Originally Posted By: Noel96
What initially captivated me with “Make It To Macon” was the sonic fabric of the chorus.

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").
sharing more of your excellent songwriting techniques.

All the best,
Noel


Noel - Another delightful visit from you! And you are hitting on very important aspects of writing. The very things that make a song "singable" and memorable. It is all very "sonic". I have mentioned a number of times (in responses to others) about the "cadence" of a song and "how it falls on the ear". These are aspects of writing that you first need to recognize (obviously, you do) and then need to practice (by repetition - constant, continual writing). It eventually becomes "the way you write" - you don't really "think" about it - you just do it because that's what makes the best sense, sonically. As you noted in the "Do You Remember" thread, these things are not often in typical songwriting books - and more likely to be noted in books from other fields.... It's not difficult to develop - the big step is in the recognition. One of those light-bulb moments. If you are familiar with a particular (developing) writer for some time and that transition occurs, it is quite identifiable... "Ah...he gets it" kind of thing. It's a big level changer....

(btw... I've written VBA code behind MSAccess for years. Of the many languages I've coded in, it remains my favorite)

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