I’m back at the (more than) perennial question about which of my new songs – because there keep being more of them – will be under serious consideration for the next CD. And when playing through a number of them I’ve discovered a recent trend of mine to write songs with four verses. Although I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Nashville/Berklee model of what a song should look like (two, or at most, three verses, a chorus, and a bridge that usually comes just before a final chorus), I do think of songs in my genre as generally having three verses. And conceptually, like an essay or a story, it makes sense for a song to have three parts – and intro, a middle, and a conclusion. When I start writing a song and am trying to figure out where it is going, I often map it out myself, into three verses. So why do I keep ending up with four these days? First, I’ve discovered that it’s most likely to happen for songs that either have no chorus at all, or just a line or two of refrain. That’s not surprising – if there is less opportunity (through the chorus) to carry the story, using an extra verse to do it makes sense. (Also for less story-based songs, if there’s not a chorus, they can seem short with only three verses.) Second, sometimes I’m telling really complicated stories, and it can be hard to fully explain what transpired without four verses. A number of my four verse songs of late have not only been stories, but stories I didn’t make up, of real people’s lives. One I wrote this past February about Daisy Gatson Bates, a civil rights leader in Arkansas who worked for school integration. There were three phases of her life I wanted to make sure I wrote about; one was her birth and upbringing, a second was her pre-integration civil rights efforts, and the third was her efforts toward integration. But in that third part, the story got complicated (because of state pushback, even with courts supporting integration), and although I first tried putting that all in one verse, it was way too crunched to make the story make sense, so I let it unfold over two verses, and it felt like I was doing the story justice and resolving it well. A similar thing happened with my song Shackleton’s Whiskey, about Ernest Shackleton’s adventures getting stuck in the ice while trying to land in, and then cross, Antarctica. There were three definite phases to the adventure, and each gets a verse. But I also wanted to wrap the whole thing up in a final verse (including the observation that for all of his impressive feats of bravery in Antarctica he never did, in his whole life, make it to the South Pole. Another hypothesis, though, is that I’m not editing sufficiently. The trick to a good song is making sure that everything that’s there needs to be there. I did recently tackle one of my favorite ones of the recent February songs, I Remember (Bus to Manzanar), which also has four verses. (Although it’s not the true story of one particular person, it’s the aggregated true story of many Japanese-American people I read about being taken into detention (as children) during World War II. I thought two different half verses were a bit weaker than other parts of the song, and thought through exactly what needed to be in the song to fully convey what I wanted to say. I could, in fact, have melded two of the verses into one and kept the essential elements of the story line. But maybe because I had played the song enough that it had settled in my mind (or maybe because how I wrote it in the first place made sense) it felt too abrupt when I played the three-verse version. I’m still undecided on that one, though. But it’s definitely true that editing is key. I know a few songwriters whose work I respect a lot but whose songs sometimes feel too long. It’s generally better to leave your audience wanting more (true not only of a whole performance but also of an individual song) than to have them bored with what’s there. So I’m going to be keeping an eye on my four-verse tendencies and try to make sure that when a song has four verses, it’s because that’s truly the right length. P.S. I just looked at the verse-length stats for my fourteen February songs: nine of them were three-verse songs, so that’s still the majority; of the remaining five (which each had four verses), two were telling stories, and three had no chorus.