What Makes A Song Good? Part 1: Cohesion

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In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about 1 factor that seems to be one of the factors contributing to a song actually being good. We're talking about how every part of the song working together to communicate what the song is about - aka the COHESION of the song. If your lyrics are about something tragic, but the melody sounds playful and the harmony sounds like a grand romantic piece, is that any good? No. The song may be made of different parts and song sections, but it also is a singular song. So let's discuss the COHESION or..... I'll say it, synergy of songs.

Transcript:

As songwriters who are seeking to constantly improve at the craft of songwriting and write better and better songs, I think we are constantly on this quest where we're asking ourselves, "How do I write a better song? How do I write a better chorus? How do I write better melodies? How do I write a bridge that's more emotionally resonant?" And yet sometimes we don't actually take the time to think about, "Well, wait a second. When I say better chorus, when I say a better song, what does that even mean? What are the things that we're looking at? What are some of the factors that lead into this idea of something being better in any piece of art?" This is a difficult thing for us to tackle, but as I mentioned in last week's episode, we're going to try. And I realized very quickly that this probably would take more than one episode to even begin to do this justice and not have it be multiple hours long. So this is going to be part one in our Who Knows How Long series about trying to tackle what actually makes a song great or what are some of the common factors to what sort of leads to a good song. Let's talk about it. Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host as always, Joseph Vidal. I know that you would take some time out of your busy day, your busy week to talk songwriting with me. If you're listening to anything and instead you're listening to something that you're hoping is going to help you and hopefully me talking about it will also help me become better songwriters so that we can all become better songwriters together, at least be striving in that direction so that hopefully both you and I are better songwriters next year than we were this year and much better five years from now than now and etc. So on, so forth. Don't want to bore you. It's just going through random numbers. I think you understand. So that's the goal. But in today's episode, we're tackling something heavy. Not heavy, maybe emotionally, but something that I feel like most people aren't even willing to start to discuss. But I think it's important to discuss because if we can't define or talk about here are some factors that seem to lead to a song being better or more good or great, then, you know, how can we possibly talk about here's how to make your lyrics better? Like we'll define better if we can't have some idea of some of the factors that go into an element of the song or the song as a whole being better, then we can't actually answer the question what would make this better. So I think it's an important thing to discuss. I think it's something that artists in general don't talk about enough. And it's just one of those things that I think it's a net negative for all of us. Yes, it's a hard discussion, but that doesn't mean it's not one worth having. Most important discussions are difficult and don't have clear answers, but that doesn't make them not important to have. So we're going to do that. It's going to be part one because I realized there's no shot that I could even begin to do justice to this in one part. So we're breaking it up. Let me know in the comments down below if you're on YouTube what some of your ideas are and please back them up. Don't just be like, "I think a great song is X and you have no reasoning as to Y." I mean, you can, but it's kind of hard to... it's not really making a point if you just list a thing and don't justify why it's a thing. But that being said, I am very curious what other people think is meant to be a discussion. I again do not pretend to have the answers. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this pretty much throughout my life, but that doesn't mean that I'm right. It doesn't mean that I'm right. But hopefully it's at least well thought out and has some merit to talking about, hopefully. But I guess that's up to you to decide. So if you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song, especially if you're like, "All right, we're talking philosophy and getting real deep into what makes something good today." But where's my hard just go do this songwriting advice? There it is, songwritertheory.com slash free guide. It gives you 20 different ways to start writing a song because I'm personally of the opinion, at least for me, it has been very helpful to have a bunch of different ways that I know I can start a song because sometimes if you start a song the same way every time, sometimes the results in the song start to sound the same. And whether or not that's a problem, certainly a problem that comes up, I think, is writer's block. I've done too many piano riffs for weeks or months. I'll sit at the keyboard or piano and be like, "I just don't have anything." But it's not that I'm out of creative ideas, it's that I'm out of piano-based creative ideas. So just going over to my guitar, or writing a bass line with the keyboard, or starting with lyrics, or starting with what I think is a compelling symbol, or going to find artwork on Google Images or an art museum that I find inspiring that I'm like, "Ooh, that