02.08.07 Counterpoint With Rufus

When I first began visiting Nashville - while I was still in college - to get my foot in the writing door, I met a brilliant man who was very generous with his time: Billy Ray Hearn, head honcho at EMI for many years.  I’ll never forget the encouragements and critiques he lavished on me, or the concise words of writing wisdom.  Just one nugget:  Good counterpoint is most of a great song.

Counterpoint in music is the relationship of two independent parts.  Say, a sung melody line and the piano accompaniment.  What Mr.Hearn meant by good counterpoint was shaping each part to compliment the others and not undermine them, and making sure the counterpoint fits the mood you want to create.  One way of achieving good counterpoint in song writing is to pay attention to the relative movement of each part.

In English I mean, for example, not writing a constant sixteenth note piano accompaniment to play under an equally busy and unrelenting vocal melody IF frantic isn’t the feeling you want to inject listeners with.  Instead, consider learning from Rufus Wainwright’s Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.  When vocal phrases are long and so are the notes that comprise them, the accompaniment compliments with more movement, more notes, shorter notes.  When the melody moves, the accompaniment takes a break, gets out of the way, note values are greater, and there are fewer of them.

Just one example of how good counterpoint contributes to the greatness of a song...and the listener doesn’t even notice the game being played.