PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase Make It To Macon

Hi floyd,

I managed to jump in a bit earlier this time!

This song is good! Real good! You and Janice have once more reached the stratosphere of performance.

Right at the moment, I'm sitting in front of my computer and giving myself a rest from programming macros in Excel while I'm slowly working my way through Walkenbach's book Microsoft Excel 2013, Power Programming with VBA. It's a great book but I've got to take breaks from it every once in a while. As much as I like playing around with programming, though, I have to say that I think I enjoy listening to your music more.

What initially captivated me with “Make It To Macon” was the sonic fabric of the chorus. You really got me thinking with this one!

I'll try and explain what I mean …

To my ears, the name 'Macon” has the following sonic characteristics: it has an “m” sound, a long “a” sound, a “k” sound and an “n” sound. As a bit of an exercise, I thought it would be interesting to look at those individual sounds in the chorus and note the words in which they occur. Table 1 below summarises my deconstruction.



Wow! Out of the 44 words that make up the chorus, 22 of them are directly related to reinforcing the four sounds found in “Macon” - see the yellow highlighting on the image below. That's a whopping 50%. Moreover, a number of these words multitask across multiple sounds (i.e. make, takes, mistake, change, mind).

When I looked a little more closely at the brickwork of the chorus, I found that there are only five syllables, in fact, that occur on the stronger rhythmical beats that aren't related sonically to “Macon”. I've highlighted those in the pink colour below. (The non-highlighted words are those that have no direct sonic relationship to the sounds in “Macon”. It's worth noting that they all occur on the weaker rhythmical musical beats.)



The net result of the above sonic landscape is that you've written a chorus that resonates and flows. Quite literally, it hums along just like the drive itself! This makes it easily memorised and enjoyable to sing. With every line, this chorus cleverly reinforces the song's hook by boosting the sounds of alliteration (the "m" sound), assonance (the long "a" sound) and consonance (the "k" sound) found in the title "Make It To Macon".

In addition, I really liked the inner-lyric rhymes of "wait/mistake", "diploma/Oklahoma", the weak syllable rhyme of "nicely/gently" and the relationship of "worth/words". I also liked the way you used hyperbole to develop the lyric content ("thousand words", "million reasons").

Lastly, I couldn't help but notice that because the singer is talking about a picture he's holding in his hands, your use of a variation of the saying "a picture's worth a thousand words" has no sense of 'cliche' about it whatsoever. Nice one!!

There's so much to talk about in this song but I'd better leave it there and save something for your next post

For what it's worth, I think that this is outstanding work! Thank you for sharing more of your excellent songwriting techniques.

All the best,
Noel