Don’t Fade Out

July 8, 2008

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.

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