III. Preaching to the Chorus (ft. B-Real and Trevor Horn)

Introduction

0:00Some mornings, getting everyone out the door feels like a win all by itself. Here's another win. Delicious Nesquik chocolate milk. With real milk, 8 grams of protein per serving, and in a convenient, ready-to-drink bottle. It's perfect with breakfast, after practice, or on the go. Because the best parts of the day are finding the quick wins that bring out smiles and joy. Get your quick win today with Nesquik. Tap the banner to learn more. Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm a songwriter, Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist, Nate Sloan.

0:31So far in our four-part series about the art of the song, I feel like I have failed in all of my songwriting advice. How so, Charlie? Give me the hooks. We've spent nearly two hours on build-up. It's all been intro and verse.

The Climactic Moment

0:43It's finally time to deliver episode three of our four-part series, The Climactic Moment. It's time for the chorus.

0:58And what does a chorus sound like, Nate? I feel like it's an impossible thing to choose just one. Choruses are like snowflakes, no two are alike. Let me give you one of my favorites, Whitney Houston's Dance With Somebody. One of the preeminent choruses of all time, worthy of a sing-along.

1:30It is pure. It is simple. Some people on this podcast may have even included it on their wedding playlist, perhaps. I mean, this is one to celebrate. For most of history, I feel like the chorus has been the part of the song that belongs to all of us. Yes. It's the place that we get together. We sing. But increasingly, the chorus has become the most engineered, optimized, 20 seconds of music.

The Evolution of the Chorus

1:52I want to ask, what has happened to the chorus, and has it lost its way? I am sat for this discussion, Charles, because, I mean, changing the intro, changing the verse, that's one thing. The chorus, this is the foundational piece of the pop song. So I'd be curious to hear how even it might be subject to emendation in our 21st century musical landscape. I'm going to pretend like I know what emendation means, and I'm just going to plow right through. And I want to think about how do we even know a chorus has arrived when we hear it?

2:27Maybe we can use Whitney Houston as an example. What are the elements that identify, oh, this is chorus for you? I guess the very first thing is we have this little build into the chorus.

2:42It's like almost announcing. It's like a fanfare. Here comes the chorus. So as a listener, you're like, oh, you know, I better pay attention. I got to get ready to like sing and dance along. So that's one thing. I mean, repetition, typically, I feel like we get our title over and over again. I want to dance with somebody. I want to dance with somebody. I want to feel the heat with somebody. I want to dance with somebody. It's like hammer it home, make it memorable, make it catchy. And I mean, probably the last thing is like what you said at the very start of this, the chorus. It's got to be singable.

3:12It's got to be something like everyone can join it. Totally. I mean, if you go to the verse of the song, it's not quite as singable as the chorus. It has this very large range going from a low G sharp below middle C to the C sharp above middle C, an octave and a half range. And we hear Whitney Houston wandering, trying to find her way. Harmonically, it's on the dominant chord, the sort of most tense chord that's trying to find its way home. When we get to the chorus, everything resolves.

3:49We land on our home chord of F sharp major, and then the melody becomes super singable. Just five note range from F sharp up to C sharp. The do, re, mi, fa, so, the easiest notes that we can all sing along to. Highly repetitive. This is the people's moment. This is the chorus. And of course, it's not the only thing. You know, the arrangement gets thicker. All that Moog bass and sparkly synth gets accompanied by these ripping horn lines, these super fast high hats, the cowbell, of course, backing harmonies.

4:25And of course, the energy ups the ante. We especially hear that in the third chorus, which, you know, is the modulation. Oh, how could I not get that? Whitney pulls out all of the stops, right? This is a chorus, through and through, and one of the best ones. At least it's singable until Whitney starts to hit those high notes, and then you're like, okay, I'm going to let you handle those.

4:59And there she is. She's laughing. She's having so much fun. Isn't that the ultimate purpose of the chorus? The chorus is this place of emotional compression, where we take all of the lived experience of that artist that has taken place over years of their life, and they put it into a song. They describe what's happening in the verse, and finally, all of that feeling is taken into this moment of pure expression.

