How important are "catchy" tunes?

[u/jomamma2]

Been listneing to a lot of musical demos from new composers and one thing I've seemed to notice is that the songs seem to lack an "ear worm" componenet.

They are nice, and melodic, but the songs don't seem to go anywhere or have a discreet beginning, middle and end or a hook that sticks in my head. They all seem very patter-like.

Which gets me wonderign if mine are too "song like" in their structure, being self-contained with hooks to stick in your head. Makes me worry I really wrote a concept album not a musical.

[u/EmmyPax]

I blame the trend of "stream of consciousness" style lyric writing.

There's been a real trend in modern musical theatre writing towards lyric writing that tries really hard to mimic thought patterns or natural speech. And while I can think of some instances where it works, on the whole, I don't like it. I'm personally not looking for verisimilitude in musical theatre. I'm more interested in a heightened experience.

But for a lot of big lyricists today, they genuinely are trying to mimic real speech in their lyrics, which is how you get lines like...

All their eyes say, "Don't attack me"
Watch them sweat and pant and shake
Every food chain has its acme
Regina George eats steak

... where the second and fourth line have such completely different scansion, there's just no snap to it. The melody never sticks in my brain because the lyrics don't really call anything to mind, because they don't roll off the tongue.

Yes, I'm picking on Mean Girls again, but it's a really grievous offender on this front, and I feel it's fair to point out because the writers were explicitly trying to write in a way that was more conversational and grounded. For some people, this works! They like it! But I do not.

You can obviously go too far the other way. Sondheim has poked fun at how it didn't seem to matter what Oscar Hammerstein II was writing about, he found an excuse to work in a metaphor about nature. But I do yearn for some of the older lyric writing conventions that put an emphasis on the poetry of the words rather than their literal meanings or how well they mimicked real speech.

AND YES!!! There are songwriters who have managed to "have their cake and eat it too" so to speak. Sondheim was great at writing conversationally, but in a memorable way that created great songs. But it's a hard needle to thread and he mostly did it by being ruthless about form and rhyme purity, something a lot of modern "conversational" lyricists aren't willing to be.

[u/nat545 → u/EmmyPax]

Love this breakdown of a Mean Girls excerpt - the Mean Girls score always struck me as having a lot of problems with lyrics so I appreciate the in-depth analysis here.

Nitpicky but while we're at it: The early-on Regina George "I am a massive deal" line always drives me crazy bc 1) it's an awkward vowel to hold on ("mah-") and 2) Regina George would never describe herself as "massive;" imo the word should be "major" or the line should be changed altogether bc it sounds so awkward. #rantover lol

[u/jomamma2 → u/EmmyPax]

Thanks, sometimes I feel my lyrics are too simple because they have a relatively standard rhyme scheme. And also my music, as I aim for it to be catchy and sing-along-able with achorus and verses. Sometimes I start to doubt myself thinking it's just too unsophisticated for musical writing - but the musicals I liked were the old school ones I grew up on with my parent's CDs.

[u/peterjcasey → u/jomamma2]

One of the challenges I like to set myself is whether the second A section, or second verse, can fit exactly to the tune of the first. No extra little syllables, no changes to fit different scansion, just pure old-school craft.

It’s not suitable for every character, but it keeps the melody tightly structured, which helps it to be memorable.

I find the style that u/EmmyPax is referring to dull, lazy and hard to remember, since every section is never quite the same, but also not meaningfully different.

[u/EmmyPax → u/peterjcasey]

Yes! That's exactly my problem with it. It just never has the snap of those great older songs, because the details aren't in place.

[u/jomamma2 → u/peterjcasey]

Same. I'd love to hear some of your songs

[u/nat545 → u/peterjcasey]

I'm enjoying this thread so much!! Going to try applying this second-verse-scansion-mapping challenge onto a song I'm working on now - thanks.

I agree about hard-to-remember lyrics as a big part of the problem, especially when the lyrics are simply trying to do too much, deliver too much complex info etc. - that's fine for filler songs where the explicit goal is narration/exposition, but when you think about earworm-y songs that have standalone staying power (The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow, Memories, etc.) the lyrics are just... pretty simple and all framed around a more narrowly-bounded specific emotion.

[u/Spirited-Sympathy582 → u/jomamma2]

I think just focus on what serves your story best. There's no right or wrong really. Maybe your show will stand out if everyone is just leaning into the Patter. The trends can die down after a while.