Working Backward
How do you come to end up with a hammer like the songs mentioned? Very few songs, especially those with effective hammers, are written in chronological order. By that I mean the first verse is written first, followed by the second verse, and the chorus and so on and so forth until you reach the hammer (if there is one). In fact, many if not all of the lines in verses, chorus, and even bridges are not written in chronological order.
In the case of songs, it’s rarely the case when an effective hammer was used that the songwriter or songwriters didn’t know from the start where they needed to end up. It’s like you wouldn’t start writing a play or a movie without knowing where it’s headed, so you start with the twist and you create the ‘story’ that moves along to the predetermined dramatic conclusion.
You can and should do this in the components of the song, i.e., the verses, the chorus, and the bridge. Let’s use the song I referred to previously, “We Were Blind”.
You can link to the song again HERE.
The first half of the first verse goes like this:
I should have never got that blue tattoo
It’s like a scar that was left by you
Maybe half of what you said was true
But in the end it didn’t matter
The first verse established my rhyming scheme of A/A/A/B, so I needed the second verse to have the rhyming scheme C/C/C/B. Now I knew that the first three lines of this half of the verse all needed to rhyme with each other, and the last line needed to rhyme with the word ‘matter’. I then understood that I needed to write the last line first and fill in the other three lines next. So what rhymes with ‘matter’? Actually if you include false rhymes, plenty of words do.
Page 3/8
Jim Bruno's Songwriting Class 