Once More Into the Bridge

My last post, looking at some musical bridges I love, opened with the assertion that their prevalence in pop and rock songcraft seems to have begun with the Beatles. It was a gut feeling that I checked against my time-honored method—a quick skim through a few songs that popped into my head—but it nagged at me that I really didn't know for sure. I figured some smart people of my acquaintance would know more. So I asked on Twitter and on Facebook if it's true that Beatles essentially invented that convention. I got some fascinating responses that made me rethink and clarify my position and revisit a number of songs by the Beatles and others. I especially relished hearing from Franklin Bruno, a singer/songwriter and academic who is literally writing a book on the subject titled The Inside of the Tune: The Bridge in Popular Music from 'St. Louis Blues' to 'Single Ladies'.

After some back and forth with Bruno and others, it was clear I had been imprecise in my thinking and wording. I was imagining that the bridge or middle eight as practiced by the Beatles and other post-1950s writers was something distinct from the "B" in the classic AABA form of most pop standards and theater songs. Furthermore, I was assuming that the form the Beatles had minted and made into a new standard was essentially ABABCAB, or verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus, a very common pop/rock song form you can hear everywhere from "Crazy" (the Gnarls Barkley one) to "Ways to Be Wicked," from "Accidents Will Happen" to "Can't Change Me." 

Upon closer examination, it seems that the Beatles didn't do a lot of songs in this form after all, though they may have been one group among many that helped popularize it in the mid-1960s. I certainly thought of them when I was thinking about bridges because they are indeed masters of the middle eight—it's a consistent strength, all the way from "Well, my heart went boom" to "You're asking me will my love grow"—but it turns out that most of their songs with these amazing bridges don't have full, distinct verses-and-choruses, and vice versa.

Instead most of their songs—like countless other early rock and doo-wop and Brill Building and Motown songs—tend to have A sections that end with a refrain, sometimes repeated, from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "Come Together," from "Things We Said Today" to "Good Morning," often followed by a distinctive middle eight (often repeated). This is squarely in the Tin Pan Alley tradition of putting the title in the last line of each A stanza—think "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," "God Bless the Child," etc. (Another popular alternative: Opening with the title line.) Some of the Beatles' refrains are longer than a mere tagline, so that something like "Please Please Me" or "She Loves You" might be seen as borderline cases—they gesture in the direction of verse/chorus, if they're not quite all the way there:

Last night I said these words to my girl
I know you never even try, girl
C'mon (C'mon), c'mon (C'mon), c'mon (C'mon), c'mon (C'mon)
Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you

The last two lines there aren't quite a chorus unto themselves, but they're on their way to splitting off to be their own thing, as we'll see. Indeed, it now seems abundantly clear to me that the ABABCAB form developed out of the AABA, as its A sections began to split into distinct verses and choruses, new A's and B's—and likewise, that the C's of the former are direct descendants of what would have been the B's of the latter. It is still no clearer to me exactly how or when this elaborated form arose, and whether it can be credited to any single writer or band. But I did find it illuminating to a) Identify which Beatles songs might qualify, and b) While I was at it, take note of some weird outliers that weren't simply AABAs or verse/chorus forms. Without further ado, here is my survey of Beatles verse-chorus-bridge songs.

Misfit Toys

The first is already a bit of a cheat, because it opens with the chorus. "It Won't Be Long," which kicks off their second album, With the Beatles, is one of those early efforts that sounds fresh from the workshop of the Lennon/McCartney on-the-job apprenticeship, where they tried out all kinds of things to see what would stick, and turned out a number of curios alongside their slam-dunk early hits. This lovable misfit toy box includes such half derivative, half inspired experiments as "I'll Get You," "Ask Me Why," "Hold Me Tight," "I'll Be Back," "Not a Second Time," and a few others. "It Won't Be Long" is closer to a swaggering success, but it is still a bit weird: After blasting out the catchy call-and-response chorus, it tears off an oddly shaped verse that's more like a vamp, repeats the chorus, then lands on the breezy "Since you left me" bridge, twice, treating it almost like a second chorus. This is one reason I probably assumed the Beatles "invented" the bridge: They tend to make these as good or better than anything else in the song: Think of "Why she had to go," "Life is very short," "I want her everywhere," etc.

The next real contender for the verse/chorus/bridge crown also begins with the chorus. "Tell Me Why," on the Hard Day's Night album, is not a favorite of mine, but there it is, with a very clear chorus, verse, chorus, and a rather jankity bridge ("Well, I beg you on my bended knees"). The album also contains two borderline cases: the odd, arresting "When I Get Home," which has a clear bridge but whose verse/chorus distinction could be argued (Does "Whoa-oa-oa I" count as a chorus?), and the intriguing "I'll Be Back," which also has a clear middle eight, but as for the rest of the song—which is the verse and which the chorus?

