Jolene, Jolene ... Dolly sure knows how to hit a high note with her quality country chorus. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Last week we looked at verses and now we're going to skip happily over the bridge and dive headfirst into the chorus. If not always the heart of the song, the chorus is at least its prominent chest, drawing us in with a catchy slogan on its low-cut T-shirt. Ahem, sorry, got a bit Gordon Smart with you all there for a minute. Anyway, the chorus is important - it's the bit we sing and the bit you'll hear on the 30-second iTunes preview, unless you're listening to Ornette Coleman.
When did we get so fixated on the chorus? The Tin Pan Alley 32-bar AABA form survived long into the rock age; as beloved of the Beach Boys (In My Room) as Cole Porter (I Get a Kick Out of You). The hook in both these songs is just the last line of the A-section, when the song title is sung, much like the refrain in folk music. In the pop chorus this line has been expanded into a full-blown section of its own where the hook is repeated over and over, or in some cases expanded so that the repeated section has an AABA pattern of its own. An example of the latter is Abba's Money Money Money where the "Aah-aaah so many things I could do" would be the B-section.
Many choruses seem quite formulaic. But I would go as far as to claim that the strictest rules often provide the most invention. The abundance of exuberance and variation within the verse-chorus form, in commercial music from Chuck Berry to Girls Aloud, sticks two fingers up at po-faced accusations of bland, formulaic music. So, having touched upon how the chorus may have arrived, here comes the glib bit: What makes a good chorus?
1. The song title must be in the chorus so people know what to sing to the poor counter guy in HMV when they don't know who it's by. Unless your chorus has no words, or terrible, terrible words, in which case you could probably do with a rethink anyway.
2. Don't get too wordy. Van Halen's Jump is good; Beck's Sexx Laws is not so good.
3. Ramp the chorus up a notch in one or more ways:
Melody: Make sure that the highest pitched note is in the chorus. Dolly Parton's Jolene is a perfect example of this as the melody in the verse is almost identical to the chorus except for the stretching of the ascending melody up an extra 4th on the final "Jolene" of each line in the chorus.
Harmony: Get an upwardly-mobile key change in there a la Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart.
Drums: Double the pattern so that the tempo seems to be twice as fast.
Instrumentation: Whack in some distorted guitar/backing vocals/strings/brass/gospel choir etc.
4. Make sure it doesn't sound anything like Sit Down by James, one of the worst choruses ever. Sit down? No, don't sit down! You're at a skanky indie disco and you'll get beer on your stripey tights. And stop mewling that miserable melody, too.
