It’s common to come up with a chorus before you come up with a verse. That’s because the chorus is the section with the hook, the catchy bit that you hope brings your audience back time and time again. They’re repetitive and of relatively simple construction, so they’re often easier than other sections to write.
It’s also common to get stuck in your songwriting process once you’ve written that chorus. It’s sometimes hard to imagine what music might lead naturally to a chorus. It’s a bit like seeing a beautiful field, and then imagining what the roads leading up to it might look like.
Perhaps you’re in that situation right now: you’ve got a chorus, and now you’re trying to create a verse that leads naturally and successfully to the chorus. You want a verse that, as we often say, begs for the chorus.
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Without knowing what your chorus actually sounds like, I think I can make some assumptions based on what successful choruses usually do:
- Your chorus melody is likely fairly high in pitch.
- Your chorus presents a line of lyric that easily stands as the song’s title.
- Your chorus probably uses a simple but tonally strong chord progression.
- Your chorus uses rhythms that are simple and strong.
To create your verse, you’re probably trying to improvise something, and I think that’s a good way to generate ideas. For any one chorus, there are many possible verses that might do the trick.
As you try to generate ideas for your verse, keep the following in mind:
- Improvise low-pitched melodies. Verse melodies tend to be lower than chorus melodies. The best partner for your chorus is probably going to be lower in pitch than the verse.
- Try “opposite ideas” to create a verse melody. Let’s say that your chorus makes use of a rising melodic idea (“Pen-ny Lane”, “in my ears”, etc.) Create a verse melody that uses lots of downward-moving shapes (“…there is a barber showing photographs…”)
- Create lyrics that require the chorus lyric as a kind of answer. If the main point of your chorus is to say how great your life is, use the verse to describe situations, people and circumstances that make it that way. Doing so means that your chorus has a purpose.
- Create verse progressions that explore chords that stray away from what the chorus offers. If your chorus is a standard I-vi-IV-V-I progression (C-Am-F-G-C), see what you can do to explore the minor side of C major – maybe something like Am-F-G-Dm-Am, or Am-G-Am-Dm-Am. Or simply allow your C major progression to wander a bit more than what you’d typically find in a chorus, something like: C G/B Gm/Bb A7 Dm Eb Bb F |C…
- Use melodic rhythms in your verse that are quicker and possibly more rhythmically syncopated than what you’ve used in your chorus. I think “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” (Jörgen Elofsson, David Gamson, Greg Kurstin, and Ali Tamposi), is a great recent example of this concept. The verse melody/lyric allows for quick, syncopated rhythms, but the chorus rhythms simplify and become very grounded and locked in.
Trying to come up with a verse can take a while. Make a few attempts, and if it doesn’t work right away, put the song aside for a week or so, take it out and then try again. It’s the kind of thing that can raise your frustration levels if you let it.
As you work to get a verse that partners well with your chorus, use that time to get a new song started. Having several songs on the go can help reduce the anxiety that comes from finishing touches taking longer than you’d like.
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