Learnings

I’m doing Pat Pattinson’s Berklee Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics free course on Coursera. Very helpful concepts. I’m up to the rhyme scheme section, which I wish I’d done before attempting song 1 yesterday, Friends from the internet. That one drags, and I realise now that’s because the rhyming couplets are too stable, putting a full stop at the end of each pair of lines. You lose momentum and it sounds plodding. The song could do with a rewrite, but I’ll have to come back to it if I want to keep to this 30 day schedule!

The first lesson from the course was about the storytelling blueprint: the point of view, the journey of the song, momentum, and tools for padding out the story (who? where? when? why? etc), and the parts of a song (verse, chorus etc). The second lesson introduced the concept of prosody, which Pat describes as every element fitting together: line number, length, rhyme and rhythm. He breaks it down into two main patterns: unstable and stable patterns. Odd line numbers, irregular line lengths and non-matched rhymes are unstable; the opposite is stable.

It’s interesting to analyse lyrics according to this framework.

Ils s’aiment by Daniel Lavoie, Daniel DeShaime

Ils s’aiment comme avant
Avant les menaces et les grands tourments
Ils s’aiment tout hésitants
Découvrant l’amour et découvrant le temps
Y’a quelqu’un qui se moque
J’entend quelqu’un qui se moque
Se moque de moi, se moque de qui?

Short / long / short / long line lengths drive this verse forward, despite the stable AAAA rhyme scheme in the first 4 lines. Then the final 3 lines change the direction, with an odd and therefore unstable number, and a BBx scheme. That unrhymed final line highlights the question mark, the protest, the sense of unfinished business.

The course doesn’t go into the musical side of things as much, in terms of melody and harmony, but it’s not hard to figure out how the chord progression matches the lyrical patterns here. I play the first 4 lines over a Dm chord, which matches the AAAA rhymes (though some chord sheets I’ve seen alternate Dm and Amaj over lines 3-4), then Gm over the “se moque” lines, with a chord change on the “de qui”, just as the rhyme scheme changes as well. Brilliant.