrifice parts (even parts we love) for the good of a song's overall consistency.

More to come…

If the Rhyme Fits, It Don't Mean Quit

Have you ever been driving along, minding your own business, lost in reverie, wondering if today is the day that your car suddenly acceleates to 120 mph on its own, when ALL OF A SUDDEN you become acutely aware of the lyrics to the song on the radio?

Sure you have. More specifically, you become aware of a line or two that makes you think, "Hmmm, I'll bet the writer only used that word right there because it rhymed." For example, you might hear something like:

 "Oh, she was his one desire, the one who took him higher..."

A line like that, aside from being cliched and sort of banal, is one of those lines that the author probably used because it was an easy rhyme and it "fit." Sometimes writers reach for easy rhymes because they want something simple and accessible to sing, but that's a fine line to walk because if you're not saying anything at least semi-interesting, you're also flirting with being forgettable. (Have you ever tried to memorize a song made up of a bunch of strung-together cliches? It ain't that easy.)

The desired goal, at least when it comes to pop songs, is to balance the familiar, simple and common with the unique, clever and compelling. Not so easy when you think about it!  So rather than immediately settling on the first words that "fit," see if you can come up with a rhyme that actually expresses what you want to say. But be careful; you don't want to replace a cliche with something that sounds forced, awkward, hokey or contrived. The ley is to actually say something intriguing while STILL being relatively straight forward and catchy. In other words, you wouldn't want to change the line to something like:

 "Oh, she was his one desire, got him caught in a love quagmire..."

just because you're trying to be "clever." That lyric just plain sucks, in more ways then one. However, you COULD try to change the initial lyric to something like:

"Oh, she was his one desire, another object to acquire..."

The words are still ordinary, everyday words, but "object" and "acquire" are used a little less frequently in pop music, and have a little extra panache. However, they still sound like something someone might actually say off the top of their head. Not only that, but now the lyric is telling us something. With just those few simple words, the listener can start getting all sorts of mental images of these characters. (The guy sounds like a douche, to me.)

This is not to say you can't play around with more exotic rhymes. It all depends on songwriting context or what sort of "feel" you're going for. Just be aware that what sounds fanciful and clever in one setting can sound awfully stodgy and stilted in another. For example, if you're going for a more literate, broadway-influenced feel, you could try something along the lines of:

"Oh, she was his one desire, with roses and candy he plied her..."

but, in general, you'll want to stay away from language like "plied her" if you're writing, say, top 40 dance tunes.

I also don't mean to suggest that you can never develop a unique "voice" or use stream-of-consciousness imagery. In fact - and we should get this out of the way right now - there are ALWAYS goung to be exceptions to the "rules," but unless you're a super-genius like Mozart, it's probably a good to get an idea of what tends to work and what doesn't. It's because there IS a logic to strong songwriting that the brilliant exceptions work so well.

So take this as a general rule of thunb: Don't quickly settle on the first rhyme that pops into your head, just because it's easy and obvious. It can come across as kind of weak, and even worse, it can draw attention to itself and pull the listener out of the song. Try coming up with something equally straightforward but a little closer to what you're trying to express (and if you don't yet know WHAT you're trying to express, that's a whole 'nother issue for a whole 'nother post).

Besides, you can always go back to your original rhyme if you feel that it truly captures the thought or the passion and immediacy you were looking for. Heck, there have been many times that I've gone with a working lyric or two because the rewrites didn't quite fit the mood. Just don't be sloppy or lazy about it, because lots of lyrics you think were just "tossed off" someone's head were actually painstakingly refined for maxiumum effectiveness.

Now get back to driving. You wanna get in an accident or something? Sheeesh.