The Secret to Writing a Great Song Verse

The tricky thing about pop songs is that they are usually short, so pulling an audience into your song is something you don’t get a lot of time for. By the time the song is a mere 15 seconds old, you’ve got to have given enough to your listeners that they feel compelled to keep listening.

It’s always been that way, of course, but these days it’s so easy to click away from your tune to something else that it becomes even more vital to grab listener interest right away.

And then, once you’ve got them, you’ve got to keep them. That places a special importance on the verse of your song. If by the end of your verse you haven’t done enough to get your audience sufficiently interested, you’re in trouble.

Here’s a list of tips, ideas and thoughts on the special significance of a song verse, and what you might do to ensure that it’s the best it can be:

Make good use of repetition. 

Finding a short, catchy melodic bit and then repeating it as your opening line can be an important ingredient for a captivating song verse. That repetition doesn’t have to be exact; approximate repetition achieves the same thing. EXAMPLE: “Royals” (Lorde)

Find an important motif.

 A motif is simply a short musical idea that gets transferred around to different aspects of the song’s verse. It’s a common feature that you’ll find in music from decades ago, as with”Mr. Tambourine Man“, where each musical phrase has a similar downward shape. (That song starts with the chorus, but the verse continues that downward motif, repeating and keeping the audience hooked.) And then in a more recent song, like Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble“, where the repeating opening motif has a similar way of grabbing the audience’s attention.

Start low, move higher.

 It’s such a commonly-done thing in pop music styles to have, at some point, the vocalist moving to their uppermost notes, that starting a verse low is an important part of keeping people listening. It creates an important sense of musical anticipation.

Use a predictable phrase structure.

 Most songs will feature 2- or 4-bar phrases, and that predictability is a vital strengthening agent for the structure of a song. Give “Royals” another listen, and you’ll notice that there is what we might call a “fragmentation” of that phrasing idea, where the 2-bar phrases of the start then shorten up (during the lyric “In a torn-up town, no postcode envy“) to become 1-bar phrases. That has a way of subtly increasing musical energy, and keeps people listening to hear where that’s going.

Build instrumentation in the latter half of a verse. This doesn’t happen in every song, but if you find that musical momentum is lagging throughout your verse, try intensifying the instrumentation as the verse melody passes the middle point. Add guitars, more percussion, and fill out chords even more as a way of generating a stronger musical intensity. That should culminate, of course, in an even fuller instrumentation in the chorus.