Verse phrasing .. the same .. or a bit different

[devin]

Dec 20, 2008, 10:49am, deantaylor wrote:Dec 20, 2008, 4:06am, claire wrote:Do you write your country songs like this, so that all the verse phrasing is exactly the same, like this guy says?-----------------------------No, not exactly the same but pretty darned close. Almost exactly the same. There is no one rule, not even in country, but when you listen to what's getting cut and what's going to number one, the phrasing is the same in each verse. You can get away with a bit of variation but again, the idea is to get that rhythm inside the listener's head - and one of the ways of doing that is to keep the phrasing the same. If you send in a song to a critique service and it's a country song and there's obvious phrasing differences between the verses, you're going to hear about it from the reviewer.ClaireThanks Claire. Very helpful. I had never run across this country 'rule' before. So, when I saw it, I was skeptical .. I thought maybe the reviewer had it wrong or was taking it a little too seriously. Thanks for shedding some light on it from your experience.Has anyone else run across this Nashville 'rule' before in your song reviews or in advice from articles/books/etc?DeanI've had that feedback before Dean...exactly as Claire says. The review was outside of Taxi, and I'm not enough of a country writer to say how credible a review it was. It made sense to me when I read it.Here's a snippet from that review:Devin, a very good bit of storytelling in both words and music. It can work as it is.If you want to tighten it up as a country song form, the rhyme structure of verses usually stick with pattern established at the start. (This is getting technical but you asked for it )Verse rhyme structures in this lyric could be outlined like this:V1: a b c b (partial rhyme = p.r.) V2: d d (p. r.) where p.r. relates to first 'd' d (p.r.) d (p.r.) but these two are perfect rhymes!I played around with your verses in light of above comments and got this:She watches the waves play with the shore.They come on strong but then they leave.She reads his* last message on her phone Says “ Please reply.” But she hits delete. ---end of snippet---So Dean, I don't know if the inclusing of my actual lyric helps her point or not. The text in bold is the new, suggested first verse (as she massaged for me above). I don't know if it would make the country cut. In the end, I liked what she suggested though...even though it's still a partial rhyme at the end of line 2 vs line 4.HTH? I dunno...probably not

[elser]

[deantaylor]

Thanks Devin, but I think your reviewer is referring to rhyme scheme .. the reviewer we are talking about is referring to phrasing. Or am I missing something?

[devin]

Hehe...no wonder I'm having a hard time...I can't even read directions!You're right Dean on my quote being about rhyming...my bad...let me see if I can find one about phrasing.I'm sure I have an example of every mistake somewhere (including some new ones)...

[ontariolightning]

unless your song is better than a live like you were dying or when I get where I'm going you can pretty much expect to be rejected

[Mark Kaufman]

I would agree with Claire's point that it's not the "rule", more like a reason to say why they passed. I imagine there are times when there's nothing bad to say about a submission...but it's not "it"...so you look for something to cite and you send it back.But I don't think Country is as hung up on that exactitude as the reviewer says. Pretty close, though...

[matto]

I would say it should be real close. I think maybe the word "phrasing" is a bit misleading here cause what we are really talking about is the meter of each line, i.e. the count and (more importantly) the pattern of strong and weak syllables.If those are off from one verse to the next, then you have to mess with the melody, and a really good hooky melody does not like to be messed with. It should be left up to the artist to inject their personality into the song by adding little embellishments and variations to the melody, they should not be forced by the writer to do so.Otherwise the writer isn't really doing their job.Just MHO...matto

[deantaylor]

Ontario, Mark, Matto .. thanks for chiming in. Very helpful. Matto, interesting thought that the artist should be able to add the melody variations .. but not be forced to do so. I can see the logic of that.Dean

[deantaylor]

I got a chance to apply this. Marc Blackwell and I are writing a song that we want to pitch to country artists, so we took some special care to try and get the 2 verses on the same melody. If you wanna tell us how we did, you can listen here:http://taxi.proboards27.com/index.cgi?b ... read=12534 Thanks,Dean

[natehedgeman]

All I can say, being a novice to taxi, is this...Since we are asking THEM to screen our songs, not to take their advice would be a mistake. What we personally like or dislike is only relevant (to the commercial side of music) if others like it or dislike it as well. Particularly the screeners and decision makers. Whatever they say is wrong with the song... re-write it. Instead of thinking the problem is with them, maybe the problem is with our music. If you change everything they say to and they still pass on the song... then it's them and whatever problem they have that they aren't telling you. (Which would be pretty jacked up btw) Re-writing the song doesn't hurt anything, you can always go back to the original version anyway.We might think that the way we write is perfect and better and makes more sense then whatever the screeners have to say. So we have a choice.... Do it their way and be rich, Or do it our "perfect better" way and be perfectly broke.Once we have a couple of hits under our belts then we can take a few creative liberties.