can make a good song." All those sorts of things can be really helpful to jump-start your creativity even when you think it's gone or currently the muse isn't visiting you or however you want to look at it. But again, songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. The first factor that I think we're going to talk about is cohesion or unity or, if we want to use the word, if you're in the corporate world I'm sorry, you're probably about to get triggered, but synergy of parts. Every element of our song should be in agreement on what is being communicated. Your melody, or for a great song or a good song, the melody shouldn't be communicating or sounding like it's communicating love. It's like a love song in the melody. Well the chord progression sounds like you're angry. The song is angry. And then the lyrics are actually telling a tragic and sad story of losing a close relative. Right? Because those three, those don't go together. They're not all on the same page communicating something. Even if the chord progression is great and the music is great and then the melody is great and the lyrics are great on their own, but when we put them together they're a mess because they don't actually work together. It's one of the classic, you know, the whole is not a sum of its parts. The idea that a team is not just how good each of the individual players are. It's how well they work together is a part of it. This is why more talented teams often lose because they just don't have the cohesion or synergy that a team that technically is less talented has. And I think the same thing is true for, well, anything. We could talk about how this is true for movies, right? You can have the greatest actor of all time. Missed cast in a movie might tank a movie. But you think like, oh, we got the greatest actor of all time, whoever you think that is, in a movie and most of the things about the movie are fantastic, but yet that actor is so wrong for the role that it just ruins the movie. It's a real thing that can happen, right? Because it's not just a sum of its parts. No piece of art is simply a sum of its parts. There's more to it than that. The parts all need to be on the same page. Think about something ridiculous. This would work in comedy to comedic effect. But generally in a movie if the soundtrack is communicating something wildly different than what's going on on screen and it's not giving the quote unquote right emotional cues, that would ruin the whole movie. There's a way to know this. You can look it up. There's tons on YouTube and they're hilarious, right? But if you think of it as being in the real movie, it would ruin it. So there's one that I think is like Seinfeld music to The Shining. And it makes it hilarious. But of course it would have ruined the actual movie. And this applies. They do things like adding a laugh track or taking away a laugh track from something. It totally changes how the scene feels by having a soundtrack where it did or having a laugh track where it didn't before or not having a laugh track where it used to. Soundtrack, same idea. Obviously different because laugh versus not laugh. It's a little binary and soundtrack really hits at all the different emotions. But you know you couldn't just take the Star Wars soundtrack and then put it on, I don't know, Dune and it'd just be like oh it's perfect because the Star Wars soundtrack is great and the Dune movie's fantastic. So like no, no. Because they might not fit together. They might not work together. In fact I think they wouldn't. I think the Dune soundtrack's fantastic. It's perfect for that movie. And Star Wars soundtrack is perfect for Star Wars. And the Dune soundtrack of course is Hans Zimmer and the Star Wars one of course is John Williams. And those two are both all time great film composers according to most people and I would tend to agree that they certainly have the longevity and the peaks that you want to look for in greatness. But I would never want to trade those two. I would never want to trade those two. I would never want anybody but John Williams for Star Wars and I would never want anybody but Hans Zimmer and his styles for the Dune soundtrack. Because things including art are not just a sum of their parts. It's how they all work together. Are they working together well? So an easy way and practical way in my opinion to sort of test this with our own songs. Because even though we're talking sort of we're getting very philosophical today. But I think it's important that we be able to connect it with okay but what do I do with this? And one of the things I think we can do is we can test this by isolating each of our parts and then testing to see do they all evoke the same emotion? They all seem to be on the same page for what's being communicated. Now obviously lyrics are always going to be more precise than music and what they communicate. We're probably going to at best we're going to get into specific emotions when it comes to music. You're not going to be able to listen to a piece of music with no context and be like this sounds like my parents just passed away due to cancer and I live in X country and my income is X amount of dollars. Lyrics of course can communicate more factual information than music can. But we're looking for something like the lyrics elicit this idea of wistfulness. And the melody sounds wistful so that even if I just listened to the melody, if I were just hum the melody to someone or to myself, I think it sounds wistful. It sounds deeply connected to what the lyric is communicating. Such that if I just read the lyric alone as poetry with no melody to help it out, no background music, no chord progression, nothing, does it still