Anatomy of Checking's "Drink It Down"

Every Sunday for about three years, my good friend and guitarist Chris Defeo joined me in my bedroom studio, hung out, and wrote awesome music with me. We recorded a lot of it and even put out a few collections under the name Checking.

Let’s look at a song called “Drink It Down” from our final EP, Fingers, and break it down structurally.

This will be a hair different from the last song we analyzed, because Checking was primarily an instrumental project.

You can follow along on Bandcamp.

The song starts off with a picked guitar part and a swirling synth. We’ll find out as the song continues whether or not this part is unique, but it’s short enough to feel like an intro.

The next part of the song starts off with a bass line and muted electronic drum part. We hear a hollow pad in the background. As the song progresses, other instruments enter, starting with a plucky synth.

Soon, the song has opened up so that everything is up front, and the guitar we heard at the beginning returns. Then, a second synth, this one more of a lead, begins to play over the chord progression.

It’s hard to define what’s going on here, structurally, because of how progressive this section is. I think we’re safe not to call it a chorus, as a whole, because we can’t imagine we’ll hear the same progression again, exactly the same way.

It could be one long verse, or it could be thought of as a verse up until a certain point, and then a chorus from that point on (maybe where the lead synth begins). We could even divide some of this section up into verse and pre-chorus if we felt so inclined.

Next, the guitar and synth from the beginning return, but the part doesn’t feel particularly like a verse or a chorus. Let’s call this the bridge.

After that, we get dumped back into the same lead synth as before, but this time we don’t build our way up to it. It’s starting to feel safer to call this the chorus.

Finally, we get something like the intro/bridge, but not quite. It’s the same chord progression, but the guitar style is different, and there’s no synth. This is pretty obviously an outro, as the song ends here.

So what’s most interesting about this song is that we essentially have a section where we jump from verse to pre-chorus to chorus, and we only ever return to the chorus, which means the song only has one verse and one pre-chorus, which is unusual for a pop song.

To recap, I think the best way to organize the song is as follows:

Intro

Verse

Pre-chorus

Chorus

Bridge

Chorus

Outro

A lot of instrumental music can be thought of, in the broadest sense, as “pop” music, and this certainly applies to Checking. What we can learn from this particular analysis is that even without a vocalist to help define each section, the Bedroom Studio Magic system of pop song part categorization can be applied in order to clarify the structure of the song as a whole.