Sustained Engagement: Keeping Your Song Interesting

When someone hears your song for the first time, you have one chance to make that first impression. Will they listen until the end? Will they listen at all or press Skip?

Think about someone else's song you heard recently that stuck with you, whether it was a new release or just new to you.

By the time the first chorus hit, you were already engaged and before you knew it, the song was over and you wanted to hear it again. You may even remember asking someone what the song was called or the name of the band.

This is what every artist is hoping for and what every producer, engineer, and songwriter should be working towards together to achieve—a record that grabs the listener, pulls them in, and holds their attention for the next 4 minutes or so.

If it were easy, we'd do it all the time. For most of us though, it's a challenge to walk the tightrope that stretches between the beginning and end of each recording that we help to create and release for the world to hear.

It's a world of ever-shrinking attention spans but it's also a world of ever-growing catalogs of music already released. It's hard enough just to stay original and to stand out long enough to even be heard, much less remembered by the audience.

But you don't have to do everything by yourself. Collaborating with others brings more perspective and more objectivity. Sure, you can have the final say—it's your record, after all—but you can leverage good ideas you may not have thought of after hearing your song repeatedly as the artist, not the listener.

When mixing your song, I try to guide the listener by shifting attention from one element to another as the song unfolds. It certainly helps when the arrangement is solid and there are interesting elements to work with. But when you or your mix engineer start creating elements during the mix session, it creeps over into additional production, which is usually not ideal this late in the music-making process. Instead, create a compelling performance that can then be enhanced during the mix session, not manufactured.

Songwriting is an art. Performing is an art. So is arranging, production, and engineering. With any art, rules are made to be broken and reassembled in new ways. As a result, there's no single checklist or template that can be applied to every recording to make it more engaging—that's something we find by combining hard work, experience, and luck.

Here are several ideas to consider as you work to keep the listener engaged. Again, there's no real "How To" guide for crafting a song that people want to hear—it's more about trying different things early in the process to see what unfolds:

Song Length & Structure

• Longer songs can become indulgent; get to the point, lyrically & musically

• Replace that 3rd verse with a bridge that delivers the same message but sounds and feels different from the rest of the song

• Skip long intros and extended solos—save that for the live gig

• If it's a strong chorus, maybe start the song with that

Lyrics

• Find new ways of saying the same thing

• Tell a (short) story that progresses in an unexpected way

• Try telling that same story from different or contrasting points of view

• Telling the story via 1st person, 2nd, or 3rd can change things up as well

Melody & Musical Hooks

• Create unique melodies that aren't expected but are still memorable (and singable)

• Explore major/minor/modal scales you haven't used before

• Remember that a blues scale can exist outside of a blues song

• When's the last time you used a tritone?

Instrumentation

• Use different instruments/sounds not commonly used in your genre

• Sometimes unlikely combinations yield an interesting result. Ever heard a muted trumpet and flute played in unison?

Arrangement

• Build up to the chorus by introducing different parts at different times

• Mute parts in one section to create an impact when they're brought back in later

• Chord voicing can vary throughout the song to feel less repetitive

• Tempo

  • Varying tempos can build tension and release it

  • A slower section or a single bar of silence can offer a rest stop between faster sections

• Meter & groove

  • Use odd meters: 3/4, 5/4, 7/4

  • Try 12/8, shuffle, swing, etc.

• Key change

  • While not heavily used since the 80s, a modulation can add a certain lift for the final chorus. There's nothing to say it has to go "up" in key either

  • Understand the Circle of 5ths and use of relative major/minor keys

Strive to serve the song and what moves you as an artist. With sincerity comes conviction, and that can give your ideal audience something they can relate to as well.

Think again about one of your favorite songs and try to remember the very first time you heard it. Chances are, you weren't analyzing chords, tempo, or rhyming schemes—you were simply enjoying the song.

Ultimately, it's the listener who decides what's compelling and what's boring. We need to tune into that listener mindset to hear the music objectively and identify anything overly repetitive or that distracts us as a listener and takes us out of the song.

We then need to transition back into our music-maker roles to make better decisions throughout the music-making process to address those distractions and find different ways to keep our audience interested and wanting to hear what happens next.

The writing and pre-production stages are critical steps in developing your plan for each recording. You want to show up ready and confident when the red recording light comes on. Do your best to capture anything and everything needed to fulfill your vision for each song but be intentional.

Don't wait until the mixing phase of your project to start "fixing" or adding things. At the same time, don't be afraid to make a change late in the game if it serves a clear purpose in sustaining the listener's engagement in the song.

What other techniques have you heard or tried yourself in sustaining your audience's engagement? I'd love to hear what you've been working on and how we might work together to reach your musical goals. Tell me about your music!

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