elicit the same emotion that the song is going for? Does it still communicate the same thing that the song is going for? The lyrics alone. And then the same thing with the melody. Sometimes I'll call this the theme test, which is a nod to themes in movie soundtracks. And there are a bunch of different great examples of this. But take something like the Jaws theme. The Jaws theme is a great example of this. Like two notes, John Williams, very well conveys the idea of something's coming for you and it's a scary thing. You wouldn't have to watch Jaws to hear that Jaws theme and it elicits some sort of look over your shoulder like what's coming for me emotion. Which fits perfectly with what it's trying to communicate in the movie. And that's just, you know, we could talk about the orchestration, but just the "melody" of that part alone communicates that. It doesn't need all the orchestration and all that in order to very well communicate what it's trying to communicate. And so anyway, so I call it the theme test for that reason. It's the idea that is your melody approaching, communicating so clearly the central emotion of the thing. That if it were just a theme or a motif in a movie where there were no lyrics and it just was this melody, does that still carry that same emotion that your lyrics and then your chord progression or just general harmony are going for? There's a lot of examples of this, right? Imperial March, which is Darth Vader's theme, is another example of this. You know, the depth to that one I think is even more because it also is a theme that depending on the arrangement can be sort of adjusted to lean into different elements of the theme. Meaning like in its full orchestration it very well evokes this idea of this relentless unstoppable army coming for you and this unstoppable force in the form of Vader and very sort of just powerful, nobody can touch this. But then in different orchestrations with the same melody it evokes this tragedy of the character as well, which you see in episode six when Vader is, spoiler alert, dying, but dying as Anakin Skywalker. And it has a tragic element to it and not just because of that scene but just the music alone does. It has this element of a broken former fallen hero. And a part of that is masterful orchestration and a part of that is writing a melody that well fits with both of those things. And just one last example because some of you are probably like, "Yes, we get it, you like Star Wars." But the ring theme in Lord of the Rings is maybe even the best example of this in a way given that that ring theme, if you just think about the melody, if you've ever heard it, and if you haven't after this podcast go listen to it. But that melody and the whole sound of that ring theme evokes this wonder and sort of the seduction of this mysterious item. Like it has a sort of like, "Ooh, what is that? I want to swim closer. I want to touch it. I'm just drawn to it. I feel like it's ee ee." Like if you told me it was a siren song, it feels like it matches the same sort of, it appears beautiful. It's something that you want. But deep down you know it's bad for you because the ring of course, I'm not going to explain Lord of the Rings. I don't know how you can be alive on the planet and not know the basic premise of Lord of the Rings and what the ring is and represents. So I will spare you telling you what you almost certainly already know. But it's perfect for what the ring is. Absolutely perfect. And to a degree because what those melodies have in their favor versus ours is they don't have to be "singable" because they're played by instruments. So you less have to worry about singability which limits their melodies less. So probably most of our melodies aren't going to be able to reach the heights that a theme that's played with an organ or with a flute or you know with a violin can reach. But I think the closer we get to that the better it is. And the same thing is going to be true for the harmony or chord progression or arrangement, however you want to look at it. All sort of sides of the, not exactly the same coin, but basically all of the music that isn't the melody. Is that something where if you played your song for someone and it had no vocals in it, so none of the melody and none of the lyrics, would somebody still gather from that song? Roughly what the core emotion of it is. And I think I implied this when I used the word "wistful" earlier, but we're looking for more than like "oh it sounds sad." I mean that's the baseline that we should go for, right? But we want to be more precise than sad. Because sad is basically 50% of all emotions roughly fit into sad. That's not very precise. We mentioned this in last week's episode, maybe you weren't here, but "wistful" is something like sadness for because of no longer having something that was a happy thing. So sort of this combination of you're glad that you had this happy thing, but you're sad you don't have it anymore. It's way more specific than just sad. Because bitter is sad, it's sort of a hybrid of sad and angry. Especially if you had a Venn diagram of angry and sad, the part in the middle where they meet is bitter. There's maybe a little bit more to it, right? But at a high level it's something like that. So that shows those words are more precise. Because bitter is a form of sadness. And so is wistful. But wistful and bitter could hardly be more different. They're very very different. They have similarities, right? They both kind of share the idea that you're probably looking back at something. Bitter is more like I'm just ticked about how it ended or something. Whereas wistful is more like, but I'm glad it happened. And maybe I'm not mad about