Parts of a pop songs : verse, bridge, chorus and middle eight
The structure of a pop song we listen to the radio, stereo or television is made up of different separate parts. The structure of modern and contemporary “song form” has been evolving in the 50 years and more. Otherwise you can note that today some of the songs we listen to have the same structure of the first years of the xx century.
Let us see these main parts of which pop songs are made:
Common structures of pop songs
The most used forms in pop are combinations of the above listed parts.
In some songs, there are all, in other ones, just some of them. However, I can say we find the chorus and the verse quite ever. So those are the fundamental parts of a song.
When I compose, I like to put them all. Often I note in many songs there is not a bridge or variation but this scheme seems to be usual.
Considerations about the structures of pop songs
In the past (particularly in the fifty, sixty, and seventy years), songs had much more complicated structures and sometimes much simpler ones.
Pink Floyd and above all Genesis (the best groups of seventy years) were, for example, in the top of selling with songs being in great demand because of their structure, breaking the above listed schemes. They had very long introductions, time changes, modulations, instrumental parts several minutes long and so on….
Otherwise, Beatles, Bob Marley and Ray Charles often created songs with an easy structure, taken from simple blues or from an “harmonic turn” repetition of a few chords varying the text.
