Valerie Gillies of Brussels asks why songs often refer to males as \u201cmen\u201d and other adult words, but woman are almost always child-like terms such as \u201cbabe\u201d or \u201cgirl.\u201d While this isn\u2019t the kind of topic the Lyrics Doctor\u2019s typically addresses, I\u2019ll give it a go. The short answer is that the music industry is reflective of the patriarchal society we live in, though a more forgiving view might be that such terms of endearment have a place in love songs.<\/p>\n
I also think it\u2019s changing. I couldn\u2019t find any empirical assessment of this in a quick web search, but some smart graduate student has surely looked into the matter. Anecdotally, I\u2019d say that songs from before the 1980s or \u201890s frequently follow the pattern Valerie describes. But more recently, many more strong women have emerged in the business\u2014Madonna, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Bonnie Raitt, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and thousands of others. These women tend to write with authority and adult voices, and they\u2019re just as likely to refer to men as \u201cboy\u201d or \u201cbabe\u201d or \u201cguy\u201d as any male songwriter is to say \u201cbabe\u201d or \u201cgirl.\u201d The Lyrics Doctor would, of course, welcome any evidence readers have that either supports or refutes this impression.<\/p>\n
\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8<\/p>\n
Steve Papke from the U.S. state of Georgia asks how often songwriters must change the phrasing or rhythm of a verse when fitting it to music. Good lines, he laments, can become average when trying to get the cadence of the song right. My answer would be that it\u2019s got to do with lots of editing and rewriting. I typically write one or two verses and most of the chorus, then start playing\/singing it to the music (usually something that I\u2019ve been fiddling with on the guitar without words for anywhere from a few minutes to a few months).<\/p>\n
Once I get a nice match of music and lyrics, the real work starts. I often use one of the verses as a bridge, and sometimes I shift lines in and out of the chorus or between verses. When a line doesn\u2019t quite add up rhythmically, I\u2019ll try rearranging the words. In Alternative Facts, for instance, I initially wrote \u201cYou meant \u2018don\u2019t go\u2019 but you said \u2018goodbye\u2019\/Does verify mean falsify?\u201d That couplet never sat right in the song, so at some point I changed it to \u201cYou said `goodbye\u2019 but you meant `don\u2019t go\u2019\/You made me high and laid me low.\u201d Not a huge difference, but to my ear it\u2019s stronger\u2014a change that was made possible by flipping \u201cgoodbye\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t go.\u201d When I\u2019m writing and rewriting a song, I\u2019ll make dozens of similar changes to get the rhythm and rhymes where I want, with words that advance the story line.<\/p>\n
\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8\u03b8<\/p>\n
Sandra Lee Bickerstaff from New South Wales in Australia and Eazteg Eririe from Lagos, Nigeria, both ask whether a song can have more than one bridge. First, let\u2019s talk about what a bridge is. I think of it as a third section that takes the composition to a different place and provides some relief from the relative monotony of verse and chorus. Musically, this can be achieved by changing from major to minor (or the other way around), moving to the fourth or fifth chord in the scale, or shifting the rhythm to another feel (or all three, or an infinite variety of other options).<\/p>\n
Lyrically, the bridge often takes another viewpoint, perhaps going from first person to second or third, changing to a narrator\u2019s voice, or stepping away from the story line to give some background. For instance, in Born to Run, Springsteen slows down for a few bars to proclaim his undying love for Wendy before roaring back down \u201chighways jammed with broken heroes.\u201d In The Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding laments that, in the end, his journey to the West Coast was a bust. In America, Simon and Garfunkel bring us from the idea of the bus trip onto the bus itself, showing the interaction between the characters as they make their way up the New Jersey Turnpike.<\/p>\n
To my mind, there\u2019s a rule that says a song should have only one bridge, but there’s another rule that says all rules in songwriting should sometimes be broken. In other words, one bridge is almost always enough, but sometimes it\u2019s not. If that\u2019s the case, write another one. On occasion, I\u2019ve used a second instance of the bridge for the solo section, just to shake things up a bit. Note that it\u2019s also OK to have no bridge at all. And if you repeat a bridge too many times, it becomes something other than a bridge\u2014more like another verse or chorus.<\/p>\n
Happy SongwRx<\/sub>iting! Valerie Gillies of Brussels asks why songs often refer to males as \u201cmen\u201d and other adult words, but woman are almost always child-like terms such as \u201cbabe\u201d or \u201cgirl.\u201d While this isn\u2019t the kind of topic the Lyrics Doctor\u2019s typically addresses, I\u2019ll give it a go. The short answer is that the music industry is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":462,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-571","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":620,"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/571\/revisions\/620"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegincident.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe Lyrics Doctor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"