At Song School earlier this month there wasn’t one class that focused on what a chorus should be like, but it kept coming up, and got me to thinking about the form and purpose of a chorus. The closest a class I took came to tackling choruses directly was the melody class I took with Bonnie Hayes. That class deserves its own blog post, but a few things she said about choruses are relevant here. You want a chorus to be memorable and not that hard to sing. Repetition is a good tool for that purpose. A chorus also frequently starts on a higher note than the verse and has a different melodic rhythm (longer or shorter notes or phrasing) than the verse. She made a number of points about the role of a chorus. Primarily it serves at the emotional center of the song, and/or the punch line. It gives the audience a break from what is happening in the song; it invites the listener into the song. For that reason, you don’t want to have a lot of extraneous things in the chorus; simple is good. Assumptions about choruses also came up in other classes I took. When Mary Gauthier was giving feedback on songs in the search for writing songs that are “true,” she first began with the assumption that every song should have a chorus, and, moreover, hat the song’s title is the prominent line of the chorus. Most of my songs follow that rule of thumb, but the one I shared didn’t have a chorus, which Mary found troubling; she thought that it needed one. (Less about the song itself, it seemed, than about the idea that every song should have one.) The most challenging chorus feedback came in the art of phrasing class I took with Amy Speace and Ron Browning. For that class I went first, and brought Dandelion Wine for feedback. Normally I wouldn’t bring a song for critique that I think of as finished, but this wasn’t a song critique, it was a workshop on how to phrase songs. Amy, nevertheless, had issues with my chorus. In addition to thinking that the chorus melody should start higher (as per Bonnie’s rules of thumb), her primary concern was that there was too much information in the chorus (it starts out “But I can make a pie with crackers almost taste like apples/ There’s succotash, creamed peas on toast, and dandelion wine). She said that that kind of information belongs in the verse, rather than the chorus – and that there’s too much going on in the chorus. I’m not sure I agree – or, at least, I think it’s unlikely that I’m going to change it. To me, the verses tell the story of a family facing difficult times during the dustbowl, and the chorus is demonstrating the strategies (and optimism) they employ to deal with the situation. I’m on a road trip now and have been listening to a lot of my favorite songwriters while driving. And I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that I tend to have complex, wordy choruses given that my favorite songwriter is Dave Carter. With a few notable exceptions, his choruses are the most complex I’ve encountered; they are not only extremely wordy, but they generally are different each time around. Other of my favorite songwriters – Antje Duvekot, and Richard Shindell – also tend to have choruses that are not simple (or, sometimes, songs without choruses). So, on the one hand, I came out of that listening experience feeling vindicated: the kind of chorus I write is not unlike those written by a set of songwriters I love and that many in the music community I’m most closely connected to revere. But song school also made me think differently about choruses from other experiences I had there. The one night I stayed up late to participate in song circles, I saw the advantage of a simple chorus. People there are primed to sing and will try to jump in on anything; I played some songs by others that people were likely to know. But when it came to my songs, I struggled to find ones to play that would be easily accessible to others who really do want to sing . . . and I recognized how much fun it is to be able to jump in and sing on someone else’s song. So I think it’s absolutely musically legitimate to write a complex chorus, and am happy, for the most part, with the way my existing choruses are. But I also see the value of a simple, singable chorus – when I brought a Dave Carter song to the song circle, I played The Mountain, because people who didn’t know it were able to join in on the chorus. So I want to prioritize writing songs with simpler choruses in the next set of songs I write, because I do think the “involve everyone” of the true meaning of the word “chorus” is important to keep in mind.