This series on perfect pop songs came from a throwaway question from a podcast with William Wittman and Steve DeMott on songwriting. To wrap up the podcast I asked them what their perfect pop song was. I’ll leave it to you to track down their choices by listening to the podcast.
My response was Sunday Girl by Blondie, I didn’t offer much explanation and there wasn’t a lot of discussion beyond nods of approval but seeing where this idea has gone with this series I’m going to be true to the idea’s roots. I’m going to be talking about a pop production, not a pop production. The emphasis is on what makes it a good pop song, not a good production.
Central to everything I’m going to say is that looking at the three elements identified in Russ’ first article in this series - song, arrangement and production, I’m going to wilfully all but ignore the last two because for something to be a great record, and especially a great pop record, all you need is the song. The other two help but ultimately don’t matter. Without the song you’ve got nothing.
What Makes A Great Pop Song?
If the question had been what is the greatest song of the modern era (let’s say post Elvis) I’d probably be answering with God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. It’s so musically sophisticated, I love playing it on the piano just to admire the harmonic structure. It succeeds where so much music with “hard chords” (excuse the technical language!) fails in that those chord changes are there because they have to be. They aren’t a contrivance to satisfy theory nerds.
However there’s something which stops me thinking of it as the perfect pop song. It’s not brainless enough!
I’ve been playing in a band for the first time in a few years and unusually for me I’m not playing bass, my preferred instrument, instead I’m playing keys. This is a chance for me to get off my root note and explore harmony a bit more. We play all sorts of things, covers but nothing too obvious, we don’t do the wedding band “required set list”. And don’t get those well paid weddings either…
Something we do play is quite a bit of reggae. Really simple two-chord stuff, and in spite of my trying to occasionally pop in something more interesting, it’s always a mistake. Simple, done well, is good. Straight majors and minors is all there is room for in some music and that’s OK. Sometimes it’s great!
Catchy And Predictable, But Not Annoying
Pop songs have to be catchy and predictable. There’s a fine line here because if a song is too predictable it irritates the listener but it surprises me just how predictable a song can be and still avoid irritation. For me a pop song has to speak to an impatient teenager who will just roll their eyes at anything which isn’t utterly direct.
To take two contrasting examples. “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” is a great song. Burt Bacharach is one of those songwriters who manages to write songs which just have an inherent completeness. They are catchy, the words are sincere but funny and it is so melodic. But using this as an example, there are those moments where the melody jumps away from the key, or he uses a bar of 2/4 to keep the listener guessing, and the production is so sweet as to be cloying. I love it. But my teenage self would have scoffed in derision. To qualify, for me it needs attitude.
A great example of the kind of directness and attitude I’m talking about which sails so close to annoying that it really distils the kind of attitude I’m talking about is ‘Chaise Long’ by Wet Leg. It’s a beat, a bass and spoken, semi-nonsense lyrics. After what feels like an age, the riff drops and that’s about as far as the song goes. It’s repetitive, faintly insulting and if you play it at a pub gig, the crowd lose their minds! It’s not big, it’s not clever, but it works.
What I’m talking about is Punk. I was never a punk, I’m too young to have caught punk the first time round but I had a prog phase in my late teens and if I’d been old enough in ’77, I’d have been in the corner clutching my Yes album and feeling upset as the kids pogo’ed and gobbed on each other.
But Punk isn’t music, it’s an attitude and the sea change that happened with punk reset the expectations around pop music. Directness and simplicity were brought back to being front and centre where they belong. I find the post-punk era to be one of the most interesting because it generated some of the most accessible and interesting pop music since the early 60s. Some of it managed to get back to musical sophistication, but wearing it lightly. Squeeze come to mind as a good example.
The Song
My choice comes from this New Wave period. Sunday Girl is my choice because it does exactly what a pop song should. It is simple and direct. It’s catchy. It’s predictable enough to satisfy on first listen but not so repetitive as to be annoying. And lyrically it’s fairly meaningless, even if you’re not listening to the French language version. And it’s got handclaps (no ‘serious’ music ever has handclaps!)
Interestingly the song doesn’t follow the classic structure in that it doesn’t really have a chorus beyond the “Sunday Girl” refrain at the end of each verse. The verses are clearly verses, the “hurry up” section feels like a pre chorus for a chorus which never arrives. Musically it’s a straight ahead 3 chord affair, as it should be. To avoid the repetition of relentless one, four and five of this approach it throws in a single key change from D to E at the beginning of the second verse, thankfully not at the end (Westlife can stay safely on their bar stools!). The middle 8 does what it should and jumps to the minor six and wanders back via some ‘different chords’ (gasps) to the tonic ready for the next verse. An instrumental break and some ad libbing leads us to the end without the “chorus to fade’ that I think of as a songwriter’s admission of being out of ideas.
So 3 minutes of just enough to get the job done without any unnecessary fuss or bother.
The Arrangement
As for the arrangement, it’s more sophisticated than it appears, but not by much. It starts with a fanfare of triumphant alternating 1, 5 ,1 ,5 chords. It repeats this 4 times, which feels like 2 times too many to me - one of my few criticisms of this song.
The verse is straight ahead rock drums with 8s on the hat and a fat dry snare on 2 and 4 combined with muted 8ths on rhythm guitar. It’s been done a million times in other songs and I still find it irresistible. There are other things hanging around in the mix including a line doubling the melody, something I’d reject as a terrible idea in a session but actually it works. All records should have a signature sound and in this case it’s a thin guitar with fast, deep tremolo playing those opening chords again under “Sunday Girl” underlining the hook.
The Production
The mix is dry and feels very L, C or R with everything being hard panned or right up the middle. There’s not much happening below 100Hz and compared to a modern production it feels very bass light but I suppose it’s an example of not missing what isn’t there. The vocal production is most telling as the compression is, by modern standards, light with a couple of words disappearing altogether in those pre-automation days. Bits of sibilance remain which would be hunted down and removed today and most interestingly to me, in the “Baby, I would like to go out tonight” section where Debbie Harry loses the sweetness of the rest of the vocal as she moves to the top of her register, things get much more nasal. Today this would get mixers reaching for the dynamic EQ but this is character. It’s what her voice sounds like. She’s from New York!
Perfect pop songs have to have enough attitude to engage disaffected teenagers but enough integrity to keep the interest as that teenager becomes an adult. Direct enough to survive a short attention span but with (just) enough content to maintain the attention of a more patient listener. And it’s got to be credible enough not to be embarrassing if you put it on at a party!