From the underrated Beatles for Sale, I might count the darkly delicious waltz "Baby's in Black," even though the bridge is just the brief two-line turnaround (with one of my favorite Lennon-McCartney harmonies anywhere), "Oh, how long will it take/Till she sees the mistake she has made," and it's inserted between the verse and the chorus (so is it a pre-chorus?). With "Eight Days a Week," I'd argue that you can start to hear a version of the classic ABABCAB template.

Ooh I need your love, babe
Guess you know it's true
Hope you need my love, babe
Just like I need you

Hold me, love me
Hold me, love me
Ain't got nothin' but love, babe
Eight days a week

Clearly these two sections fill separate roles that look and sound a lot like a distinct verse and chorus. I could see the argument that they are as bound together in one form as the "A" section of any standard, but there is clearly some mitosis-type division starting to take root here. Which would make the bridge, "Eight days a week, I lo-o-o-ove you," a C rather than B.

Test Cases

Help!, similarly, has just two examples, and they're both arguable. "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" again starts with the chorus, so if we call that the B, the form would be something like BABABCBCAB; also again, because the A and B here are over the same chords and they flow into each other seamlessly, I could see an argument that they constitute an A by themselves, though the way they're moved around here, a bit like modular furniture, speaks to their segmentation. The towering "Ticket to Ride" is another test case of whether you consider the title phrase ("She's got a ticket to ride" x 3, plus "and she don't care") a chorus distinct from the verse measures that precede it; I'm very much on the fence on this one, and inclined to see this one, more than "Eight Days" or "Lose That Girl," as a bit closer to an AABA. I include it in this inventory because it is definitely on the continuum, and falls along a trend line where A sections are starting to sound more verse/chorus-like.

Rubber Soul also has just two examples you can point to, one crystal clear ("Girl") and the other arguable: Is the verse/chorus of "Wait" really just another of these A forms with two parts? And is the song's third part ("I feel as though you ought to know") a bridge or a post-chorus? As with "It Won't Be Long," I'm not sure what to call these various sections, even though there seem to be three of them, not two.

Revolver has some interesting song forms and some of the band's best middle eights, but the ABABCAB form isn't much in evidence here. You could make a case for "I'm Only Sleeping," but the candidate for the chorus ("Please don't wake me, no, don't shake me") seems pretty clearly to be the conclusion of the form that precedes it, so I'd put this one closer to an AABA.

The first two songs on their next album are the only ones in this ballpark: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" has a clear bridge on top of its verse and chorus, but it's entirely instrumental (the brass interlude with the laugh track); and "With a Little Help From My Friends" is as close to a clean ABABCAB (plus a CB tag) as we've yet seen in the Beatles catalogue since "Girl." But for all the other formal daring on this record—a lot of it in the arrangements and instrumental breaks—the song architecture on Sgt. Pepper's is mostly verse/chorus and AABA as far as the ear can hear.

Magical Mystery Tour's "I Am the Walrus" is a strong contender here, the terseness of its chorus—and the oddness of its "Sitting in an English garden" bridge—notwithstanding. And while this Genius page presents a kind of case for "Hello Goodbye," I'm not sold; it all sounds pretty samey-same to me.

The White Album has the most examples, but then it is a double-length album. "Back in the U.S.S.R." is as clear as day; the would-be A section is now split into a very clear verse/chorus or A/B alternation, and that Beach Boys bridge (the C) is one for the ages. Even more clear, possibly the prototypical example from their entire catalogue, with an inarguably clear verse, chorus, and bridge: "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." I hesitate, but only slightly, to include "Julia," whose verse and chorus sound very similar but are in fact distinct, and whose bridge ("Her hair of floating sky") is transcendent; the unorthodox form is best illustrated as ABBCBABB.

By the time we get to Abbey Road, with songs spliced into mini-suites, we're seeing new forms ("You Never Give Me Your Money" could be considered AABCD, give or take) and even non-forms: "I Want You" is more an incantation than a proper song. Let It Be—which also has no proper ABABCABs—is typified by strong verse/chorus offerings ("Let It Be," "Get Back," "I Me Mine"), an exquisite AABA folk ditty ("Two of Us"), and run-on jams like "I've Got a Feeling" and "Dig a Pony."

Among the Fabs' non-album tracks, it's slim pickings but for "Don't Let Me Down," with its anomalously sunny bridge "I'm in love for the first time," and "The Ballad of John and Yoko," with its "Saving up some money for a rainy day" bridge (and here I would take seriously the argument that the verse-and-chorus are properly heard as a single A, a la "Ticket to Ride").

Bottom line: The Beatles were clearly bridge masters, but not only did they not mint the verse/chorus/bridge form, they only fitfully employed it. The above survey comes up with about half a dozen clear, inarguable examples from a vast song catalogue (227 by some counts). So the search continues for how the ABABCAB form and its variations gained critical mass in pop and rock songwriting. And, as I mentioned earlier, I plan to look at some other Beatles songcraft curiosities I uncovered while doing this brief survey. More to come! Until then, take it to the bridge.