CHAPTER EIGHT

TRAVELOGUES

VERSE CONTINUITY

We've all seen travelogues. Ah, fabulous Hawaii — majestic mountains, pipeline surfing, luxury hotels, exotic cuisine. The places may be interesting, but as a film, a travelogue is dull, dull, dull. Its elements have no natural continuity. What do majestic mountains have to do with twenty-foot waves featuring pipeline surfing? What have either of these to do with elegant hotels and Oriental cuisine? Their only links are accidents of geography: They are all part of fabulous Hawaii!

A travelogue not only makes for a dull movie, it makes for dull verse development in a lyric. Look at this lyric summary:

What's going on here? What does police brutality have to do with car bombs or prostitutes with AIDS? Nothing, except that they are all part of fabulous Streets are turning deadly in the dark. Aside from their connection to the refrain, the elements have no natural relationship — they don't belong together.

Verse development should mean verse relationship. Your verses should have a good reason to hang out together. When verses are in the same lyric only because you're taking a tour of the title, you likely have a travelogue on your hands.

Okay, so no one would actually write something like that, right? Wrong. In fact, it happens all the time — all too often in songs with serious political, ethical, or religious messages. This series of ideas is typical:

No matter how well written and interesting these verses get, the basic defect remains: The verses don't work together to accumulate power — they are simply a travelogue of human ineptitude. Important ideas deserve the most powerful presentation you can muster.

Your lyric accumulates power when your verses work together — using each verse to prepare what comes next. It's like starting avalanches. If you go a third of the way up the mountain and start three separate avalanches from different spots, you'll cause some damage to the town below, but not nearly as much as if you'd gone to the top and rolled one snowball all the way down. Speed and power accumulate and sweep everything away. The town is devastated. The boxes gain weight and power as the snow plummets down the mountain.

In a travelogue, all the boxes are the same size.

There's no real connection (other than the title) between the verses. The second box is isolated from the first and third. It's certainly a way to give us a new look at the title, but at the cost of forward momentum and accumulating power and weight. Although the strategy can work, it isn't optimum.

Let's get to work on verse development. We'll start by putting together a travelogue (on a serious subject), and then we'll try to fix it. Let's work with the idea of cycles of violence, using “Chain Reaction” as a title. Here's a starting verse and chorus:

Okay, gang warfare. One violent act will surely lead to another. But instead of using this scene to move us to the next act in the chain, we'll let the lyric make the easy move and randomly select another place. Here we are in some place like fabulous West Beirut:

However compelling the scene is, it is isolated; a single snowball a third of the way up the mountain. It's an equal-sized box, or at least a box that doesn't benefit from the weight of the first box. Because it relates to verse one only through the chorus, it doesn't build momentum. Its only power comes from what it is, not what it connects to. Verse one was a separate avalanche. It lent no power to verse two.

Now, one last stop in this travelogue of violence. How about racial hatred in fabulous old South Africa:

It's not that a lyric like this has no power, it just doesn't have the power it could have. Even when each scene in a travelogue is effectively presented, there is less total impact than there could have been if each verse had carried over into the next, accumulating power and momentum.

The test is to look at the verses without the chorus. Without knowing that all three events take place in fabulous “Chain Reaction,” we wouldn't have a clue what's going on:

Now, instead, we'll try developing one continuous fabric. It doesn't matter which verse we pick, just so all the other verses roll down the same mountain with it. Let's start with verse one and develop from there:

The linking of the verses gives the whole lyric momentum. Each box lends weight to the next box. Look at the results when we leave out the chorus:

Now the verses show the circle of violence, and the chorus gains power each time because the information carries over from verse to verse, adding weight and momentum to each scene.

EXERCISE 12