5:29The great artist Bruce Springsteen describes this as, we've talked about this before, blues in the verse, gospel in the chorus, right? The chorus is the main point. It's the place of catharsis. In the verse, yeah, you can talk about all these ideas. You can make things that are complex. I mean, talk about, like, born in the USA.

5:50Born down in a dead-nast town. The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. Ended up like a dog that's been beat too much. Till you spent half your life just covering up now. We got some blues. You know, things are literally hurting. We're making a complex narrative about what it means to be an American. But by the time you get to the chorus, pure gospel. Born in the USA. I mean, that's what we came for, right?

6:24Yeah, it's the simplicity of this chorus that makes it so effective, especially in contrast to the verses. And I feel like it might sound easy to do, but to create something that iconic and yet that kind of condensed and simple, that can't be easy. No, it's definitely not. You know, in preparing this conversation with you, Nate, I knew I wanted to talk to somebody who could help me think through how you write that chorus moment. No one spends more time mulling over lyrics than a rapper.

6:55And so I reached out to one of the great hip-hop groups of all times who've been dropping beats and bars since the 1980s. I'm V-Real of Cypress Hill. What? Yes, I reached out to Cypress Hill originally to talk about verses. And funny enough, V-Real actually wanted to talk about the chorus. You know, you want to key in on the chorus and that'll tell you everything in terms of what you're going to write about, like concept or story. So even though V-Real writes these really long raps, the chorus is his guide, but it's not for all rappers.

7:28A lot of songs that rap or in hip-hop music initially, when it's not necessarily an idea about anything, it's very much like Seinfeld. It's just all over the place and random and it's not really about nothing except for about how good I am as a rapper. That's kind of an interesting comparison. It's like weaving something out of nothing. Yeah. And then the chorus kind of centers you in some way, right?

7:59Yeah, yeah. I mean, V-Real does talk about writing some of those sort of braggadocious style songs where it's just, you know, mulling together all the reasons why I'm great. Yeah. But he says that his best work comes from having a very clear chorus that guides both him and the listener. I try to focus in on what the chorus is, what the chorus is saying to people because that's the main thing that's catchy. That's what's going to, you know, that's what's going to reel people in. That's why they call it the hook. So I try to pay attention to that. For me, when I hear a chorus, if it doesn't hit me right after I dropped it, then I know that I ain't got it and I have to try to write something else.

8:37The hook, the chorus, these terms are often used interchangeably, a hook being the catchiest part of a song, which is often the chorus, but not always. I asked V-Real to give me an example of one of his best choruses. So, for instance, Rock Superstar, I had that song, the idea of the song in my head for maybe two years before Muggs gave me the actual music that I thought it fit on, that the idea fit on. But, you know, all I had in my head was the chorus for a long time, but I didn't hear it on any specific beat until the one we end up recording it came out.

9:15And then, you know, as I had that chorus, I had an idea of what to key in and write about. So, for Rock Superstar, it was basically, you know, talking to people outside of the industry who have a perception on what it is. Like, oh, the minute you sign a record deal, you are going to become a millionaire, you're going to be this big star and be famous, and it's going to be an easy life and all this other shit.

9:52And so, you know, what I did was wrote about the hardships of being an artist, the things that people perceive about the music industry and what the music industry, you know, is and what, you know, what you become because of it. And yet, it connected. This track went platinum. It's now one of the group's staples, all because of a chorus. It's meant to grab you. It's the catchy part. It's the most simple part of the song in terms of lyrics, but a chorus, it's where the anthems are created.

10:27Be real, just eloquently describe the thesis of this episode. The chorus gives you the anthem. But the word chorus, what does it actually mean? Where does it come from? We've been using it over and over again, and I have no idea what its origin is. I feel like the best place to go to for any definition has got to be Helen Zaltzman, the host of the podcast The Illusionist, the best and funniest show about language. I asked Helen, where did this word originate? Here's what she told me. The word chorus has only meant the refrain of a song for about 100 years.

11:01And prior to that, it was the parts of the song that the audience was supposed to join in on. My nightmare. But of course, we also know the word to mean a group of people singing, like the chorus in a musical. And it's meant that in English since late 16th century. It comes from the same Greek word as choir, but a chorus was different to a choir at the time because a choir was attached to a church and a chorus wasn't. Why the word chorus at all? Well, it came to English from Latin because Roman theatre had choruses, which were groups of people singing and dancing, often in a circle.

