Ah, the bridge….the most misunderstood, puzzling, hardest-to-identify, hardest-to-write part of a song. Apparently, in Nashville, they have ‘Bridge Specialists’ – songwriters who are called into sessions specifically to write bridges after the rest of the song is done. So if the pros struggle with bridges, what chance do the rest of us have?
The reason bridges are so hard to write is that their job (and in some ways their ONLY job) is to be different from the rest of the song – to bring something new and unexpected and maybe even a bit shocking to that song so that the ears of the listener don’t fall asleep after a few verse/prechorus/chorus repetitions. One way to think of a bridge is a ‘song within a song,’ so it’s not surprising that writers, after finishing the rest of the song, say, “Damn – now I have to write a mini-song inside this song that’s different enough to be surprising but similar enough to not mess it all up.” Hence the cursing about bridges. Hence, Bridge Specialists.
There are a few standard tricks that songwriters fall back on when writing an effective bridge. The most common is the key change – the ear of the listener ‘wakes up’ at the jarring sound of chords that are outside of the key of the rest of the song. And it doesn’t even have to be a full key change – there are lots of bridges that stay in the same key, but include a single chord in a different key. This is enough of a shock to keep the listener awake and ready to hear the chorus again with fresh ears.
What many songwriters don’t realize is that bridges can also be WAY LESS than that – they can literally be any element the listener hasn’t heard before. Rap breaks (featuring a guest rapper) almost always function as bridges, in a way that guitar solos used to (for those of us old enough to remember guitar solos). A lot of modern pop songs rely on studio production effects rather than lyrics to take listeners to a different place, so that the bridge isn’t so much a ‘song within a song’ as it is an instrumental break with new production elements. That’s why thinking of bridges as songs-within-songs can be limiting. Think of them as ‘anything new,’ from a different strumming pattern to a different time signature to a long ‘oooh’ to complete silence (although complete silence is risky – people may assume the song is over and start clapping.)
Having said all this, I’m now going to go listen to “Easy” by The Commodores – with a bridge so good that any writer other than Lionel Ritchie would have pulled it out and made a whole new song out of it.