How To Deconstruct Songs Like A Car Mechanic (with Benny Romalis)

Christopher: I’m betting you know what “verse” and “chorus” mean, when it comes to songs. And you probably understand how they work together to make the song musically effective.

But what about the intro? Or the hook? What about a pre-chorus or post-chorus? What about a bridge? Any solos? Maybe there’s an interlude or an outro.

Could you explain what each of these parts are and the purpose they serve in a song? If not, Benny Romalis from How To Write Songs is about to lay it all out for you!

In our last episode I did our mini-interview with Benny, and you learned a bit about his backstory and the amazing work he and Keppie Coutts do over at How To Write Songs. Today I’m back to share a section from the beginning of his Musical U masterclass, which had the amazing title of “Songwriting: Thinking Like A Car Mechanic”.

In this section I want to share with you, he introduces and explains that idea of thinking like a car mechanic, why it’s so useful to a songwriter or someone who wants to understand songs on a deeper level. And then he shares one huge idea that I think can totally transform how you write songs, or even just how you hear and perform music.

So without further ado, here we go into a section of Benny Romalis’ Musical U masterclass!

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So this idea of deconstructing songs and thinking like a car mechanic, this is the image I want you to have in mind as we go through this material.

I love this image. This is what my dad – I was saying to Christopher – my dad is someone who always really wanted me to get into cars. And I never did, but he used to show me how he pulled apart car engines and sort of laid them out on the ground when I was a kid.

And I always thought that was cool, but I was so uninterested in cars that I was off doing other things! But he’s one of those people who, from a young age, pulled apart cars and put all the pieces out on the ground sort of like this, and then started to put it back together.

And when Keppie and I were working on How To Write Songs, I started to think about these analogies for all these different disciplines where people actually get to know the inside of the thing they’re studying by deconstructing, constructing it, and pulling it apart.

And I do believe there’s something so powerful in this idea that when you look at a car put together, it’s hard to know what’s going on.

You know, it’s interesting to see it all working, but we really don’t learn much. As soon as you lay all of these components out on the ground, suddenly we understand what each of these parts is there to do. We understand not only what it’s there to do in isolation, but what it’s there to do in combination with the other bits that it then gets connected with.

So if we look at songs in the same way, it helps us do something that’s really important, I think, with songwriting, which is to demystify songwriting and to demystify creativity as something that you either have or you don’t.

Because when you pull apart songs and you look at it in this way, you realise that that’s what a lot of great songwriters did. They just started pulling them apart early on and understanding how they work from the inside.

So what I want to focus on is this idea of song sections to begin with, because song sections are really the “car parts” of song form. Song sections are how we break up a song.

So when you hear a song and it’s just this beautiful, layered composition that you hear entering your ears, you go “wow, it’s beautiful”. There’s all of these different things going on, but if we start to break it up into sections, that’s the first way in to songcraft. By actually looking at the sections.

So the song sections. Just a couple of notes here. On song sections, naming will vary between genres. So the song section names that I’m using are pretty true for most genres, but some genres, there is some variation.

As listeners, we actually don’t need to know or care about song sections. We don’t need to know how songs are constructed in order to enjoy them.

This is really a big point for anyone who wants to get good at songwriting, because as songwriters, we very much need to think the opposite. We very much need to care and understand how songs are constructed.

And the reason is so that we can make deliberate choices. A lot of the songwriters in our cohort, and we’ve experienced this recently with the six-week program. One of their biggest complaints at the beginning of the program was they just felt like it was random. If a good song came out, they didn’t know how the song came out. And even though they were excited that a good song came out, they felt terrible that they couldn’t repeat it or didn’t know how to even begin repeating the process.

So when we can look at making deliberate choices, we can then start developing a little more consistency and a little more repeatability. It doesn’t guarantee a great song, but it does help you feel more in control of the process.

Okay, so song sections. Here are the main sections that we’re going to be looking at here.

Here are the main parts. Think of these, like the hood panel and the door, and these are the parts of the chassis, the big parts.

We have the verse. We have pre-choruses. We have the chorus, bridge, and solo.

Now, I’ve got solo in there because solo is an interesting one, where in some genres of music, the solo is actually an incredibly important part of song form. So if you write songs in the blues genre, if you write songs in jazz, if you write bluegrass music or a lot of country music, all of those genres have solos as an integral part of the form.

And you would say jazz is essentially, you know, a lot of jazz music is there to create a form that simply allows the artist to improvise. It’s all about the improvisation and the solo. So solos, there is one of the main sections.

Then we have the supporting sections: the intro, the interlude, the post-chorus, and the outro. And again, there are other little sections that exist, but these are the main ones we’re going to focus on to keep it simple.

So these are our car parts that we’re going to be moving around now.

A really big part of being able to make deliberate choices is to ask this question of what is the function of each of these sections? What is the job that each of these sections is performing?

And if we can really understand the job that each section is performing or that we need to perform, then it helps us learn, or it helps us understand how to best structure our song form and what order to basically put these parts how to put these parts together in the most suitable order.

So if we just do a quick breakdown of the functions of these sections…

The verse really is there to give the backstory. It’s there for context. It’s there for character development. That’s its job.

Pre-chorus… If Keppie was here, she gets very excited about pre-choruses! She gets very excited about saying that the pre chorus is not the part that comes before the chorus, or it’s not just the part that comes before the chorus. Because to say it’s just the part that comes before the chorus is to ignore the very important function that it performs. And that is it actually delays the chorus. It builds tension and it creates contrast. And all of those things are really important.