11:33And they got that from ancient Greek theatre. About two and a half thousand years ago, a chorus was between a dozen and several dozen people speaking together in chorus to provide commentary or explanation as to what was happening on stage. A bit like if a play had intrusive thoughts. Wow, great stuff from Helen. I am shook by the idea that the chorus is like relatively kind of young. Yeah. But then also very taken with the idea that the word itself goes back to ancient Greece.

12:07That feels appropriate for the gravitas of this musical concept. It makes sense. We are social beings. We want to be together. We want to sing together. That has been a mainstay of Western classical and pop music. We can go all the way back to Handel's Messiah. One of the great moments of waiting around for a very long time when you finally get the Hallelujah Chorus. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

12:35Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. If you've ever been to a Handel Messiah singalong, you're like 30 parts deep before you finally arrive at the Hallelujah Chorus. You're like, oh, I really needed it. Songwriters in pop music figured out how to get to the chorus a little bit faster. You can go back to the 1840s. The American minstrel songwriter Stephen Foster's song, Oh, Susanna, has plenty of choruses to keep people going.

13:06Here's Pete Seeger playing Oh, Susanna. Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me. I come from Alabama with the banjo on my knee.

13:17Core American songs have choruses. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ware Howe in 1861. Here's a version performed by Odetta. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

13:32Glory, glory, hallelujah. I know these might be some very old examples. If I need to take you to a higher moment, Nate, I feel like the best person to take us there would be Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell. Ain't no mountain high enough. Ain't no valley low enough. Ain't no people wide enough. Ain't no mountain high enough. What a power move. Write a chorus about a literal apex. About the mountains. It totally works.

14:03As a music historian, I'm obviously loving going back to Handel, Stephen Foster, Marvin Gaye. And you may have unwittingly connected these because in Messiah, there is an aria all about making every valley exalted and every mountain low. So there's our connection from, you know, Jorg Friedrich Handel to Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell. So I'm being flippant, but I also think there is something kind of eternal about the chorus.

14:34It's something that kind of transcends time and space. Okay, you say the chorus is eternal. What is your degree in? Historical musicology. More specifically, the era that you mostly studied in your PhD? Mainly 1920s, 1930s, popular music. Oftentimes that body of work is called Tin Pan Alley. Great American Songbook. There you go. Great American Songbook. And what was so great about the Great American Songbook? Well, Charles, I would say it's that the song's lyrics were very universal and captured something particular about the American experience.

15:13And the music was harmonically rich and a lot of the interesting and it kind of set this new template for pop music of the era. There's one thing that I feel like is not so great about the Great American Songbook. Uh-oh, no choruses. No choruses. Yeah, wow. What is going on? Well, I did a little bit of research in my digging and I found this paper aptly titled Song Forms and Their Historical Development. You know, it's a banger of a paper, I promise you.

15:44It's by scholars Ralph von Oppen and Markus Fried-Hunschild in the German Society for Popular Music Studies. And they look at this song called After the Ball that they sort of see as this transitioning song that takes us from an era of early American popular music with choruses to the time where the chorus disappeared. So After the Ball has this very long building verse section.

16:10And it goes on and on. This is Joan Morris and William Bulcomb playing After the Ball. This song eventually arrives on this 32 bars of music. The best part, the chorus. After the ball is over, after the break of one, after the dance is leaving, after the stars are gone, many a heart is aching, if you could read them all, many the hopes that have vanished, after the ball is over.

17:0032 bars of the best part of the chorus is so long that over time, people eventually stop playing them. The song was originally from the 1890s. When you get later on into the 20th century, performers like Nat King Cole, cut the verses out and just get right to the chorus. I love that we're talking about this song by Charles K. Harris.

17:35It's really important in music history because it basically invents the pop music industry as we know it. It's the first song to sell a million copies of sheet music. And it is worth checking out the verses because there's a fun story there. He learns in the last verse that when he broke up with his girlfriend because she was kissing someone else, that was actually her brother. It was he totally misunderstood the whole thing. And now he's a sad, lonely old man. Oh, boy. It's kind of an interesting twist there.

