Don’t Fade Out

July 8, 2008

Welcome, new visitor! My name is Ari, the man behind Aries9. Here I share my thoughts on music and life, so you can get to know me and my music. Thanks for visiting!

It’s one of my pet peeves. It used to be worse in the 80’s but it still happens often enough in pop music.

Fading out a song at the end.

There are millions of ways to begin a song. The most common way is to play a riff or the main chord progression — sometimes with just a guitar, sometimes full band. The Beatles turned listeners’ heads when they wrote a song that started with a chorus, right off the bat. Now it doesn’t seem so surprising.

Similarly, there are millions of creative ways to end a song. Repeating the chorus and fading out is pure laziness. The only time where fading out is called for is when that effect actually has a significance. It creates a sense of the continuity, the song doesn’t end, it just trails off…. And yes, I can see that in some places. I would probably do that with some of my songs.

But probably very few.

The other problem of fading out is playing the song live. A lot of times, musicians have help fro producers in stage to arrange the songs — but not for playing live. So a lot of the faded-out songs have really dumb endings live. It just destroys the feeling of the song. You just can’t repeat the chorus 3 times and hit the root chord at the end. You have to properly write endings to make them work.

Like my previous rant on song titles, I just think it’s a missed opportunity. A song creates only a finite space for creativity. You owe it to the song to work it to its maximum capacity (without overdoing it).

We can write brilliant melodies and riffs in a flash. But songwriting is a hard work. Laziness is our enemy.

Filed under: Reflections |