When you’re writing a pop song, you really only have three jobs.
1. Write a melody for the verse.
2. Write a melody for the chorus.
3. Add a kinda slowed down and slightly different melody, and play it as a bridge before the last chorus.
That’s it. That’s a pop song.
So when a song does more than that, it really stands out to me.
There are a lot of ways this bare minimum formula for a pop song can be exceeded. The lyrics can be great and meaningful. It can be beautifully sung. The melodies can just happen to be particularly good. Any of these can elevate a song.
But I’m particularly partial to a song that has more than the 2.5 required melodies to it. Because it’s putting in effort that it doesn’t have to.
Some great examples of songs like this are “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, “Famous Last Words” by My Chemical Romance, and “Car Radio” by Twenty One Pilots. Listen to any of these songs, and you can have four or more different melodies stuck in your head afterwards, all from the same song.
This overachieving is why I have to give some credit to Pink’s latest radio hit, “Beautiful Trauma”. It may not be the greatest song of all-time, or the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of its generation, but it’s a pop song that manages to include several different melodies that all manage to be catchy, and all manage to thematically match their subject matter very well.
For example, this song includes:
A haunting, ethereal opening verse that looks on the past with a sense of sad nostalgia.
We were on fire.
I slashed your tires.
It’s like we burn so bright, we burn out.
The verse right after that where the melody picks up the pace, literally on the line:
Cause I’ve been on the run so long they can’t find me
(Get it? Picking up the pace? Like running? But also the song goes faster?).
The song introduces a more up-beat, party-like element to the song that mirrors the highs of up-and-down rocky relationships, and gives the song the back-and-forth feel of a real tenuous relationship.
A slightly different haunting, ethereal melody for the pre-chorus as the song brings in more sad elements and talks about things like “rock bottom” and “beautiful trauma,” which again, results in the tone of the song and melody fitting the lyrical message.
And, finally, a chorus that is energetic and repetitive, which I think is fairly fitting for a song about unhealthy, on-again/off-again relationships. Lots of excitement and passion. Lots of pain and heartbreak. Lots of doing it all over again.
I’m not saying Pink is a musical Shakespeare, where every little line and melody has an intentional meaning. But it’s there.
The song has multiple, multiple melodies, and they all really work within the mood and context of the song. It’s easy to do it once or twice, but this song does it over and over again. And the end result is an ear-worm that will get its verse stuck in your head. And then later, the chorus will be stuck in your head. And then later, the other verse will be stuck in your head.
It has all the catchiness of four or five different songs, because it has the melodic strength of four or five different songs.