18:06But, yeah, I mean, we go from this, you know, massive song that takes forever to get through the verses to just the 32 bar chorus. And by the time we reach, you know, my era of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, these songs just these songs go by real fast. You know, they might even be like less than a minute long because they're so just compressed and they're just trying to get, you know, just the highlights of the song like you were describing. So it's funny. The Great American Songbook, I was saying, didn't have choruses. In fact, it's actually all chorus.

18:38It's all chorus. Yeah. Right. When jazz players would play through one of these songs, they would say, let's blow a couple of choruses, which is to say, like, let's play all the way through all 32 bar changes, do solos over them. Right. One of the challenges, though, is if it's all chorus, then you don't really have a repeated lyrical moment. Right. You've zoomed in so close. So you have to have words that change throughout and tell some kind of story within this shorter song form. And so rather than have like a four line stanza that you sing instead, what we get are these little tags or refrains that are used to remind us that, oh, yeah, this song has a title.

19:15It has a catchy moment. Usually it's the first line of the verse or the last line of the verse. I feel like the best example that I sing every single day to my children when they go to bed is Over the Rainbow. Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high. That's A section one. You go to A section two. Somewhere over the rainbow, skies all.

19:47I usually sing my kids a little Limp Bizkit before bed personally, but, you know, teach their own. So if the chorus disappears by subsuming itself into the entire 32 bar part of the ABA things, how does it come back? Largely in the world of blues and rock and roll, there are so many songs we could mention. Probably one of the biggest hits of the rock era would be like Johnny B. Good, which takes a blues format and appends a solid chorus into it.

20:19Deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens. There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood, where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Good. Who never, ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play a guitar just like a ring and a bell. Go, go. Go, Johnny, go. Go. Go, Johnny, go. Go. There's the chorus we haven't seen in pop music in about, I don't know, 40 years at this point.

20:49Tim Panale, good to have you back, chorus. We missed you. Something you can sing along to, something you know is going to repeat over and over again here, superimposed onto that 12 bar blues form you mentioned. I feel like the reappearance of the chorus is really connected to technology once records and radio are readily available for consumers in the 40s and 50s. You know, these styles you mentioned, blues, rock, country, they can really start to come to the fore now that people aren't just like using sheet music to share songs anymore.

21:24I mean, that makes sense. You know, in the era of sheet music, if you're learning to play a song on the piano, if you're going to have to wait a minute before you get to the best part, the sort of title line, you might give up. I certainly do. Studying piano is hard. But if the song begins with somewhere over the rainbow, you're like, oh, this is this is the good part. This is this is what I came for. And so as recording technology increases to be the main form of consumption of music, we see that song form undergoes this very big structural change. The scholar Drew Noble put together a study that showed that the transitionary album is the Beatles.

21:59Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's the first album that they released with no A.A.B.A. songs. Previously, they had put out songs like Yesterday, which are a great American songbook style. Yesterday.

22:13All my troubles seem so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe. With Yesterday, it begins like any great American songbook, A.A.B.A. style song. You get the name of the song, first line, Yesterday. And then you get that whole A section. They repeat the A section, go to a B section and another A section. When we get to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, we have a clear delineation between verse and strong choruses.

22:44It's not the most popular song on the record, but one of my favorites. It's getting better all the time. Just getting better. It's getting better all the time. I used to get mad at my school. No, I can't complain. The teachers that taught me went cool. No, I can't complain. You're holding me down. Oh. Turning me around. Oh. Filling me up with your rules. The verse sets up this entire idea of a difficult youth. You know, our teachers, our school are holding us down, not having a good time.

23:17But by the time we get to the chorus, everything smiles and bright. It's getting better. Better, a little better. All the time. Can't get the worst. To admit, it's getting better. It's getting better. Since you've been my... We have the title phrase repeated over and over again. It's singable. It's catchy. You have to wait for it a little bit. But when it arrives, it's quite a payoff. For some songwriters, things could have gotten worse if they didn't catch up to this new style of writing verses and choruses.

23:50In fact, there is this bridge period where some songs actually needed to be updated in order to fit the mold. Like, you know the song Respect by Aretha Franklin? Mm-hmm. Not originally her song. Uh, Otis Redding. Back in 1965, quick little tagline like that was all you need.