any element of it. There's no anger in wistful usually. There's a lot of anger in bitter. But anyway, the emotion that we're talking about here should be something more like the words bitter or wistful. And less like the words like, oh it's like kind of happy or sad. I mean, you might be able to do something as simple as major versus minor key. We'll accomplish happy versus sad. That's the baseline requirement. Which although let me point out that it's not true that you put something in major key and it's automatically happy in minor and it's automatically sad. There's plenty of poppy, happy, catchy songs that are in minor and plenty of super depressing songs that are in major. But we should be going for something with our chords, our background music that elicits a more specific emotion than just sad versus happy. So this is one of those things where like perfect is unattainable, right? But I think philosophically speaking, a perfect song would be one where if a thousand people all listened to the melody alone, no lyrics, just the melody. Maybe it's hummed, maybe it's played by a violin. I don't know. And a thousand different people just read the lyrics as if it were poetry. And then another thousand people just listened to all the background music. And then they were pulled after and they were asked what was that song about. They all would have the exact same answer and it would be correct. To me that would be like one, this first factor we're talking about, that would be perfection. Again, obviously that's unattainable, right? So we're trying to just get as close to that as we can, which is still going to be pretty far from that, right? But to me that's the goal. Perfection is something you can never actually achieve. It's a direction to be pointed in. I think that's the direction that this factor is pointing in. And by the way, this is also something that should apply across each song section, right? So it's more than just the three parts of melody, harmony, and lyrics. It's also the synergy or the cohesion of your verses with your choruses and all of that. We could even dive way deeper into sort of the specifics of like what does musical cohesion across song sections talk about. And of course there's going to be a lot of variety there, right? But like one obvious example would be if between each of your song sections there was a crazy key change that made no sense, was super disjointed, not intentionally, it didn't like fit with the lyric or like it makes sense that the lyric would have the disjointed. But like just in a song that is pretty straightforward, it has this disjointed key change between every song. That would be an obvious, like that's not as bad as weird for no reason. It doesn't fit with the lyric of the song, right? So moving in the opposite direction of that to me would be the key there. But again, we could probably spend this entire year's worth of podcasts just diving into different ways. We could apply this one factor to songs, but I don't want to put you through that. So we're not going to do it. But I'm just throwing out there that there's way more to this factor than just the cohesion of those three parts. We could talk about song sections. We could talk about viewing the song as a whole versus viewing the song as a sum of parts, which is not, I think both can be helpful. Ultimately, the whole is the most important. But but obviously it is made up of parts, right? So if your song has a terrible chorus, but the rest is great, probably the song is going to be sunk. So there's a lot to this factor. But I think we I think we have established the central idea that across all things, I think, certainly all artistic things, and certainly for songs, I think this cohesion of all the parts is all moving in the same direction, just like you would expect the soundtrack and the script and the cinematography and the acting of the actors to all point to the same thing. Now before somebody comments this, I'm going to just throw out there that let me take an example that I think is pretty commonly done. And I personally think is fine and great. And on the surface, it may seem like it's in conflict with this, but I don't think it is. And that's when you have a song that sounds happy. But when you listen to it, it's actually kind of bitter and sarcastic. So it sounds like it's a nice, oh, happy song. But if you really listen or pay attention or read the lyrics, you realize, oh, no, this is like, you're just slamming this person with sarcasm. You might say, wait a second. So shouldn't it sound angry? Shouldn't the melody sounded because that's the core emotion? No. Well, I think it can. I think it can in that work, because that is true. But it also is true and makes sense that it would sound happy because what is sarcasm? Sarcasm literally is verbal irony. So then what is irony? Irony is saying something that is the opposite of what you mean. So if you say to somebody like, you know, no, I care about your opinion so much. If you're using sarcasm, what you mean is I don't care about your opinion at all. Right? I couldn't possibly care less about your opinion. Something like that. So it makes sense that if it's the opposite, that sarcasm is essentially your words, if you read it like a script, what they actually say versus what you actually mean, insert it with the tone, are actually opposites. So it makes sense the music would follow that, right? Where the music sounds like it's happy. Yeah, go you. But really, it's no, screw you, you suck. That makes sense that it would have that. So your lyrics are where you're communicating the you suck part. And then the music is what's adding to the irony by sounding happy. So that's actually an