Do you dream of playing to huge crowds in huge venues? As a life long rock and metal fan, I’ve always had those dreams and there’s a type of song that fits them, a type of song that only makes sense when a crowd of tens of thousands sings along. Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica and many other rock bands have written them: songs with melodies that demand to be shouted out from the middle of a packed arena, every member of the crowd screaming in out-of-tune unison.
Of course there’s a formula that you could follow if you wanted to write a song like this.
Lyrics and Meaning
A common theme on this blog is that lyrics are not the primary means of expressing meaning in a song, they’re just one ingredient. So stadium rock songs as diverse as You Give Love A Bad Name, Born to Run, The Trooper and Creeping Death are all actually about the same thing. Lyrically they cover topics such as love affairs (good and bad) doomed soldiers in the charge of the light brigade and monsters in ancient egypt, but see them performed in front of an audience and you realise that isn’t what they’re really about. Actually, they’re about people coming together to feel part of the same group. They’re about friendship and fraternity.
That meaning doesn’t necessarily come from the lyrics, but rather the fact that ten thousand people can sing the same thing at the same time.
So, whatever your lyrics, you need to make space for the fact that everyone has to be able to sing along.
How do you write a melody that everyone can sing along to?
That’s a tricky question to answer.
The masters of the singalong stadium chorus are Iron Maiden: just take a look at this recording of Fear of the Dark in front of an audience of 250,000.
Pretty much every melody in this is designed for a quarter of a million people to singalong to.
There’s lots of the repetition – the opening guitar melody is the same as the opening vocal part; the chorus repeats the line ‘fear of the dark; the middle section repeats the same line, albeit with a different melody.
They all use simple scale patterns, in this case a minor scale mostly moving in step but with the occasional, emotive leap of perhaps a fourth or fifth. Sequences abound ‘fear of the dark’ repeated, slightly lower each time for example.
They use pretty simple rhythmic ideas with lots of long notes.
Call and response – lots of stadium rock songs use this, and building in is vital for your stadium rock song.
Call – ‘Oh, we’re half way there’
Response – ‘Oh-oh, living on a prayer’
Call – ‘Can I play with madness?’
Response – ‘The prophet stared at his crystal ball’
Chords
You’ve got lots of choices here. Bruce Springsteen in Born to Run uses standard pop song chords, including I IV V (E A B) and I VI IV V (E C#m A B) which you could find in rock and roll songs. But since the innovations of 1970s heavy rock bands, a kind of progression has come to be synonymous with epic singalong choruses.
Yes, it’s the aoelian I VI VII. For example Em C D or Am F G. This chord progression and variations on it have become ubiquitous to entire genres of music (heavy metal, hiphop) and especially to stadium rock songs.
What chord choices give you this epic mood?
Em C D
Em C G D
Em C Am Em C D
For the chorus you’ll need something like this. The verse is another matter. If you’re going to use the same kind of chords, which many people do there are several things you could do. It’s best to change chord less often, for example two bars of Eminor and two of C, an/or have something riff based. Bon Jovi song’s are a good example of both. Of course a heavy metal song is more likely to be rhythmic or riff based in the verse.
Arrangement and Sturcture
Big big bigger, that’s the key for stadium rock songs. In particular you need a big, loud chorus, a long drawn out intro, a long guitar solo (or similar) in the middle, a huge reprise of the chorus, maybe a coda centred around repeated chanting of singing of a three note refrain on the syllable ‘oh’. You certainly don’t want the song to be shorter than about five or six minutes.
The stadium rock song is a difficult thing to master, and most of us will never be playing stadiums anyway. But certain genres lend themselves to this kind of song, no matter the venue and the central ideas – the use of aeolian chord progressions to sound ‘epic’, the use of call and response phrasing, the sprawling structure and the huge volume – are applicable in all sorts of songwriting situations.
Any anyway, lots of us dream of playing to huge crowds. So why not write songs to match those dreams?
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