24:26Not really a full chorus. Hmm. Right? But when Aretha sings it, two years later... What you want, baby, I got who? What you need, who? Do you know I got it, too? All I'm asking, who? Is for a little respect when you're... Just a little bit. Hey, baby. Just a little bit. Oh, just a little bit. Mister, just a little bit. Those backup vocals. Just a little bit. Hey, baby. Just a little bit.

24:57It really creates more propulsion. It feels like the chorus has more weight. When I think of Aretha's version of the song, I always think about how she changes the gender perspective of it. R-E-S-B-E-C-T. But not what it means to me. R-E-S-B-E-C-T. Take out CCB. Yeah. Haven't really thought about how she actually changes the formal structure of it to make it even more poppy and really hit a little bit harder. I want to propose one other song that has transformed into an older style, into this newer style with a full chorus.

25:30And it takes us back to our first artist that we heard, Whitney Houston. She's known for many things. But if you think about, like, the ultimate Whitney ballad, what song comes to mind? And I... Thank you. Yes, exactly. Usually not with so much nasal. Of course, the song was originally a Dolly Parton song. I Will Always Love You was sung as her goodbye to her TV co-star.

26:00Porter Wagner, I believe. She sang it this way in 1974. I'll think of you each step of the way And I will always love you I will always love you When Dolly sings it, it almost feels like a continuation of the verse, a little tag, a sort of response to the verse material.

26:35But when Whitney sings it... Okay, I'm having a sudden realization about this song. In 1992, totally appropriate for the Bodyguard film that Whitney adapts I Will Always Love You into this epic love song of all time about, you know, infinite, long love.

27:08But, back in the 1970s, Dolly Parton's relationship to Porter Wagner was not that nice. He often tried to upstage her, or rather, he was actually afraid that she was upstaging him. They sometimes had a tense on-air relationship, so maybe it's more appropriate to say, Yeah, and I always love you. I always love you. See you around. Okay, so through the history of American music, first there's choruses. Then we get this, like, hyper-intensified chorus, this great American songbook period where it's all chorus, but in some ways it doesn't have the amount of repetition that we need. In the 60s, the verse-chorus form that we really know and live in today, that becomes the predominant form of music.

27:46Some songs are having to update themselves in order to fit that mold. So I wanted to go through this whole history with you because I felt like it was important to understand the sort of growing pains that the chorus underwent in order to develop into the verse-chorus form that we know today. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together.

28:17From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox. But something I wanted to understand better is that if the chorus is the entire center gravity of the song, how do you approach getting to that chorus idea?

Approaching the Chorus

28:47And so I reached out to one of the great record producers of all time. My name's Trevor Horn. I'm an old record producer.

28:55Now, you know Trevor Horn, right? Too many credits to count, really. What do we got? The Buggles. Video Killed the Radio Star. Yes. Owner of a Lonely Heart. Seal. Oh, Kiss from a Rose. You interviewed Seal about that song. I did. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Relax. No way. I didn't even know that one. Yeah, so many hits. But he actually got his start as a song fixer. Trevor Horn started working for a publisher where he would punch up other people's songs. And it's where he learned the importance of a strong chorus. I think sometimes you start a song and you have the chorus already.

29:29Generally, the chorus is the title of the song. The chorus is the most important part of the song and thus it is the title. Writing from the chorus first makes it easier to write the song because it's the main idea. The chorus is like the meat sandwiched between the various bridges and verses. The whole purpose of everything else is to set up the chorus and make it so when the chorus comes in, you kind of get a feeling of satisfaction. Like you heard something or something happened. So Trevor is winnowing away on other people's songs, realizing, you know, I got to get this

30:02chorus first. If I can figure out the main chorus, the meat of the song, it's all going to come together. He's collaborating with his buddy Bruce Woolley and they make the song Video Killed the Radio Star. So Trevor Horne makes Video Killed the Radio Star with his collaborator, Bruce Woolley. They're really still getting together as a band. And he told me the story of how this song came together from a bunch of fragmented ideas that only really glued together once he found that iconic chorus line.

