Why Elton takes 2½ minutes to get to the chorus

this video is sponsored by the vidami youtube looper pedal stick around to the end to see how i used it to transcribe tiny dancer most pop and rock songs from the last 70 years have used very similar verse chorus structures and if you ask a songwriting guru what the most important rule is of structuring a pop song they'll say don't bore us get to the chorus almost every pop and rock song you can think of will get to the chorus within the first minute of its run time [Music] [Music] some songs actually get to the chorus before the first 30 seconds is over but elton john's 1972 classic tiny dancer doesn't get to its course within the first minute it doesn't even get to the chorus within its second minute by the time we first hear elton telling tiny dancer to hold him closer we are two minutes and 33 seconds into the song [Music] some songs have already ended by that point so how does tiny dancer avoid boring us how does elton hold off the chorus for so long without it sounding odd or disjointed well it's all down to how tiny dancer is structured like i mentioned earlier most pop and rock songs from the last 60 or 70 years have followed a fairly similar structure an intro of usually no more than 20 seconds verse 1 a pre-chorus and then the chorus then we get the verse pre-chorus in chorus again and then usually a bridge or sometimes an instrumental and finally the song will end with a double or perhaps even triple chorus now according to this interview clip when bernie toppen first gave the lyrics to elton tiny dance's structure was something closer to this typical song structure however elton decided it would be more effective to put the first two verses together effectively pushing back the chorus yeah when you look at it on the words blue jean baby l.a lady seamstress of the bad pretty eyed pirate smile you marry a music man ballerina as soon as you get the word ballerina you know it's not going to be fast it's got to be sort of gentle and and sort of quite slow so i mean like the way it's written here is it's a verse and it's a chorus or a middle light and a chorus then another verse i just sort of ran it through and put two verses together then a middle like then a chorus and then back to the sort of thing always [Music] [Music] slowly [Music] it seems that with tiny dancer elton really didn't care what a typical pop song would do and instead let the song take its time for example when the chorus does finally arrive our patient is rewarded with not just one chorus but a double chorus even though this winds up extending the song's already long run time by a further half a minute elton wanted this song to unfold slowly like a movie to build up to its chorus so when we finally arrive there it's a moment of release and triumph potentially the most important section of thailand answer is the section before the chorus when this section arrives for the first time at 2 minutes and 12 seconds in it's the first significant change we've heard in the song so far so this section is acting to remind the listener there is something else coming if you just listen a little bit longer up until the start of this section the song has a flowing legato sound to it but when the pre-chorus begins this flow is interrupted by these bright staccato piano chords but coupled with this dynamic shift we also get a shift in key whereas the song so far has been squarely in the key of c major this section jumps to the parallel minor key of c minor so when we're hit with this staccato a flat chord it's the first time we've heard anything beyond the key of c major which certainly helps to recapture our attention [Music] this key change though serves two important roles in tiny dancer it not only contributes to this much needed mood shift that we've just discussed but it also plays a major part in what makes tiny dance's chorus so epic and climactic this is because when the chorus enters the key actually shifts back to c major so in this moment as we're entering the chorus the tonality takes on a really bright brilliant sound because we're shifting from c minor to c major [Music] elton discussed the writing process of tiny dancer again in 2019 tiny dancer has a really long lyric a very cinematic lyric it lent itself to a long build up the middleweight sets up well then it slows down for a moment when i say softly slowly that line suggests a big chorus bernie's lyric took such a long time to get to the chorus i thought the chorus had better be something special when it finally arrives as elton mentions here just before the chorus the music slows down with the lyric i say softly slowly [Music] beyond being a brilliant bit of word painting this slowdown acts to stoke our anticipation of the chorus it feels like the musical equivalent of a rollercoaster slowing down just before it plummets down the track it keeps us waiting just that little bit longer so we've talked about what makes tiny dancers chorus so climactic but how does the structure of the song actually keep us listening long enough to hear it well it's all down to the verses see when you look closely the verse of tiny dancer is actually structured like a song in miniature we get this first line which we could call the a section the next line is a repeat of that same melody and harmony [Music] then for the third line the melody in harmony changes giving us a different line which we could call the b [Music] section [Music] and then finally for the fourth line we return to the a [Music] with section tiny dancer in my hand so this kind of makes each verse sound like we're getting a verse a middle eight and then a sample chorus particularly as the title of the song is in this line so if you look at it this way tiny dancer does give us something that resembles a chorus in the first minute of the song albeit a brief