"Most of our songs come from imagination," said Joe McCarthy. "A song-writer's mind is ever alert for something new. What might pass as a casual remark to an outsider, might be a great idea to a writer. For instance, a very dear young lady friend might have said, 'You made me love you—I didn't want to do it.' Of course no young lady friend said that to me—I just imagined it. And then I went right on and imagined what that young lady would have said if she had followed that line of thought to a climax."
"It's the chance remark that counts a lot to the lyric writer," said Ballard MacDonald. "You might say something that you would forget the next minute—while I might seize that phrase and work over it until I had made it a lyric."
But, however the original idea comes—whether it creeps up in a chance remark of a friend, or the national mood of the moment is carefully appraised and expressed, or seized "out of the air," let us suppose you have an idea, and are ready to write your song. The very first thing you do, nine chances out of ten, is to follow the usual method of song-writers:
2. Write Your Chorus First
The popular song is only as good as its chorus. For whistling purposes there might just as well be no verses at all. But of course you must have a first verse to set your scene and lead up to your chorus, and a second verse to finish your effect and give you the opportunity to pound your chorus home. Therefore you begin to write your chorus around your big idea.
This idea is expressed in one line—your title, your catchy line, your "idea line," if you like—and if you will turn to the verses of the songs reproduced in these chapters you will be able to determine about what percentage of times the idea line is used to introduce the chorus. But do not rest content with this examination; carry your investigation to all the songs on your piano. Establish for yourself, by this laboratory method, how often the idea line is used as a chorus introduction.
Whether your idea line is used to introduce your chorus or not, it is usually wise to end your chorus with it. Most choruses—but not all, as "Put on your Old Grey Bonnet," would suggest—end with the idea line, on the theory that the emphatic spots in any form of writing are at the beginning and the end—and of these the more emphatic is the end. Therefore, you must now concentrate your chorus to bring in that idea line as the very last line.
3. Make the Chorus Convey Emotion
As we saw in the previous chapter, a lyric is a set of verses that conveys emotion. The purpose of the first verse is to lead up to the emotion—which the chorus expresses. While, as I shall demonstrate later, a story may be proper to the verses, a story is rarely told in the chorus. I mean, of course, a story conveyed by pure narrative, for emotion may convey a story by sheer lyrical effect. Narrative is what you must strive to forget in a chorus—in your chorus you must convey emotion swiftly—that is, with a punch.
While it is impossible for anyone to tell you how to convey emotion, one can point out one of the inherent qualities of emotional speech.