This past week was meter week in the online Berklee songwriting class I’m taking. This topic is simultaneously the most important and the most difficult to teach. This was not a hard week for me – as a Bob Franke acolyte, and as someone who has paid attention to language my whole life, I’m a bear for correct meter and emphasis in songs. The concept of the week was the importance of following the natural flow of language in your songwriting. I love the way language sounds, so that has always been a driving force of my songwriting. But what I realized this week is just how hard it is to teach someone to hear the natural flow of language (or, more importantly, what isn’t natural) in songwriting. Both in the course forums and in some of the discussion groups I’m part of, people have been struggling to understand what syllables should be stressed or unstressed. Most of how Pat teaches about rhythm (in language) is by getting you to hear how words would sound if you were saying them conversationally, and then making sure that you put them into music that way. (If the natural rhythm of the words doesn’t match up with the rhythm of the melody in a song, you need to change one or the other.) But it’s almost impossible to get someone to fix incorrect rhythm (or not get it wrong in the first place) if that person can’t hear what sounds wrong. Two things were particularly interesting to me in this week. The first was that he did take it one step further, in a way that might actually be a start at reaching people who can’t naturally hear how the language sounds. For one-syllable words, he grouped them by part of speech to indicate whether they should be stressed or not. Articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns (unless the goal is to indicate emphasis) are unstressed. Those with meaning – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, are stressed. I’d never thought of it that way, and it makes sense. The best thing in the week was videos of a master class he did with a songwriter. She played her – quite lovely – song that had, in subtle places, emphasis on the wrong words as she sang it. And he stopped her each time and suggested a fix – sometimes a word change, sometimes a melodic rhythm change. And it’s true that if you’re distracted by melody, you might not initially notice that the language rhythm is off. It’s equally true that in the master class it was noticeably better every time she changed back to the feel of natural language. It’s my contention (and I suspect Pat would agree) that getting the rhythm right is the cornerstone of good songwriting. Anything on top of that is what makes a song great or not, but it’s unlikely to get there if it distracts the listener from the beginning by an unnatural language rhythm. And, as with everything I seem to be learning in this class, it all comes down to listening and internalizing. I’m sure there are natural abilities that predispose people to be able to hear how language should sound (especially in music), but the best thing you can do is spend a lifetime listening.