The Revolution Nobody Noticed

I woke up this morning, and checked my email like every morning. There was an update on music industry trends from ASCAP, with links to several articles. One such article was from a songwriter and songwriting teacher named Mike Errico, and I found myself bemused.

The thesis of Mr. Errico's article on the songwriting craft, available here if you're interested, is that streaming has changed the economic equation for songwriters. In the modern era of popular music, songcraft has been responsive to the economics of the music business. For example, songs used to have intros so DJs could talk over them. Their lengths were determined by the physical storage capacity of the media on which they were distributed. When the CD came along, for instance, it seems like average song lengths tended to go up. Singles still tended to be edited down more to be radio-friendly, since that medium still depended on shorter lengths. And so it goes.

Now, as Mr. Errico noted, the equation has changed again. Spotify begins paying for songs after :30 of length. Given that the overall amount of payout to songwriters has declined under streaming, Mr. Errico rightly asks why a songwriter would want to write, or an artist would want to record, a song much longer than :30. As he puts it:

Redefining an art form isn’t new, but neither is the concept of streaming, which was happening with elevator music in the 1930s, and was theorized decades earlier. But now that streaming has taken off, will song form react?

• Will it just be three choruses and nothing else?
• Is it the return of the ABAB song form, where the sections have a balanced weight and there are no sections dedicated to “setting up” another section?
• Pre-choruses?! Who’s got time for a “pre”-anything?
• And bridges? Bridges to what, exactly? Who has time for a bridge? You’re either there or you’re not there. Why get stuck in transit from one section to another?

Mr. Errico goes on to ask whether Psy wouldn't have been better off making "Gangnam Style" a minute long rather then four minutes. The funny thing is, this road has already been paved. One person disrupted the art and craft of songwriting in the way Mike Errico describes. He did it decades ago.

And almost nobody noticed.

I know this person, went to school with him, and played in two bands with him. His name is Robert Pollard.

Robert, hereafter Bob, started out as a traditional songwriter, doing verses, choruses, and so on. Here's an example of a song Bob wrote just out of high school in the late 1970s, "Somewhere Sometime." The recording isn't great, but serves for illustration purposes. This was originally performed by the band Anacrusis, for which Bob was the lead singer. (A note in passing: that is yours truly on the drums.)

The song itself is a classic ballad form (AABA, the same as Errol Garner's "Misty"). It has a radio-friendly intro for the DJ to patter over. Then two verses, a bridge, and a third verse. The form then repeats. Wendell Napier plays a guitar solo over the the two A verses. Bob then comes back for the final B and A, and an outro takes it to the end. Very symmetrical, very conventional. At 3:00, it was right in the sweet spot for hit radio formats of the day.

By the time he got around to forming his band Guided by Voices, Bob was in the midst of making a critical change in his approach to songwriting. Where others worked to refine their songs and add structure, Bob wrote until he got to what he felt was a good stopping point, and declared the song complete. And he put out everything. This often led to songs that sounded like they were thrown against the wall to see if they'd stick. But sometimes, it led to such 90+ second gems as "Game of Pricks," which amounts to "three choruses and nothing else," as Mr. Errico described above. No intro, just boom and they're off.

In fact, Bob plays fast and loose with song form on many occasions. For example, in the song "I am a Scientist" he tacks on a different set of chord changes at the end, reminiscent of a tag at the end of some jazz tune or old standard. "Redmen and Their Wives" ambushes you with a big chorus almost at the end of the song. And so on.

Understand that we're not talking about a complete abandonment of song form here, but simply stripping out the filler. Consider the GbV song "Teenage FBI." In its original form, it was another hook-laden, sub-two minute piece of ear candy. But to make it more radio-friendly, producer Ric Ocasek used filler and repetition, stretching it out to almost three minutes (and coincidentally making it sound like a Cars song; just sayin').

The bottom line is that Bob Pollard's aesthetic - if you have a hook and nothing else, why let that stop you? - is custom made for the new economics of streaming. It's been under the music industry's nose for more than two decades now, just waiting to be discovered.