30:35Bruce and I were always talking about old English comedy on the radio in the 50s. And we had this line, I heard you on the wireless back in 52. We had that line for about three months. And this particular day, I remember we had a little bit of weed. I don't know where we got it from because we were as poor as church mice back then. And we smoked this little bit of weed and we went out walking on Richmond Common, you know, So we were walking along and suddenly it plopped in my head.

31:09I said, I heard you on the wireless back in 52, lying awake, intently tuning in on you.

31:18Fuck. That works. And then if I was young, it didn't stop you coming through. And Bruce said, I'll write that down now. And he wrote it down in a notebook. I heard you on the wireless back in 52, lying awake, intently tuning in on you. If I was young, it didn't stop you coming through. Oh, oh, oh, oh. So the inspiration for the verses comes from a nice walk, some mind-altering substances, as well as a dose of science fiction.

31:50Bruce and I were both reading a lot of J.G. Ballard stuff. And there was a story called The Sound Sweep. It was about an opera singer who lived in an abandoned studio. And it was in a time when music wasn't played anymore. They distilled it down to emotion and you just felt the emotion. And The Sound Sweep had a sound vacuum cleaner. And he went round all the churches and the cathedrals, sweeping out the residual sound with his sound vacuum cleaner.

32:21He was deaf-mute. And he'd fallen in love with an opera singer, the opera singer who lived in the abandoned studio. And then, of course, I was thinking about The Sound Sweep, so I said, they took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine on new technology, and now I understand the problems you could see. They took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine on new technology, and now I understand the problems you could see.

32:51So at this point, the song is just like total chaos. You have, I heard you coming through in 52, we've got The Sound Sweep, sci-fi world. It's not until that there's a sudden inspiration for Trevor when the chorus comes around and brings all these ideas together. I just popped out Video Killed the Radio Star. And Bruce said, we can't use it because it's the name of two bands, Snips and the Video Kings and the Radio Stars. And I said, ah, they'll be gone by the time this comes out. So suddenly, so just Video Killed the Radio Star,

33:24the idea that you were out of date. It's one of those lyrics that just bears repetition, maybe too much. It used to irk me that we only had Video Killed the Radio Star, Video Killed the Radio Star. We didn't have another line, you know, Video Killed the Radio Star.

33:55Video Killed the Radio Star. Video Killed the Radio Star. But Video Killed the Radio Star does have that, you know, that gambit that any songwriter can land on if they don't know what to write next. Just don't use words, just vocalize something. Oh, uh-oh.

34:15It was one of Bruce's things. But when he was doing it in the demo, you know, it went, oh, uh-oh, just like, oh, uh-oh, you know, like a little sort of throwaway.

34:35When we were doing the first really good demo of it, we had Tina Charles there. Tina Charles is a brilliant singer. And I said to Tina, Tina, could you do, oh, uh-oh, but could you make it like you were something from the 60s, you know, like... And she went, what do you mean? And I was like, you know, something a bit cutesy, you know? And she went, oh, uh-oh. And I was like, perfect, perfect. Sort of exaggerated. Oh, oh, oh.

35:07It's sort of agreeing with the lyric and the singer. This line, Video Killed the Radio Star, the chorus, it's so much more than just a chorus. It is the line that inspires them to create the buggles. They first see themselves as a band that might make music via some sort of computer for other people back in the late 1970s. And they weren't going to even show their face initially. But, of course, you know, if you're going to have a song called Video Killed the Radio Star, you need a video. This song goes on to become an essential part

35:38of American popular history. It is the first song played on the launch of MTV. What? It's so interesting to learn that the inspiration for the song was, you know, the wireless radio and an obscure sci-fi story because I always thought it was a commentary on the music video itself. Which I think is kind of maybe how, like, the reputation that it has now. Sure. But they kind of unwittingly seem to have commented on this new phenomenon

36:09that they couldn't even have totally predicted, which is just so fascinating. And kind of an example of what we've been talking about.

The Pre-Chorus and Post-Chorus

36:15Like, a chorus, you want to make it hooky, you want to make it great, but you also don't know how it's going to resonate ultimately. I mean, the chorus resonates as the most important thing to the degree that throughout history, the chorus becomes significantly more important. It starts to take up more and more space because we don't just have the chorus, Nate. We have the pre-chorus. We have the post-chorus. It's almost like we start to see the urban sprawl of the chorus, right? It's starting to spread out into other areas of the song.

