The best way to illustrate the hit ballad is to examine the songwriting successes of Diane Warren. I cannot stand her songs, or her personally, but she has had more hit songs than any other songwriter in the 20th/21st centuries, so where better to start?  Artists to look at are Mariah Carey and Celine Dion.

With dance songs, we built from the bottom (the beat) up. With ballads, we move in the other direction, starting with the lyrics. Lyrics should be about love, or miracles, or other inspirational things, or occasionally about lost love. Think of your average American Idol “coronation” song — you want a song that conveys both grandiosity and happiness.  (There actually used to be a random word generator on the Internet that would create a random AI song.  If anyone still has the link, please let me know!)  Use a lot of words, too, especially in your verses, and make sure to have a bridge. The bridge will come in handy later when you get to the chord and key changes. When you write the chorus, make sure to include lots of open vowels — oohs, ohs, and ahs. Avoid ee’s, because they sound screechy when held and hiccupy when Mariah goes into melisma (a/k/a “runs”).

Which brings us to the melody. Long, sweeping phrases and an opportunity for the eventual singer to show off his or her vocal range and breath control are key. (Unless you know you’re writing for someone with no vocal range or breath control, like Madonna or Britney.) Don’t write too many notes, as a basic outline is fine. The singer will have their own style for filling in the blanks, honed over years of impressing Star Search judges. The singer’s style will also serve as a reminder of the genre they have been pigeonholed into: a country singer will be more yodely and a pop singer will be more punchy. Also, your chord progressions will provide them with a guide.

So what’s all this about chord progressions and key changes?  Well, other than providing support for the melody, chord progressions let everyone know if the song is happy, sad, uplifting, depressing, inspirational or whatever other emotion you’re trying to impart.  In fact, it can be all of these things in turns!  Without going into detail (I’ll save that for another post) there are literally hundreds of kinds of chords and combinations of chords that can convey with subtlety or with a 2×4 over the head what mood your song is in.  This is more complicated than simply putting the song into a major or minor key.  And speaking of key, remember back up there in the lyric section when I was telling you about the bridge?  The bridge (as well as the final chorus) is an excellent place to throw in a key change.  Some key changes are done for mood, but much of the time in the hit ballad, a key change serves as an opportunity for the singer to do some showboating and go up a fifth (that is, from “do” to “sol”), thereby conveying both “I am inspiring you” and “I can sing even higher notes than I was before!”  The inspirational part actually dates back to the music of the early Catholic Church, and it’s pretty much ingrained in most of Western civilization.  The showboating part didn’t show up until opera was invented.

The least important part of a ballad is the bass and percussion.  In fact, many ballads will neglect the bottom of the sound spectrum entirely.  One big exception is anything sung by Barry White, because he is the bottom of the spectrum.  Another exception is anything else that’s meant to be seductive.  Bass often moves slowly, and therefore it is associated with sexy movements.  As for percussion, the drummer gets the most exercise in hair metal band ballads, since he was sitting there anyway.  Also, the timpani (big kettle drums) are popular when you get into the grandiose, inspirational parts of songs, because they are incredibly dramatic.

Now, while I was discussing chords, I neglected to mention instrumentation.  There are several options, depending on your mood.  With your traditional Diane Warren ballad, you’ll probably find piano (the instrument she composes on) or sweeping string sections.  If your ballad is being played by a rock band (or a hair metal band) you’ll want a distorted or fuzz guitar; other bands might employ organ, depending on the makeup of the band.  Another option is brass, although you will be leaning more towards French horns and tubas (low register) than trumpets and trombones (high register), unless you’re at the “inspirational” part of the song.  Sexy saxophones of all flavors are also good, especially for makeout songs!  In the modern indie-rock tradition, there are a lot of acoustic guitars and pianos with very spare arrangments; in fact, this seems to be incredibly popular right now.  I’m pretty sure Sarah Bareilles and Colbie Caillat dominate this sub-genre on the ladies’ side.

So that pretty much sums up the midtempo ballad.  Questions?  Comments?  Let me know what your favorite love song is, try to shoot down my arguments, whatever strikes your fancy.

I’ll be back in a few days with my discussion of novelty songs, the freaks of the hit world, and their apparent decline in the past decade.

My personal experience is that there are two “usual” types of hits: the uptempo dance number, and the midtempo ballad (a/k/a makeout song). In this blog, I’m going to examine uptempo songs. Later, we’ll cover ballads, and the third, rogue category, the novelty song (which can occasionally fit into one or the other of the first two categories). Now, on to the hits!

The backbone of a danceable song is the backbeat. (It even has “back” in it!) This usually consists of drums (or some kind of percussion, drum machine, etc.) and some kind of bass line, either from bass guitar, “stand up” double bass, or maybe the left hand of the piano or organ player. This is what you tap your feet or fingers to, it’s what you move and groove and shake your booty to. It’s what made people on American Bandstand say, “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, I give it an 8.5″ for many, many years. If you haven’t got a beat, you haven’t got a hit dance song.

If you’re reading a score, the backbeat is on the bottom. Building upward, you find the instruments that play (or create) chords: keyboards, guitars, and string and horn sections. Chords are nice; they move around and create a mood, and then they resolve and finish the song (or section). Without getting into the technical details, I’ll just say that there are ways of doing this that are “usual” and ways that are “unusual”. The usual suspects are simple triads (made of 3 notes) and that’s your basic rock ‘n roll or punk song. When you get a songwriter who really knows what s/he’s doing, and s/he does something unusual, then you get a song that’s not only mass-market enjoyable, but stimulating. People actually like that. However, they don’t like “weird”, so if you’re using this post as a songwriting guide (I hope not!), be careful of weirdness.

Up at the top of our hypothetical score are the lead “instruments”, which can be just about anything that plays a melody: lead guitar, vocals, piano, sax, and if you’re Jethro Tull, flute. Here’s where the “catchiness” factor of a hit song comes into play. Like Blues Traveler said, “The hook brings you back.” So what’s the hook? Hum or sing your favorite song. The part you know best and sing loudest is probably the hook! Oftentimes, the hook is the title of the song or the fun part of the chorus. It gets repeated a lot. And in a hit song, it should be easy for the majority of people to sing. Most people who listen to the radio and enjoy songs are not trained singers, and they don’t have the range of, say, Mariah Carey. (I do, but this isn’t about me.) So take pity on your shower singers and car karaoke stars, and watch the range.

Finally, and this is optional: the lyrics. I say this is optional because there are plenty of songs out there that people sing that do not have lyrics. One of my personal favorites is… um… well, I can’t remember the name of it, because it doesn’t have any words! Oh well. Maybe I’ll remember it for the next installation of this mini-series. Anyway, if I could hum it through the blog, you’d probably know it too. And I hum or la-la-la along with tons of classical music that doesn’t have words. So lyrics are optional. And if you do have lyrics, frankly, they don’t have to make sense. In fact, it probably helps if they don’t. And if, like “Louie Louie”, the words are slurred? That’s pretty much an instant hit.

I’ll be back in a week or so with Midtempo Ballads, or Seduction In 12/8 time. Your homework assignment is to listen to the popular dance music of your generation with an ear to what I’ve discussed here, and report back as to whether I’m right. Class dismissed!