example of on the surface, maybe it seems like it breaks this rule, but actually it's a perfect example of this rule applied in some ways where the song is actually essentially utilizing music to double down on the sarcasm. And there are other examples like that, right? And of course, there's multiple ways to do this factor. Again, this is a thing where we could talk about this for the rest of the year. And some of you are probably thinking, it seems like we're gonna, because you're still talking about it. But no, we're down. We're down with this point. So that being said, I now realize that I thought that this episode would have time for two factors. But we had time for one. So we're gonna have another episode where we're gonna tackle what I think is another factor that is something to consider, something to look at, that I think is common to certainly all art at least, and certainly songs where this is just a factor to something being more good or better versus another thing that has less of this factor. But hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully it gave you something to think about whether it be in the form of, huh, maybe I should run my songs through some of those tests of does this melody communicate without the lyrics and without the background music? The same thing that the lyrics are trying to communicate or the music or to the last sarcastic song point. You know, is there a way that I can have my melody and my, let's say, lyrics intentionally conflict but in that conflict it actually sort of elevates the main idea in the way that like angry lyrics plus happy music sort of adds to the, like that sarcasm in the combination of things. You know, it's not just sarcasm that can be used that way. There are many emotions where we could toy with, let's take wistful. I said earlier that wistful is something like a combination of happy and sad, right? You're sad that you don't have the thing anymore but you're happy that you had it. It's a fond memory. So in that case, you could communicate that maybe by the music and the lyrics both being wistful or perhaps you could communicate that in a different way where the music just sounds sort of happy but the lyrics have this sad sort of I miss you element to it or maybe the opposite would be the way to go but there's many different ways to break this down and apply this I think. And you know, getting creative with it I think can be a good idea for whatever that's worth. But let me know what you think. Does this seem like something that like yeah, okay, that seems like a good starting place at least for that factor generally seems to be a factor to whether a song or really any piece of art is good or not or more good, right? Basically if you have two songs that are exactly the same but one is more obviously cohesive in all of the different parts communicating in one direction the same thing versus another one where it's like yeah, but the melody kind of has a different emotion to it that doesn't really fit with the lyrics. To me, I think yes, yes, obviously, it would always be better for all of the parts to be working together rather than one kind of going rogue communicating something that really the song isn't trying to communicate so it just kind of feels out of place. But next week, factor number two. Hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully that will be helpful. If you haven't already, be sure to grab the free guide songartatheory.com slash free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song. These episodes are admittedly philosophical. Don't worry, we'll get back to hard teaching. But in the meantime, this hard teaching or maybe not hard teaching but hard go do this uber practical in that guide, which hopefully compensates for the fact that these podcasts are admittedly at least during this series where we're getting away from that a little bit. I think ultimately this is in some ways the most practical thing we could talk about because what else is there even to talk about if we can't begin to discuss what makes a song great or what makes this song great, right Rick Beato? But yeah, Rick Beato is great. I love Rick Beato. I'm just throwing that out there. If you don't know who Rick Beato is, first of all, how? Second of all, check him out. I certainly don't agree on some things. But to his credit, he admits that he doesn't consider lyrics when he's talking about what makes a song great. My pushback to him is how could you possibly claim a song to be great if you don't even think about the lyrics? Like, that's such an important part of whether a song is great. To talk about the music production as a reason that the song is great to me also doesn't really make sense. It's like, well, it makes the production great. So the track, that specific arrangement of the song might be great. But that doesn't make the song itself great, which is basically just the combination of lyrics, chords, and melody. But alas, I still love Rick Beato. He's the grandfather slash godfather of music YouTube as far as I'm concerned. And he's just super awesome. Also he's done great things for the world because I feel like I was the only person on the planet that was like, guys, of course music theory is helpful as musicians and songwriters. You know, I wasn't on YouTube at the time, but just as a human, I felt like half the time was like, how do these people... does everybody like pretend like it's worthless? That knowledge? Rick Beato came on the scene and everybody was like, oh yeah, how about that? It's actually deeply practical. And for that, he will always be a legend. He'll always be a legend. Rick Beato's the best. Anyway, have a great week. I'll talk to you in the next one.