Sick of filling notebooks with half-finished tunes that go nowhere?
Finishing songs gets much easier when you have some idea of where you’re going. Song forms are the bare bones, the dark matter underlying songs. With a solid grasp of these structures, you’ll know all the possibilities for your current song-in-progress—so you can weight the possibilities and feel out the form that’s best for your idea.
Tom Waits has called song forms “Jell-O molds for music”. Think of these forms as empty vessels to fill with your own melodies and lyrics.
Be sure to check out The Least You Need to Know About Song Structures if you need a refresher on basic song sections.
AA: Strophic Song Form
Strophic form is the simplest song structure: it uses only one section—which can be repeated any number of times. The melody remains the same each time, though the lyrics usually change—making this a verse-verse-verse form that puts the focus squarely on your lyrics. Strophic form is great for story songs, so it’s quite popular in folk, blues, and country music.
If the lyric remains the same each time—less common but possible—it’s a chorus-chorus-chorus form.
A few tips on writing in strophic form:
- To add musical interest, you could introduce variations as the song unfolds.
- You could still tie verses together with a refrain (effectively building a mini-chorus into each section)
- When composing a strophic form entirely of verses, some songwriters use a circle-back ending by restating the first verse at the song’s end.
- “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash reveals one way to add variety to a verse-verse-verse form: by inserting instrumental verses between vocal verses. This adds length and allows lyrics to sink in. The guitar solos are simple variations on Cash’s vocal melody, so those instrumental passages are just verses without words.
AB: Binary Song Form
Binary song forms use two different sections, both of which may be repeated. These two sections may sharply contrast one another or complement one another in a more subtle way, depending on what your song calls for.
For songwriters, binary form typically follows the pattern verse-chorus-verse-chorus or chorus-verse-chorus-verse.
AABA
AABA song form could also be written as refrain-refrain-bridge-refrain. This form was extremely popular among Tin Pan Alley songwriters. Often a few lines of the refrain are slightly altered with each repetition to add variety and provide a sense of lyrical development.
“Over the Rainbow” is a well-known example of AABA form. The bridge (B) section starts with the lyric: “Someday I’ll wish upon a star/And wake up where the clouds are far behind me”. Contrast that with the very familiar refrain of the song, and you’ll get a sense of how beautiful this simple song form can be.
AABA is also sometimes called 32-bar form, a name that assumes each section will be 8 bars long.
ABABCB: Verse-Chorus with a Bridge
This form looks a lot more complicated than it actually is. All we have here is a verse-chorus form with a bit of variety added by the bridge: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus.
Season to Taste
There are myriad variations on each of the forms listed above. Experiment freely with different patterns of verses, choruses, and bridges—whatever expresses your song idea best is the right form. The above patterns aren’t rules–they’re just common patterns that have grown popular in our music.