Songwriting – A Silly Trick for Increasing Your Song’s Marketability
There is a pretty simple tool you can use to make your songs more marketable. Before I mention it, I need to talk about the fact that the most important part of having a marketable song is having a great melody. Granted, if you’re an independent artist you want your song to be hitting on all levels to give yourself the best chance for success. You want to have great lyrics, instrumentation and all of the other things that go into making a great track. But melody is king.
Great melodies are memorable and singable. As a result, they’re usually fairly simple. Our minds like simple. In terms of music and melody writing, simple is easy to remember, repetitious and easy to sing along to. As songwriters a lot of times we like to overcomplicate our melodies. One of the ways we do this is by writing lyrics that are too wordy. Wordy lyrics can get in the way of your melody and overcomplicate it enough so that it’s barely even melodic anymore.
Think about how much easier it would be if you didn’t have to focus on lyrics, but JUST on the melody. Well, that’s actually an approach used in a lot of hit songs. Think about it. What if you could use simple one-syllable sounds instead of words? Then your wordy lyric problem would go away, and you’d find yourself focusing ONLY on a melody. Plus if your words are just simple sounds, your melodies become simple too, because simple melodies plus simple words/sounds would go hand in hand, right?
For that reason, if you wrote a simple melody where there were no words, but just vocal sounds, it can make your song more marketable. If you don’t believe it, I’m about to prove you wrong. Let’s refer to the hits.
- Pink’s song, “So What” starts by repeating “nah.” and it’s pretty catchy, huh?
- Another one you’re sure to have heard is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” With the exception of the phrase “caught in a bad romance,” the intro is all vocal sounds. “Rah rah, oh la la,” etc. And don’t tell me you’ve never had that one stuck in your head.
- One I’ve been guilty of singing along to way more times than I’m willing to admit is”King of Anything” by Sara Bareilles. In the first ten seconds of the song, the melody is sung entirely on the sound “oh.”
- Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” also features entire chunks of melody just on the word “oh.”
Now you might be saying “Okay, I get where you’re going with this, but these songs are all really poppy. I want to want be marketable, but I think my music is edgier than the songs you’re presenting.” To that I say, fair enough. Let’s check out some rock songs that use the same concept.
- Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” starts its memorable melody entirely on hums.
- How about Alice in Chains’ classic rock hit, “Man in a Box.” The vocal intro has no real words at all.
- Let’s go back even further in time to Cream’s “I Feel Free,” so you can see this isn’t a new thing. There are multiple layers of non-words happening in that intro (with the exception of the phrase “I feel free” that keeps popping in).
- I think you’re getting the idea, but I’ll give you one more just to really hammer my point home. Because, if the Beatles do it, it has to be a valid songwriting technique, right? Remember the first few bars of “From Me to You” by the Beatles? No real words. And let’s not forget they also wrote “Oh-Bla-Di, Oh-Bla-Da.” The sounds are even in the title on that one.
I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
Obviously you can’t just have silly sounds repeat throughout your entire song, if you want to keep it marketable. You’ll need some real lyrics. But if you start a song this way, it can rope in your listeners from the very beginning, the same way all of the examples above did. Then you can repeat that melody throughout your song. If you do that, you’re establishing a melodic motif that you can work from when you write the rest of your melody (which will have lyrics). If you write the nonsense lyric part first, the rest of your melody will be easier to write, because you’ll already have a piece of your melody established. Once you have that, the rest will flow easier.
You can use this concept for writing melodies, even if you don’t keep the nonsense syllables in the song. You might simply find it more freeing to just write an easy melody with vocal sounds, without having to think of any words. Then you can put words to it after, if you want. It’s certainly worth trying, if you’re stuck in a melody writing rut. And if the nonsense syllables work, you can keep them. It certainly worked for all the songs you saw above. But as always, experiment with it and have fun.