Tom Dunne: Some simple steps to writing a hit song
Parachute by Something Happens was a hit in 1990, and has since garnered millions of streams in the digital age.
How do you write a hit? I’ve asked that question of enumerable hit writers. Their answers are either vague, as in “I wish I knew”, or trite, as in “start with the chorus, then repeat it”. The general consensus, though, is that it takes three minutes. Three minutes, a rabbit’s foot and divine intervention.
The closest I myself have ever come to a hit is a song called Parachute. It currently has 2.3 million streams on Spotify. This is ‘small beer’, as my children delight in telling me, compared to say, Beyoncé, or indeed the lad up the road who posts road-kill videos on TikTok. But to me it is a source of quiet delight.
And before you ask, yes, it took three minutes and, yes, it starts with the chorus and then repeats it. But does that tell the full story? No. Does it reflect the years leading up to those three minutes? The late-night polishing songs that even I struggled to remember? No.
By the time we wrote it we’d been professional for three years. That was three years of listening to music and lyrics forensically, of putting in the hard graft, of lessons being learned. Many people helped along the way, but for me, with that song, one man stand out.
His name was Tony Berg. When we met him he was an aspiring producer in LA working on an album with Sean Penn’s brother Michael. That album, March, was superb. Everything about it, the production, the sound, the lyrics appealed to us. The fact that he knew Wendy & Lisa (yes, The Wendy and Lisa from Prince fame!) and that they would drop into studio didn’t do any harm either.
One day, by the pool – it was LA after all - he slipped me a copy of the Rolling Stones' Beggar’s Banquet on cassette. I had never heard it. He set it up for me before I listened, telling me to pay close attention to Jagger’s vocal, the easy blues feel, Keith’s incredible guitar.
I was mesmerised. It is the ‘back to basics’ album that inspired The Beatles to head in a Get Back direction. “Tony knew things,” I concluded. So, when he chose to have a quiet word with me about my lyrics, I was inclined to listen.
“That song of yours, Beach,” he said, “No beach in it?”
“No.” I nodded.
“And that other song, Forget Georgia,” he added, “no mention of Georgia anywhere, but, yet, a lot of beaches.” I nodded again. “The Whole of the Moon, on the other hand.” I got his point.
Back in Ireland I resolved to concentrate on song titles. As Warren Zevon would say to me years later, “Once you have the title, everything else is just homework.”
When a man who has written songs like Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, Send Lawyers, Guns and Money and Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School speaks, it is beholden upon you to listen.
My mind, though, was also consumed by backing vocals (BV). We had none and for a band that admired other bands like Big Star, REM and The Posies, this wasn’t great. So on the day Ray, our guitarist, bought a piano – the composition instrument of choice - I got a four-track recorder. “I will fix this BV issue,” I declared.
Four weeks later I asked Ray if he could play anything yet. I immediately liked the first thing he played and put it on the four track. “Now you little beauty,” I thought, “get ready for a backing vocal!”
The Parachute line came immediately. I recorded it first, as a BV and then wrote the rest of the vocal around it. Three minutes, tops. Lyrically it was a, hopefully, positive message to someone I knew. I meant it, but to say my attention was all on the BV is no understatement.
It was the reaction of the others to the song that somehow enabled me to see it in its entirety. When Virgin, the record company, heard it, they were straight back to us. The first time we played it live the audience sang along having heard it only once on the radio. That had never happened before.
At this point Parachute is an old friend. We would not have played 3Arena this week without it. Tony did little after our sessions, apart from heading up A&R at Geffen where he signed Beck. That and producing Phoebe Bridgers. And, oh yes, that stunning Fiona Apple version of The Whole of The Moon! I’ll stop now.
