Anatomy of a Pop Song: Verse

The vast majority of pop music makes use of at least one or two parts that repeat themselves throughout a song. Often the first of these is the “verse,” referred to in the world of poetry as the “stanza.”

The verse usually plays the lyrical role of telling the story and setting up the chorus or leading to the pre-chorus. A song can have any number of verses, though it’s most common for there to be two or three, broken up intermittently by the other parts. Certain songs, usually in the folk genre, will have more than three verses and few, if any, additional parts. On paper this reads more like poetry than pop music, but it’s an effective way to tell a longer story.

Although the chord progression will be the same (or similar) from verse to verse, this part of a song can vary in other ways, namely length, vocal melody, instrumentation, or dynamics.

As we’ll talk about in a future post, the chorus shares certain qualities with the verse. There are three qualities that generally distinguish the verse from the chorus:

1. The verse precedes the chorus.

This rule is almost always true. Occasionally, a song will begin with the chorus preceding the first verse.

2. The lyrics change between verses.

Again, this is usually the case. There are, however, some songs in which the verses reuse the same lyrics.

3. The verse builds suspense, while the chorus offers release.

This is the most reliably followed rule for verses in pop music. The verse/chorus structure is designed to create an ebb and flow that will keep an active listener engaged throughout the song. Without a build, there can be no release. The verse is there to tell the story and to create tension from which the chorus can release the listener.

One of my favorite compositional tricks is to double the length of the second verse and vary the vocal melody in the second half. This helps to distinguish between the first and second verses, create more tension in the second verse than the first, and break the monotony of the vocal melody to keep the listener engaged at a place in the music where many pop songs start to lose a listener’s interest and attention. Unless the songwriter is experimenting heavily with structure, every pop song will need a verse. The creativity here happens in the variations between them.