36:49You mentioned the pre-chorus. This is a bit of connective tissue that gets you from the verse to the chorus. It introduces the chorus. It builds you up into it. It gives you more kind of hooky, sticky material. Yeah. I feel like one example that comes to mind here is a song by Prince, one of his breakout hits, I Want to Be Your Lover. Such an essential pre-chorus

37:30because the melody of the chorus and the verse are the same. So the pre-chorus literally bridges those two sections. Not a bridge, not a bridge. I shouldn't use that term yet. We're going to get there next episode. But it is this, yeah, this essential connective tissue or, I like your metaphor, urban sprawl that sort of sets up the part that's about to arrive. It's almost like a little breath. The pace slows down a little bit. The harmonies open up. It kind of lifts you up into the chorus. And then when you arrive there, it's just this feeling of like exultation

38:02that's even more pronounced because you had that little push up from the pre-chorus. So that's the pre-chorus. The pre-chorus has been around basically since the verse chorus. It has become more important over time. And then there's the post-chorus. Yeah, the post-chorus is a much newer phenomenon. The term was first coined in 2011 by music theorist Mark Spicer. And so we're talking like 15 years old. The post-chorus is this moment that is going to extend the chorus. Keep the chorus going. The scholar Kara Stroud describes two different kinds of post-choruses.

38:35You have the post-chorus that is a codetta, basically something that keeps it going but is maybe a little bit smaller than the chorus. A great example would be like Roar by Katy Perry. Right, it's simpler.

39:06We don't have as many words. We just have the uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. You're gonna hear me roar. Keeps the chorus going. And there's another kind of post-chorus, though. Uh, Kara Stroud describes the anthem post-chorus. This is where the post-chorus is actually bigger than the climactic moment that came before. An example would be I Need Your Love by Ellie Goulding and Calvin Harris. I need your love, I need your time. When everything's wrong, you make it rise.

39:37I feel so high, I got a life. I need to be free with you tonight. I need your love.

39:53So that instrumental moment with just those scattered I Need Your Love, clearly that is the anthemic big part of the song. It has more prominence than the formal chorus with the, you know, the lyrics that happened before. I feel like there might be another name for that section, Charlie. We called it the Pop Drop, the sort of EDM-inspired instrumental section, either in place of or after the chorus, that, uh, you know, is the place that you want to dance. And it's more like fist-pumping and, uh,

40:23and bouncing up and down than it is singing along. Yeah, it's like a miniature version of a massive EDM-style drop. And, you know, I have to shout it out because it's one of the few musicological terms that we can say we've coined over the, you know, decade plus of making this show. Probably had kind of a moment in the mid-to-2010s, I guess. And, like, is maybe not quite as common on the charts now. But nevertheless, you know, justice for the pop drop. But now we have all of these sections that are chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus, right?

Hook-ification

40:55Like pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus. There's so much chorus. If the chorus is the meat of the sandwich, this is one of those, you know, Katz's deli pastramis, where it's like there's basically no bread. You just got to stack a meat in the center. You know, the commercialization of pop music has really intensified the chorus. I feel like if we have to blame somebody for this, uh, extra layers of meat or tempeh, if you will, I would probably have to point at the Swedes. You know, it's Swedish pop in the, uh, the maximal style of writing and ABBA,

41:26and certainly in the contemporary, uh, you know, hitmaker Max Martin, who just love giving us as much chorus as possible. We've analyzed so much of Max's music on the show. I wanted to find a new one for you. And so, uh, let me give you Britney Spears' You Drive Me Crazy. Okay. Okay. You would think with a long intro like this, we're never going to get to the chorus. Keeps on building. Where's it going to go?

