Is The Pop Bridge Becoming A Lost Art Form?
As usual, the problem seems to involve TikTok.
“Why are pop songs with a bridge a dying breed??” tweets Australian pop musician Hatchie, garnering thousands of retweets and comments from pop fans across the globe.
Hatchie’s tweet sparked a conversation among music fans, many musing over the lack of bridges in today’s top hits — to name a couple, ‘THAT’S WHAT I WANT’ by Lil Nas X, or Lost Frequencies X Calum Scott’s ‘Where Are You Now’ — and why pop songs are getting shorter.
Is this to cater to young people’s waning attention spans? To make sure the track will go viral on TikTok? And who are the songwriters doing their part to keep the pop bridge alive?
So, Uhh, What Is A Bridge And What Does It Do?
The bridge, a beloved structural convention of popular music, can generally be described as a new piece of melodic, harmonic and lyrical information that follows the verse-pre-chorus-chorus progression of a typical pop song.
A good bridge will add something different to the song, something the listener hasn’t heard before — it will develop the song’s narrative and musical arc in some way; usually by expanding on what’s already there, or adding something totally new.
Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘drivers license’, for example, explodes into its bridge — where the song quietly mourns its way through the verses and chorus, the bridge sees Rodrigo reaching new heights in her vocal range, desperately running through images and memories in quick succession, reaching the song’s hopeless, honest peak with the lyric “I still fuckin’ love you, babe”.
It’s hard to imagine ‘drivers license’ having the same emotional impact without this iconic moment — certainly, the song’s emotional impact would have suffered.
Why Is It A Dying Breed?
In this 2019 interview with The Verge, Switched On Pop’s Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding explained why pop songs are getting shorter. According to Harding, pop songs are, on average, 48 seconds shorter now than what they were in 1995, due, in part, to the payment structures of today’s music industry. Artists are paid per stream, instead of per album or single sale — and songs must be played for a minimum of 30 seconds to count as an ‘official’ stream.
But the goal is to have as many people as possible listen to the entire song, not just the first 30 seconds; having people listen through the song in full increases the artists’ chances of landing on Spotify playlists, or being served back up to that listener in their personalised algorithm when the artist releases new music.
Today’s pop songs need to be short enough to keep the listeners’ attention the entire way through — many listeners won’t even make it past the first chorus before skipping onto something they prefer, rendering a bridge a seemingly useless addition that only serves to lengthen a song’s run time.
‘Good Ones’, the lead single from Charli XCX’s latest album Crash, comes in at just two minutes, sixteen seconds: a lightning strike of a pop song, it follows a strict verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus structure, with a notable lack of a bridge. Each section is as hooky as the last and the song doesn’t feel lacking without a bridge — in fact, if anything, the short run time prompts the listener to keep playing the song back on repeat. The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s ‘STAY’, at a breezy two minutes and 22 seconds, also embraces multiple choruses over a bridge, as does ‘Get Into It (Yuh)’ by Doja Cat.
And Then There’s TikTok (Of Course)
TikTok’s hold on the music industry is almighty — and with its power reflected clearly on the charts, and in tactical promotional and roster decisions made by major labels, it’s also impacting songwriting.
Leith Ross’ ‘We’ll Never Have Sex’ took TikTok by storm when the artist posted a one minute and 15 second-long clip of themselves performing the song. Since then, that video has been viewed over seven million times, with the audio used nearly 40,000 times by other users — many of whom discuss them discussing how meaningful the short clip of the melancholy folk song is to them.
Leith Ross has recorded and released ‘We’ll Never Have Sex’ on DSPs, settling on a gentle, minimal final version of the song that cleverly stays true to the original TikTok video. The final version of the song comes in at just one minute and 39 seconds, and follows a folk song structure of AB verse sections with no discernable chorus or bridge.
Again, the song doesn’t feel lacking in any way — the misty, coy completeness of ‘We’ll Never Have Sex’ is what draws the listener in, the hooky verse structure doing all the work of a chorus, with the feeling of resigned mystery keeping the listener connected until the very last moment of the track.
Yet it’s important to point out that between TikTok fame and the official release, no new sections have been added to this song — whether by artistic or strategic choice (or a little bit of both), ‘We’ll Never Have Sex’ continues the trend of shorter, sharper songwriting for the modern age — a quick hit of tangible emotion that gets straight to the point.
Who Is Keeping The Bridge Alive?
In a landscape where songs are getting shorter and shorter, there are several pop songwriters who are keeping the bridge alive. Besides Olivia Rodrigo, whose album SOUR includes many a classic bridge (‘jealousy, jealousy’, ‘good 4 u’, and the undeniable classic ‘drivers license’), it would be remiss not to credit Taylor Swift for doing the most to keep tracks lengths long, and bridges alive and well.
Amongst Swifties, Taylor Swift’s bridges are the stuff of legends — every fan has a personal favourite, spanning across her discography — highlights include ‘Out Of The Woods’, champagne problems, ‘All Too Well’ (regular version *and* ten-minute version), and ‘Dear John’. If there’s one thing Taylor Swift is a master at, it’s the art of the bridge.
Pop songwriter Maisie Peters is another artist embracing the bridge — her debut album You Signed Up For This features expertly crafted pop songs, and several perfect bridges. The bridge in ‘I’m Trying (Not Friends)’, her current most-listened-to song on Spotify, recently had its own moment in the spotlight due to fans on TikTok making videos pointing out how great it really is. The jerky, contemptuous vocal melody, bouncing on top of papery percussive hits, sums up the ultimate message behind the song — a hurting ex, mourning the loss of a relationship that was doomed from the start.
Closer to home, several pop songwriters lovingly crafting world-class bridges for their music — Gretta Ray carved out perfect bridges in ‘Love Me Right’ and ‘Passion’ bridges in particular, cementing her as one of the greatest Australian songwriters of our time.
Thankfully, then, the pop bridge, despite being an endangered species, is yet to go extinct. Bridge enthusiasts may just need to look a little harder to find them.
Eilish Gilligan is a musician and writer from Melbourne. She streams at twitch.tv/eilishgilligan and tweets at @eilishgilligan.