Obviously as you might have observed by my less than frequent postings of late, I am busy, and it only takes the slightest bit of work to make me feel overwhelmed. Anyway, to force me into posting something now and then I have decided to start mini-blogging. Not micro-blogging, I do that here. No, instead I will be posting regular and short musings and ideas as I think of them. I have gone as far as to outline essay-like postsonly to abandon them becauase I failed to find a good closing paragraph. But not anymore. The future is one hundred words or less.
So here goes…
So… on writing ballads.
For those who think its clever to point out the etymological routes of words far outside of their common usage, this site is not yours. Go away. When I say ballads I mean the slow, almost always romantic songs in musicals.
Zombie Wedding really only has one true ballad, and perhaps two half-ballads that are really slow rock songs and I would not utter them here. That song is called “Today Was A Good Day”. It’s nice enough I suppose. It was a very late addition that I threw together for the New York Fringe production. You can listen to it if you like. But I’ve written other ballads too, and I’ve even rewritten as I gradually hone my ballad writing ability.
So some “Ons”…
Oh here’s one… I mean, No. 1 “Length”
Don’t make your ballads too long. Nobody and I mean nobody wants a six minute ballad. They might clap at the end all the same, but come on, you know its boring.
No. 2 “Minor Considerations”
Use minor chord sequences sparingly, for a ‘B’ section its okay, but a whole ballad in minor sounds so clunky and dense. The only good thing I learned from Stephen Schwartz is to not be afraid of not using minor chords so much. So many great songs have no minor chords. This point can probably be expanded into…
No. 3 “Here’s three chords. Now form a band.”
Ballads are not the time for harmonic self indulgence. Ignore all the essays you have read about Stephen Sondheim, they are retrospective. Don’t worry if your song gravitates towards the same three chords, it sounds great. And if you are successful then no doubt in twenty years time some “contextual studies” moron will be writing tomes devoted to your mastery of the understated elegance.
No. 4 “Easy Time”
Don’t fixate on a tempo. Let the melody speak for itself and the actors will tell you the speed of the song. I think that this might be a fairly definitive rule for ballads; that they are about the melody. I differentiate ”Today Was A Good Day” from Zombie Wedding with the other slow songs by the fact that they are not set to a strict tempo. That tempo is usually a musical, or more accurately a rhythmical representation of the atmosphere of the scene. In ballads that can all stop. Ballads are the dream sequences of the musical landscape.
So that’s all I can think of right now but don’t worry kids, I’m back now, and me and your mother are going to give it a real go this time.
