Skip The Chorus

In the age of streaming and sharing, old formulas for what makes a hit are fading away

- Tariq hussain

ONE FALL AFTERNOON, my friend Justice and I met up in a park near my apartment in East Vancouver for a song­ writing session. We’d both been listening to Bon Iver’s album 22, A Million, a collection of songs with abstract, often distorted, lyrics and frequently without traditional verse/chorus structures. Here’s the verse, now the chorus, maybe a bridge — so much popular music of the last century has had these familiar signposts. On this album, it’s the layers of sonic textures — synthesizers, saxophones, affected vocals — that draw you in. Bon Iver is not alone in this; off the top of my head, I could name a number of chorusless songs by other influential artists, such as Father John Misty’s “I’m Writing a Novel,” or Sufjan Stevens’s “Death with Dignity.” My friend and I were so fired up about the conversation that day that I got to thinking, Is the chorus dead?

On mainstream radio, for as long as I’ve been alive, the chorus has reigned supreme. My introduction to Western pop music was via a pocket­ sized radio I had in the 1970s and 1980s that churned out three­ and ­half­ minute songs with simple, catchy choruses I could learn in a single play. Later, when I started writing my own music, I adhered to the familiar formula. Choruses are radio­ friendly—a sonic marker in an era where some listeners flip “every fifteen seconds,” according to an executive I talked to — so it makes sense that musicians would try to write for that format. If you’re a song writer, you’ve probably heard the expression “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” (also the name of a 1995 greatest ­hits collection by Roxette), and I agree that it’s an effective approach to songwriting.