Pop songs with unconventional structures.

Cafe Society
1

Listening to a Luther Vandross compilation, I was struck by two songs-- Never Too Much and Until You Come Back To Me/Superstar-- that seemed. . . different. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was different though. They seemed to have been built differently.

Back To Me/Superstar was sort of easy to figure out. These are two different pop songs merged into one so, of course, the flow was not what I was used to in a pop song. But Never Too Much felt different in a way I can’t explain. Much like The Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody.

Does anyone know what I’m talking about (since I can’t seem to explain it) and are there other pop songs with this ‘unpop’ flow to them?

2

Many of the songs Burt Bachrach wrote had their own one-off structure. And then there’s just the great one-of-a-kinders:

Mimi on the Beach
Bohemian Rhapsody
O Superman

. . . I’m sure there are more.

3

Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.”

4

Many Beatles songs used unusual structures. “Paperback Writer,” for instance.

5

I recently decided (realized?) that Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven have similar structures:

  • Several slow verses, with no real chorus between them (three verses in Rhapsody, four in Stairway)
  • A more up-tempo bridge
  • A hard-rocking final verse
  • A slow, soft closing
6

“Maybe the People Would be the Times, or Between Clark and Hilldale” by Love.

{Yes, that is just one song. Musical structure is simple, but it has an unusual rhyme scheme. Catchy too.}

7

There are an awful lot of songs that might qualify as “pop”, and starting in the mid-60s, it became fashionable to explore unconventional structures. So depending on how inclusive you want to be, I’m sure you could end up with a list of thousands. A few well-known ones I can think of off the top of my head:

The Beach Boys started getting into unconventional song structures with songs like “I Get Around”, which has three or four different subunits. “Good Vibrations” has a variety of subunits.

McCartney & Wings did a couple of “suites” – “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and “Band on the Run”. Grand Funk Railroad’s first big tune, “Closer to Home”, was also episodic.

The Who were good ones for that sort of thing, although not their big hits so much. “A Quick One While He’s Away” and “Rael” are two early episodic pieces by them.

At the other extreme you have things like Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire” which is a single riff repeated over and over.

8

Squeeze - ‘Up The Junction’ - has no chorus.

MiM

9

“Turn it on again”

10

Biggirl said:

You got me. Just listened to it here

Can’t say how you think it seems different.

Alanis Morissette played around with some unconventional formats on her album after Jagged Little Pill. Several seem kind of stream of consciousness.

Probably several others.

11

I guess I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t figure out what was different about the song either. It’s verse-chorus-verse-chorus like a pretty standard pop song. It does have that slight break between the first chorus and verse that’s a little different, but otherwise it’s unremarkable structure-wise.

12

XTC’s “The Wheel and the Maypole” is two of Andy Partridge’s song fragments smashed together to good effect. The first (the “Wheel” part) is a verse-chorus-verse-chorus folk-traditional, crypto-medieval fertility-love wedding song; the second (the “Maypole” part) is a celebration of personal mortality and cosmic entropy that doesn’t have anything that sounds like a traditionally subdued verse – it’s more like dual choruses with the “And what made me think we’re any better?” lines functioning as a bridge section (and reprised in the second iteration of that second chorus).

**Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” **is, stylistically, an epic, proggy smash-up of 60’s-style surf rock and 70’s-style glam, with an Ennio Morricone-western twang running through it, complete with horse-hooves sound effects and mariachi horns. But its underlying structure is just as bizarre; the analysis that follows is based on the Wembley '07 (the HAARP concert) version, BTW.

The song begins with a variable prologue (horse hooves and other sound effects on the LP version; a drawn-out bit of John Williams’ “Close Encounters” theme in the Wembley concert). That’s curtailed by a machine-gunned surf-rock glissando on guitar, kicking off an intro section of epic, inarticulate, banshee wailing (the “aah…aah…aah…” part). Another glissando leads to a twangy, Morricone-spaghetti-western-inspired guitar solo. A third glissando kicks of a transitional smashup of the “aah…aah…aah…” part and the verse (musically, it’s the verse, but articulated as simply more “aah” sounds: “aah, aah-aah-aah, aah-aah-aah, aah-aah-aah…”) and then finally, we get the first proper verse (“Come ride with me…”), roughly at the song’s halfway point, at 4:15. [Whew!] That’s followed by a repeat of the original “aah…aah…aah” intro, ending in a fourth glissando. Then comes the epic chorus (“No one’s going to take me… alive!..”) with its doubled lyric, leading to a rollicking guitar solo, followed by a regular chorus, a reprise of the second guitar solo and then the outro.

Listed in an itemized way, it looks like this (with vocal sections capitalized):

prologue (sound FX/John Williams)
[glissando]
Intro (“aah…aah…aah”)
[glissando]
twangy guitar solo
[glissando]
Transitional smashup of intro & verse (“aah, aah-aah-aah…”)
Verse (“Come ride with me…”)
Intro [redux]
[glissando]
Doubled chorus (“No one’s going to take me alive…” x2)
rollicking guitar solo
Chorus [single take]
rollicking guitar solo [reprise]
outro

A while back, I found an old dispatch from the music-festival front (IIRC, in the NME online archives, '06-'07) by a female music critic. Her reaction upon hearing “Knights of Cydonia” for the first time (at this festival set) was priceless: she fell into such a state of uncontrollable laughter, she wrote, she had to actually lower herself to the ground because she couldn’t stand up.

While I didn’t share her reaction, I think I understand it. As a pro, she would’ve been pretty knowledgable about song structure and Muse’s reputation for outrageousness. Her analytical, critical faculties were probably checking off the song-structure rules as they were being broken, and her system simply got overwhelmed by the flagrant nonconformity of it all – and of Muse managing to top even her expectations of outlandishness. Sadly, she didn’t mention what the final straw was (The mariachi trumpet? The third surf-rock glissando? The second time Bellamy launched into the banshee "aah"s? The over-the-top epic call to survive?) The visuals probably helped push her over the cliff… namely, Matt Bellamy’s outfit, hairstyle, or prancing about on stage? – it all adds up to the same giddy spectacle in the end.

My first take on the song was, sadly, that it was one of the most moronic, clunky, awkward-as-ass pieces of shit I’d ever heard – admittedly, it took a few listens before I “got” it… or did KoC simply wear me down by attrition? Now, of course, I think it’s f’n brilliant, but it’s possible that repeated listens to it has simply damaged my brain… :smiley: