What Is A Song?

What is a song? That seems like a question we shouldn't have to ask, but if we're being honest with ourselves, I have a feeling not many of us have given a lot of thought as to the answer. It feels obvious, because we spend so much of our time listening to songs, that it falls under the Supreme Court dictate on pornography; we know it when we hear it.

At a fundamental level, a song is nothing more than a collection of musical ideas, but we know it's more than that. There's something magical about a great song that extends beyond chord progressions or notes on staff paper. We can study theory our entire lives and not be able to use it to explain why songs move us the way they do. There is something ethereal about songs, something only a few people have ever been able to be able to tap into again and again.

Songs are music, so it would seem like people who write music are writing songs. But is that really the case? When we look at any number of rock and/or metal bands, we see a fairly common structure where an instrumentalist will write and compile the riffs, while the singer will then write the lyrics and melody to sit atop. That leaves us to question if they are both writing the song, if only one of them is doing the heavy lifting, or if it all depends on the nature of the song when it is finished.

I once got in trouble for arguing that a guitar player in a major band wasn't necessarily a 'songwriter', because it could be said he was just compiling riffs. This was not said about Metallica, although the assembly-line nature of their riff collages is now very well known, and does give some credence to my line of thinking. No, what I was getting at is a fundamental truth about songs that rock and metal fans don't like to admit to themselves, because it works against the nature of the music we listen to.

Songs are defined by their melodies.

In the majority of cases, that is the truth. The vocal and the vocal melody are the identity of the song that the casual audience will know, in most instances. While there will always be songs like "Iron Man" known for a riff, or "We Will Rock You" where the drum beat (despite its simplicity) sets the tone, the majority of songs exist as the vocal, if for no other reason than that is the human connection we have with music. It's far easier for the listener to sing along with a song than it is to hum a bass-line.

But this extends further. If you look online, you can find covers of nearly any song in the world being done in different styles. If you take a pop song and give it heavy guitars and double-bass drumming, it will still sound like the same song. If you take a metal song and play it on piano, it will still sound like the same song. You can change nearly everything about the instrumental, and the song will still be identifiable as the same composition, so long as the main melody remains the same.

Think about the inverse. If you take most of your favorite songs and put a different lyric and vocal melody on them, would you consider them to be the same song? That was inadvertently the case when Beyonce and Kelly Clarkson were essentially given the same backing track. The results were "Halo" and "Already Gone", two songs that sounded similar, yes, but they were hardly the same. That's for the simple reason that we only have so many notes, and it's the inflection of the human voice as we put words to those notes that gives songs their unique identity. You can almost always identify what song a singer at karaoke is performing, no matter how bad they might be.

That isn't to say guitar players and the like aren't important, but it does go to the question of why singers are so often viewed as being the face of a band. They are the one piece of the song that cannot be removed. You can perform songs acapella and they work. You can't perform most songs without the singer and have them hold up. That simply isn't the format our popular music is written in. And given how infrequently a purely instrumental song becomes popular, that feels like a more universal truth than merely a happenstance of how the system has been set up.

That isn't to say instrumentalists aren't important, or that you can't prefer guitar riffs to vocal lines if that's your thing. I'm merely musing on the nature of what we listen to, and how sometimes our communities get siloed off to such a degree we lose touch with the wider picture. We are the types who keep making lists of the greatest guitarists based primarily on their ability to solo, when the fact of the matter is that not only are solos only a fraction of playing a song, but guitar itself is usually not the prime factor in making a song what it is. Listen to any sports arena chanting the riff to "Seven Nation Army" and tell me how many guitar players have ever played a solo that has moved so many people.

The magic of music isn't in dexterity and amazing people with flashy skills, it's in writing and playing songs that stick with us for our entire lives. Those are the songs that mean everything, the ones that will live forever. It's worth taking a moment to really think about what we're remembering, and why we're remembering it.