In preparation for my 2008 song-a-week project, I wanted some numbers to give me an idea of how much writing I would need to do. Using the 80/20 rule—only 20 percent of my writing will make the cut while 80 percent will go into the waste basket—here is what I came up with.
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen averages 281 words per song. Nothing Like The Sun by Sting averages 206. The Beatles’ Abbey Road averages 102 and Let It Be averages 139.
This means that if a song has between 100-300 words, I’ll need to write 500-1500 words. Not a very difficult task when you look at it that way. So far, this blog post has 127 words. Now, this won’t include object writing exercises. Object writing is like a warm up before exercise. It just loosens the muscles and doesn’t count into the actual sets and reps you will do.
In terms of musical content, I’ll need to write five different choruses and five different verses. I’ll probably choose the best chorus first and then write five different contrasting verses and choose the best one.
This give me a really good rough idea of how much writing I’ll be doing in the new year. Wish me luck!
Dean Michael Wegweiser says
December 29, 2007 at 12:52 PMGraham. Good stuff. I’m digging this – I’ve recently also looked into the ratio of vocal to instrumental in a song, as well as where the “phi point” of a song occurs… That is, about 2/3 of the way through a well written song, a climactic event occurs, such as a solo or modulation, etc. Though I’ve never looked at number of words – good angle. 🙂
Graham English says
December 29, 2007 at 7:13 PMI’ve written a little bit about the golden mean in harmony and the so-called Devil’s Interval. Math in music is very interesting stuff to me. Let me know what you uncover!
Van says
January 24, 2014 at 2:19 AMHi Graham, I like your approach. I’d like to run a regression on words per song per year as a proxy for quality of song writing but have no idea where to get the data from. Any advice?
Graham English says
January 24, 2014 at 10:40 PMThanks, Van. Interesting idea. I’ve had good luck adding lyrics to my MP3 metadata with Get Lyrical. But you have to have the MP3s in your iTunes library. You could possibly program a script to analyze a lyric site.
Or, you could write a script to create really small mp3 files with the correct metadata from Billboard playlists and then use Get Lyrical to get the lyrics. I think it could be automated.
If you do it, please keep me posted.