Structure of the Lyrics in the Prechorus: Alternative Pop Songs

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Cody Kimmel. I am the lead singer of the band Eliot Fitzgerald, and I'm here with Expert Village to teach you how to write an alternative pop song. Let's talk about the lyrical structure of the pre-chorus. The good thing about this is the pre-chorus really, because of the purpose that it serves, has a lot more freedom that you can have in the lyrical structure. If you want it to be, you can just have it be one phrase that you use to kind of set it up. It could be just a repetition of phrases. Lyrically, it can be the same every single time you hit it and maybe the verse just kind of leads up into that pre-chorus. It really, it doesn't matter as much. Now as we're thinking about the alternative pop style, this is, the pre-chorus is something that's really become popular in the alternative pop style. Just in the way that the song structure and the way that the history of the song writing of alternative pop kind of developed, the pre-chorus became far more prevalent in this than it did in a lot of other genres. So lyrical structure, this one is going to be just like a phrase. The example that I'm going to give is literally just a phrase, a, a, a, a, whereas we talked about before in the verse an a, b, a, b or a, b, c, d or some variation of that is a really strong lyrical verse structure and poetic verse structure. For pre-chorus, the lyrical structure should be simpler, like an a, a, a, a, where you just kind of take a line, maybe repeat it with some rhyming there or just take a single line and use that. And melody wise, it should really, it should also be a distinguishing thing. Let's say there's a lot of lyrics in your verses. The pre-chorus shouldn't be heavy on the lyrics. Once you do that, there's going to be a really good set-up for your chorus."