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CODY KIMMEL: Hi, my name is Cody Kimmel, and I'm the lead singer of the band Eliot Fitzgerald
and I'm here with the Expert Village to teach you how to write a folk song. Now, that we've
talked about our chord structure, for the choruses and the purpose of the chorus, its
time to talk about the lyrical structure of the chorus. Now, like for the verses, the
common lyrical structure for folk songs is a ballad like poetry, which is commonly a
four-line stanza or something like that which is an ABCB rhyming pattern. Now, obviously
there are variations on this, and things can change within this; however, with folk music,
the way it's written and the way it flows, it focuses more on the poetic aspects, and
the lyrical aspects rather than the musical and the chording aspects. It's just the way
that the genre developed. It's just the part of folk music. It's what makes folk music
fun. So, in the chorus, you want to structure it very similarly to that. You want your lyrical
structure, to not necessarily change much from your verse structure. However, what you
do want to do is you want to develop a chorus structure that is going to be lyrically, as
far as the content goes, the moral. Your verses are keeping--maintaining the story, your chorus
is stating the moral. For example, in this song, the kid brings the picture to his dad,
and he's sad, and he's crying, because he thinks that the picture's just terrible. But
his dad looks at him and says, "I know your picture isn't perfect, but I'll hang it on
the fridge. It's telling my friends how much I love you in spite of all the things you've
been. I know you're not that good at drawing, but I know also that you try so, I'll take
from you this picture to make it perfect while it's resting in my eyes." Right there, lyrical
structure--it's a ballad like format, four line stanzas, ABCB rhyming pattern that states
the purpose and the meaning and the moral of the song.