I love music.
But, then again, who doesn’t? Like a good story, music has the ability to touch upon our emotions. Music can uplift and inspire us, or it can fill us with dread. It can even make us cry. As is often the case with art, just the tiniest little details placed with great care can evoke a world of feelings!
One of my few regrets in life is that I never learned to really appreciate music at a younger age. Yes, I often heard it and enjoyed it, but for the most part it was just background noise, and I never took the time to let myself listen to it. Fortunately that attitude began to change as I got older, seemingly peaking once I went off to college. Finally getting myself a nice pair of good old-fashioned headphones helped, too.
And one thing I’ve come to learn about myself and about music is that my favorite part of a song is almost always the bridge.
For those who do not know, a bridge is a point in a song where the music tonally shifts to create a contrast from the overall composition. This could be accomplished by changing tempo, using a different chord progression, or changing keys. And though not every song has a bridge, every bridge is typically inserted to provide some variety in the sound and recapture an audience’s attention, and to connect regularly structured choruses and verses to each other.
And for musicians, I’m sure, there is much more to the story than that. But I am not a musician: I am a listener. And as a listener, what captures my attention the most about a bridge is that it seems to be more of a bold declaration than the rest of the song. For me, the bridge is usually the point where the song itself slows down (or speeds up) to tell us that this next bit is the most important part, and you should pay attention to it. While the rest of the song seems to be on the expositional side of things, the bridge always feels like a more direct message to either the subject of the song or to the audience. And at the same time, it provides a little added insight into the mind of the song’s narrator.
Thinking about the bridge in a song has recently got me to thinking about what the “bridge” equivalent would be in the realm of lengthier storytelling. Where exactly, I wondered, is that point in your story where the tone shifts–either speeding up or slowing down for the purpose of conveying importance? But soon I realized that a story is just a series of bridges connecting main events. Bridges are all those little points where the plot is set aside for the sake of exploring your characters and their emotions. If your story is typically light and upbeat, then your bridge is the moment your character’s best friend opens up about something dark in their life. If your story is typically grim and foreboding, then your bridge is probably the one moment of happiness your characters share before the plot finds them again. Most likely, this could be the point in your story where all the themes are explored. But the beauty of the bridge’s flexibility is that it could also be there in your call to action, or at the turning point. In some cases, it could even be your story’s climax.
In my usual, long-winded way of exploring different subjects, I suppose this observation has made me consider this: at any point where it feels something truly important is happening within your story, write it–not like it’s a narrative, but like it’s a new strain of music bursting from the main melody. Make it feel important; make it reach out to your audience through paper and ink. Make it count!
Night Owls, what songs have some of your favorite bridges?