Our job is making music of really any kind is to create tension so that we can release that tension. You can’t release it if you don’t build it first. If you don’t create it first.

And the tension and release back-and-forth is so important when it comes to creating a musical experience that is enjoyable and immersive for the listener. So the pre-chorus is there to create this buffer between the verse and the chorus, to delay that chorus coming in and really build that tension so that when the chorus lands, it feels satisfying and it releases that tension.

The chorus is, of course, it’s simple. It’s there to deliver the central message or theme. That’s its job. That’s why we have the chorus.

The bridge is an interesting one, and the bridge is possibly one of, it’s probably my favorite section in songwriting because it is so versatile. It’s the opportunity to create this perspective shift or have a little twist, or it’s there to provide extra information that isn’t able to go into the verses or the choruses.

The bridge is also fascinating because it’s so versatile in where it can appear. It can appear very early in the song form. If we think about songs like “Somebody To Love” by Queen, it comes in a third of the way through the song form. “Every Breath You Take” by Sting, same thing. It can be used traditionally at the end of the second chorus, but that’s just the traditional way of using it.

It can be also used so many other ways. “Karma Police” by Radiohead has it at the very end of the song, and it actually creates the outro. It’s the most anthemic part of the song. So the bridge is a powerful section.

And then, of course, we have the solo. It is not just an interlude, a solo, really, depending on the genre, is there to demonstrate improvisation, but it is an instrumental break, and that’s an important thing to consider.

So we’ll come back and talk about these supporting sections in a second. But here’s one of the big considerations, and if anyone’s seen any of our YouTube videos, you’ve probably heard us say this word many times. But contrast really is such a big consideration.

And the question is, how do we create contrast, and why do we need to.

Let’s just talk about that for a second. Let’s just in the chat, why do we need to create contrast? Let’s not worry about how. Let’s just talk about why.

Why is contrast important?

“Listener interest”.

“Because the song can never be boring”. Ideally, yes. Because the song can never be boring.

“To keep listeners’ attention”. Great.

“Prevent boredom”. Great.

So contrast, you’re all latching onto the same idea.

“Sets boundaries and expectations”. Great.

“Ties in with tension and release”. Yes.

“Humans crave variety”. Love it.

“For development”. Great.

So you’re all onto this idea that without contrast, it all just feels same.

Let me just stop there and make this point, though, that this is the beautiful tension that exists in music, that the only reason that music works is because of repetition.

If you have a drum groove laid down, if you had one bar of a drum groove and then it switched to a different groove and then a different groove every half bar, you would sound, it would be horrific!

It would be like, you know, the worst versions of jazz are when everyone’s soloing all the time in the band.

I took my wife to a jazz festival, and she’s not a lover of jazz. She was such a good sport about it. I love jazz music. And I took her to this jazz festival before we had kids, and we were having the best time.

But the first concert we saw, we went in and it was experimental jazz, and they all started soloing at the same time, and no one was really holding the pulse. It was just… And my wife looked at me and said “can we go?” I said “totally, we’ll go after the end of the first song. You can’t leave halfway through the first song. We’ll wait till the end of first song”.

The first song was 32 minutes long! So after 32 minutes of rambling improvisation, we sheepishly left.

But really, that’s an example of maybe too much contrast for some people’s ears! You know, some people love it, but there is obviously, you know, there are boundaries, so we need repetition. We need, you know, we need parts of a melody to be repeatable so that we can latch onto the pattern.

The problem for us as songwriters is how much repetition is too much repetition. How often can we repeat something before it gets boring? And that’s sometimes difficult to know when you’re the songwriter in the songwriting process. That’s sometimes why feedback is so valuable, because you’re in the moment. You go, I love this melody, I’m going to keep using it. And then you play it for someone. They say you’ve just repeated the same melody in the verses and the chorus, like, eight times. It’s too much. Go back. Let’s find a moment where we can break the pattern.

So setting up patterns to create a sense of repetition so that people can latch on to the song is important. Breaking the pattern is then the next most important consideration.

So that’s the tension we’re always grappling with.

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Christopher: Awesome. So I hope you caught the big idea there: to really think about not just what sections are in a song or a piece of music, but what’s the function of each section? What’s the job that each section is performing?

And particularly in terms of this idea of contrast, how does it create contrast? How does it create tension and release it, or keep things interesting and varied?

Such a cool insight, because I think it’s easy to think about how a song is put together with different sections, or when you’re listening to music, to recognise there are different sections in the piece. But how much have you really thought about the purpose of each section and why it’s so important to the song as a whole?

So that was just the beginning of Benny’s masterclass. After that, we went through a couple of song examples and he showed how the structure of the song broke down in terms of those building blocks. And it was really fascinating to dive into this question of how each section was playing a role in the song and how without that section, or if that section would be different, the whole song might fall apart.

Really powerful stuff. So I hope you enjoyed that section. If you are a member of Musical U, that whole masterclass is waiting for you inside the Masterclass Library. Definitely a recommended watch.

I’m going to go jump over for today’s live masterclass, in fact. Today I have our guest expert this month, Linor Oren, presenting on “Practice Magic”. I’m really excited. I’m going to be doing her mini-interview shortly, and we’ll be sharing that on a future episode of the show.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you take away this idea of thinking like a mechanic and analysing the job being done by each part of a song. And I hope you play around with it in your own music-making, too.

Cheers! And go make some music!

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