So I realize this is going to be a hot-button topic, but I listened to Taylor’s new album and was honestly pretty surprised by the lack of interesting melodies on this thing. I’m not trying to diss her abilities as a lyricist and performer. Personally I think she’s a great performer/singer actually.
I’ve heard some say that you can’t teach melody. I think that is partially true in that there isn’t a step by step guideline to write a good melody. That being said, I think there are some reliable tools we can use to help write a good melody such as:
- Small pauses to create melodic phrases that “call and answer” each other
- Furthermore, you can create a sense of tension and release with this method by ending phrase A with a dissonant or “tense” note (such as the maj7th) and then ending phrase B with a consonant or “resolved” note (the tonic or maj3rd for example). Obviously you may have multiple “calls” and/or multiple “answers,” but you can still achieve the same effect in that scenario.
- Using melodic contour to similarly play with this idea of tension and release.
- A melody can also ascend or descend to reach certain cadences. You can also play with contour by starting with a very narrow contour, followed by big intervallic leaps to create a bold, heroic sense or release for example.
- Repetition is great, but following it with variation can effectively play with and satisfy the listener’s expectations. For example, you can repeat Phrase A twice and then follow it up with Phrase B which is similar, but just slightly different to play with expectations a bit. Then you can bring in a Phrase C which is very different to further break up the repetition.
- Apoggiaturas — starting with a note outside of the chord, and then resolving it to a chord tone. Basically another form of tension and release.
There are many other tools for writing melodies that I probably haven’t mentioned. If anyone has any they’d like to share, please do!
Of course Taylor employs some of these tools from time to time and she definitely has some strong melodies under her belt. That being said, most of the melodies on Tortured Poets Department don’t really employ any of these tactics. There’s a lot of melodic ideas that she seems to reuse. Many of her melodies seem to follow this structure:
- Phrase A, Phrase A (repeat), Phrase A (repeat), Phrase A (repeat except the very last note maybe).
- She also doesn’t seem to play with consonance/dissonance in her melodies that much. In the melodic pattern I mentioned above, she’ll sing a super repetitive Phrase A that mostly lingers on the tonic (or some other consonant note) only to resolve on another consonant note on the last phrase.
There are also times where her melodic phrases seem completely unrelated to each other and don’t engage in a conversation — they just feel like fractured melodic phrases that have been frankensteined together. The phrases often don’t have much in common in terms of rhythm or pitch. Therefore they feel disjointed and don’t employ any tension and release.
I know you could say that a lot of her melodies are sort of “modal rap” (rap that uses a limited set of notes in the scale), but I’d argue even rap employs a lot of similar tactics. Rap has a lot of rhythmic tension and release with emphasis on certain words/phrases and inflections that can surprise and satisfy the listener’s expectations. There is definitely a craft in creating a good flow. Even going with this “modal rap” idea, her selection of notes in the scale is often sort of odd. Honestly, there’s just too much consonance in her “modal rap” phrases. She also uses the major 7th too much and at times that don’t really seem to make sense with the melody.
Overall, there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of intent behind her melodies as they don’t seem to employ any tools like I mentioned to make them work together.
It seems to my ears like she wrote most the lyrics to the album before writing the melodies. I will admit that it is extremely difficult to conform pre-written lyrics into a solid, catchy melody. I hardly ever dare do this myself. I can respect the effort in trying to do so, but most of the time I just don’t think it works (props to anyone that can pull that off though).
Any thoughts? Also as I mentioned before, I’d love to hear if anyone has any other good melodic tools I should know about!
