OK, if you're reading this, welcome. This blog is meant to be for members of our band, Frontline Caste, to discuss ideas related to songs we're writing, but its framed as a discussion of different aspects of rock music. So if you're reading this and you get something out of it, you're more than welcome, but the main purpose is for our band to discuss different aspects of the songs we are writing by looking at songs from the past. I tend to be the historian of the band, so this is designed to be a sampler of different music from different times to look at different ways we can expand what we're doing musically.
The idea for today - structure. Turn on the radio and the structure is pretty clear - Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Out. Everything from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Justin Bieber does the same thing, and there's nothing wrong with it. It works for a reason - radio needs songs to be pretty standard to get airplay. There used to be different radio stations where different types o music got played, but these days, unless its a jazz station or something, pretty much everything used to follow the same pattern.
Its not the only way to write a song, though. When rock n roll was young, from the 1950s through to the 1960s, this structure was established by everyone from Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley to the Beatles. If you listen to the Beatles, this was pretty standard for the first 5 albums or so, and then they got bored with it as well.
The late 60s, though, everything changed. Music started getting more experimental and you began to get the first big Prog-Rock bands - Yes, Rush, Pink Floyd, Genesis...
One to start with would be Led Zeppelin, who were certainly able to write fairly standard rock songs, but expanded it. Even in a song like Whole Lotta Love, they have the same basic structure, but they hit the bridge just over 90 seconds in to the song, and the bridge is followed by probably the most famous rift of the song. It is followed by a false ending, and the band extends the song by jamming on the chorus for another minute after the song has effectively ended.
Led Zeppelin "Whole Lotta Love"
So the next one here is Eric Clapton, because I've already mentioned it in the band room. With Gravity I talked about the idea of the second chorus leading to a section with an entirely different mood to the song. "Layla" by Eric Clapton does exactly that. To all intents and purposes, its a fairly standard radio song - verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge (solo), chorus - but then when it comes to end, it changes into almost a completely new song.
Eric Clapton - "Layla"
That ending is often referred to as the "second movement", which shows that rock n roll was becoming more influenced by classical music at this time, and a lot of progressive rock was influenced more by classical than blues. But for me, it was heavy metal that explored this in more depth. "Intro to Reality" and "Belly of the Beast" by Anthrax, for example, are officially two separate songs, but on the album they appear on they blend straight into each other, creating one long song that keeps building throughout the song.
Likewise, "Holy Wars" by Megadeth starts with a typical long intro, does the typical verse /chorus thing, heads into a bridge, which builds into a solo, at which point the song speeds up again and they hit a second solo, then the vocals come back in leading to a different set of verse and chorus...
More famously, just about anything from Metallica before the Black Album included more complex structures, with multiple solos, multiple sections to the song and the like. "One" is actually one of the more straight-forward Metallica songs. "And Justice for All" features two sections to the intro, the verse/pre-chorus/chorus/verse/pre-chorus/chorus/solo/slow bridge/verse/pre-chorus/chorus/long outro. "Fade to Black" doesn't actually have a chorus, built around a long intro/verse/instrumental break/verse/instrumental break/bridge/solo and then just speeds up until it gets to the end. "One", by contrast, is built around two distinct parts - the first section with a long intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus then a long bridge that leads to the second section which works verse/verse/solo/outro.
Metallica "Fade to Black"
Pantera followed Metallica, and used a lot of the same structures, but they played a lot more with elements of hardcore, so their songs would move from more complex traditional heavy metal to the more stripped down and rhythm heavy second section to the song. You can hear this on songs like "Cemetery Gates" (to a lesser degree), "This Love", and "Hollow". They make the structure of the song more complex by playing varying complexity of the song.
Pantera "Hollow"
I mentioned Prog-Rock before, so I should also show how that evolved into Pro-Metal. Tool is a band that I will bring up again and again, and they are an example of a number of different ways that a song can be made more complex not just in structure but also in their use of dynamics, time signatures, poly-rhythms and the like, and most importantly they're still completely listenable. "Schism", in this case, starts with a long intro/verse/break/verse/chorus/verse/bridge/quieter bridge/a new vocal section/a bridge built on the first verse/outro...
Tool "Schism"
There's a bunch of other stuff we could add: Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" is built on three different movements; Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" was built in seven different sections; Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an adaptation of a famous epic poem and they used the structure of the poem to build something like 7 or 8 different sections...
But I'll sign off with Green Day, not because it is the best example of playing with structure, but because its a very recent, and fairly easy to explain version of playing with structure. Effectively, "Jesus of Suburbia" is 4 different songs sown together and united by theme. Each piece could have been a separate song, but instead they built it in to one large song.
Green Day "Jesus of Suburbia"