preview of the true chorus this aaba structure found in the verse is what's called 32 bar form or american songbook form whereas today most songs follow the typical verse pre-chorus chorus form that we were talking about earlier in the 1920s 30s and 40s this 32 bar form was the structure of choice you'll find it or at least a variant of it in most timpan alley and american songbook classics like over the rainbow i got rhythm blue moon or anything goes although this structure is still sometimes used in modern pop music for example in bob dylan's make you feel my love made famous by adele so tiny dancer's structure does a lot to keep us listening long enough to hear the chorus at two and a half minutes in but having a chorus in the first minute isn't the only convention that tiny dancer ignores tiny dancer is also much longer than a typical pop song whereas most pop songs are about three to four minutes long tiny dancer is almost six and a half minutes long now of course generally these songwriting conventions are followed to make songs more commercially viable if your song sticks within a three minute run time and gets to the chorus in the first minute it's going to be more likely to be played on the radio songs are rarely played on the radio that break the four-minute mark songs that are longer than four minutes will often be edited down into a radio edit to make them more commercially viable or sometimes the dj will just cut the song short themselves by fading it down but tiny dancer doesn't have a radio edit the only version of this song is the album version which stands at 6 minutes and 12 seconds long and radio djs can't even fade it down around the three minute mark because that would mean you only get one chorus due to tiny dancers less than commercial structure and run time it initially didn't do that well in the charts only reaching number 41 in the usa when most of elton songs at that time would chart in the top 10 if not at number one the song wasn't even released as a single in the uk although it did have some success in other countries reaching number 13 in australia and number 19 in canada but over the years tiny dance's popularity has grown to the point that today it's often regarded as one of elton's most popular songs but whereas other elton songs like benny and the jets and goodbye yellow brick road reached half a million u.s sales within a year of release it wasn't until 2005 that tiny dancer finally hit half a million u.s sales it then reached 1 million sales by 2011 and 3 million in 2018. typical songwriting habits and conventions can be a great framework to refine songwriting but they shouldn't be relied upon as a foolproof formula and tiny dancer is a great testament to this even though a three-minute run time might have suited songs like goodbye yellow brick road and crocodile rock elton knew that the arrangement of a song should serve the song and this is exactly why tiny dancer is six minutes long and why it doesn't get to the chorus until two and a half minutes in slowly [Music] count the headlights on the a big sort of fast not that fast but it's quite heavy then the drums are in well they will be by that time and it's it is and then it just drops again and goes back to that first foot so like i mentioned right at the start i'm going to show you now how i used the vidami youtube looper pedal to learn and transcribe thai dancer for this video the vidami pedal allows you to conveniently control a youtube video using your foot usually when i'm learning or transcribing a song by ear i'll be sat at the piano like this and i'll actually have to keep twisting around to control the playback on the laptop so if there's a particular part of the song that i want to work on i've got to keep turning around rewinding it playing it again rewinding it what the vidami does it makes it so much more convenient with the pedal you can play or pause the music you can rewind it you can slow down the playback speed and along with that the best function of all you can loop sections of the music so let me show you how it works so imagine that i want to learn this segment of tiny dancer this bit [Music] so obviously that little string feel goes by really quick so without the pedal i'd have to keep manually rewinding it going back trying to work it out rewinding it etc but with the pedal i can just loop it right so all i have to do to loop the segment is hit the loop button once at the beginning of where i want the loop to start and then hit it again at the end and it will automatically start looping that section for me [Music] so now that it's looping i can just focus on trying to work out what the notes are on the keyboard [Music] so now that i've used the vidami to work out that string motif i can fit it into the song [Music] use the link in the description to get 10 off the vidama youtube looper pedal thanks very much and as always thank you to everybody who supports me on patreon including the names you can see on screen now and abigail allen andre science diagram andrew andrew brown andy deacon austin barrett austin russell bob mckinstry britney parker cameron oliveila chris cabell christopher ryan david defunderford david lee fish dr darren wicks elena scorchenko s ben hansen eugene leroy eyes fd hodor gillamo latona james ko j.a cockensparger joe watson jonas soderstrom justin vigger lavender monroes mark height melody composer squared michael vivian nancy gillard paul muller paul hazel peter dunphy piott schmiolofsky roger clay sam lin steve daly sean kennedy tim beaker tim payne toot volte vidad flowers and vladimir kodakov [Music] you

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 504,633

Keywords: music theory, chorus, analysis, sheet music, elton, long song, song structure, don't bore us

Id: Mf3-8KlZ3wE

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020