41:57But here's the thing, Nate. If you take that long intro, the two verses, and the small instrumental interludes of You Drive Me Crazy, that's only a minute and eight seconds of a song that's three minutes and 17 seconds long. And since I can't do math that quickly, I did count it out. That's two minutes and eight seconds of pre-chorus, chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, an interlude that includes the main chorus line, an alternative chorus with a different chorus melody,

42:28followed by a chorus and a post-chorus. Two minutes and eight seconds of a three-minute and 17-second song is Driving Us Crazy. You drive me crazy I just can't see I'm so excited I'm in too deep Oh, crazy But it feels all right When you're singing of you Leaps me up all night But that is not enough chorus for Max Martin. Max needs maximal chorus.

42:59Before he worked on Katy Perry's Roar, he worked on Katy Perry's Teenage Dream. Teenage Dream, a song of three minutes and 48 seconds. I kid you not, all of the non-chorus sections once again add up to one minute and eight seconds. Whoa. But when you add up all the pre-choruses, choruses and post-choruses, Nate, you get a two-minute and 40-second long section of choruses. So you're saying when you approach them in this way, these songs are mostly chorus. I would say that we have undergone hook-ification.

43:31Hook-ification. Yeah. You know, we heard the word the hook from B-Real of Cypress Hill. Sure. The hook meaning really just anything which is catchy. And now every section needs to be catchy. You know, we live in this attention economy. Any section might go viral in short form video. Every part of the song needs to be a hook. It has to grab you. And so the chorus, yeah, it's really taken over. And we've reported on some of this before. We've talked about the pop overture, where you begin with the chorus.

44:02Bruin 5's payphone from 2012 is a great example. I'm at a payphone trying to call home All of my change I spent on you Where have the times gone? The hook-ification has become so extreme that it's extended even into the intro of the song. This is my ultimate intro. No intro. You know who would like this? Harold Arlen, the composer of Over the Rainbow. You know, we're just getting that title phrase right at the start now. We've compressed all of musical history

44:32into this continuum of hook. I think of a song like Bad Bunny's Si Vau A Tu Mama from 2020 as another example of this like hook-ification. That song doesn't really have a chorus in the traditional sense, but instead it just has hook after hook after hook.

45:04It's like there's no verse, there's no chorus, there's just the endless hook. That is the whole purpose of the song and it's really unique and maybe says something about how our approach to pop is changing. Another way the chorus has just taken over has been in vibe snatching. The idea of interpolating a previous hit and giving it your own spin. Drake has a trio of albums. One of his hits off of that is Janus, S-T-F-U. He's lifting the chorus melody

45:50of Leaky Lee's I Follow Rivers. So I feel like with the pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus taking over so much of the real estate of the song with the pop overture, the vibe snatching, the just everything turning into a hook, it feels like the chorus is just the predominant part of the song. And I wonder, can we ever have too much of a good thing?

46:22I mean, to me, the Bad Bunny track is actually not an example of, you know, the prominence of the chorus. It's the opposite. It's like the absence of a chorus. Maybe a generation that's coming up raised on pop music that is like constantly changing and constantly shifting is going to have different attitudes about this idea of everything being chorus. Charlie XCX maybe leading the way in this post-chorus type world, if you will. If we've had so much chorus, maybe we need something new.

46:53After the success of her dance-oriented album, Brat, from a few years ago, she has come out with some new songs with a very sort of punk rock and roll attitude. Her song, Rock Music, coming in at just one minute and 55 seconds. Love it. I don't know if it has a chorus. Me and my friends We go out Yeah, we're throwing spines Basically all the time

47:27Yeah, we're on to the next I think the dancer is dead So now we're making rock music Such a cool track. I mean, presumably the chorus would be Now we're making rock music I mean, presumably I guess, yeah, you could call that the chorus but it's super short I counted Brittany I counted Katie Rock music again just a minute and 55 seconds If you take the intro verse and bridge

47:57we're talking one minute and 34 seconds When we add up all the choruses only 18 seconds of the song are choruses So if Charlie XCX is the bellwether we are looking perhaps

The Future of the Chorus

48:11at a shrinking chorus in the future of pop music The pendulum might be swinging the other way If everything is chorus is anything chorus? Is there a cure for too much chorus? Well, traditionally the antidote for too much chorus is to insert a bridge into your song And Charles, that's exactly what we're going to talk about in next week's episode One of the most beguiling and mysterious parts of a song The bridge Let's take it to the bridge Running a business

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