tom t on brevity in songwriting



60 other music related oral histories

Tom T is one of my favorite songwriters. Thanks for posting. I found his comments to be pretty insightful.

Charlie

I've never been brief enough...maybe one song. Lennon & McCartney were masters at it (early works). 2 minutes..... Serve the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuphFPEqJqw&feature=youtu.be

I'd never heard the back story on that song. Very cool how some of the iconic songs got written.

Writing of any sort, but especially writing lyrics for a song is an exercise in brevity. We have 3 minutes or so.... part of that is instrumental so less than 3 minutes to set up the scene, tell a story and reach some sort of conclusion that someone listening for the first time will immediately understand.

Boil things down to their essence. Say it in a way everyone can relate too. Say it in a way it hasn't been said before. Not always the easiest thing to do. And it ain't poetry.

This was so cool to see! Man does it put things in perspective. I love this kind of thing. Thanks much for sharing it!



Actually that was more of a marketing move than anything. They recognized that radio stations had a hard time finding songs to fit those smaller lengths and as a result a shorter song like that would be played MUCH more often. They wrote that way to get airplay. Brilliant! ...like many of the thing they did.

I heard someone say at a songwriting event... might have been our very own David Snyder .. that Nashville was looking for the short songs again. Many writers have a hard time writing anything complete, that's less than 2:30 total. It takes much thought and a bit of expertise to tell a story in that time length.

BUT.... if you still have any 45's from the 60's.... pull them out and look at the song lengths.... many of them were in that magical 2:30 to 2:45 area and varied by only a few seconds one way of the other.... and I'm talking about the big #1 hits we all (us older folks anyway) grew up listening to on the radio. Almost nothing back then ran much past 3 minutes and when Hey Jude came out running over 7 minutes, that was a wall breaker.

In fact, many songs from that era had 2 versions. The radio version, and then the song they sold in the stores that was permitted to run longer. Album cuts became common. Even Margarittaville had 2 versions, of course, that was a bit later as well.

Enjoyed hearing the song's back story. The YouTube lyric video of the song is cute.

Download NAMM's list of oral histories and you'll discover the list is sixty (60) pages long! What a resource!

This gives me hope! As a jingle writer about 90% of what I write has to be in 30 seconds, not just the tag, the WHOLE concept! On on more rare occasions I get 60 seconds and I even end up putting in a bridge and or key change! I thought I was in this terrible habit of a verse being 30 seconds, chorus 30 seconds...you get the idea. Maybe I can use that to my advantage!



Great to know! It's so cool to hear these observations. Thanks!