The best song bridges ever: The few seconds that can make or break a track

“When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife / And when you think about me, all of those years ago / You’re standing face to face with ‘I told you so.’”

In Good Luck, Babe! — one of the biggest pop hits of 2024 — Chappell Roan, one of the latest pop sensations to come out of the United States, sings about a woman who doesn’t accept her feelings for her. Roan’s suitor insists on living within heterosexual normativity, even if it means putting aside her own emotions. In the chorus, Roan declares: “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.”

The lyrics quoted at the beginning of this article are from the bridge of Good Luck, Babe! They were circulated widely on social media throughout the summer. This part of the song is so catchy that the public hasn’t been able to stop sharing it. Especially on TikTok.

Chappell Roan — whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz — gives a passionate performance in her music video. Despite not being an architect — as the joke goes — she has “built the best bridge in history.”

It’s not uncommon for a pop song to go viral on social media. But it’s less common for the bridge of a song to spark conversation and debate. Carly Rae Jepsen — the Canadian pop singer best known for her hit song Call Me Maybe — faced a similar “virality” in 2022. That was when the comical bridge from her single The Loneliest Time — featuring Rufus Wainwright — rang out, in which she regretfully exclaims, “I’m coming back for you!” after letting him go. This began to be used massively in TikTok videos.

The Loneliest Time never achieved the commercial success of Good Luck, Babe! But — to continue the building metaphor — it also put a simple bridge on the map.

The bridge is — and has historically been — an important part of the composition of commercial pop songs. Its main function is to act as a transition between two sections — usually between two choruses — with the aim of providing dynamism through harmonic, melodic, or lyrical changes, or by generating a climax. It’s the resource used by the Beatles in their first single — Love Me Do (1962) — represented by a harmonica solo, or by the French singer Mylène Farmer in the bustle of percussion and synthesizers of Sans contrafaçon (1987) that leads to a glorious rain of keyboards. Whitney Houston used a bridge when she prepared for the most famous high note in history in I Will Always Love You (1992).

“Normally — and explained in a simple way — the structure of a song is (or was) verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus,” explains music journalist and musicologist Marta España. But she notes that “a third verse — due to its less melodic, flatter character — can become repetitive. Hence, the bridge helps to break the stability.” España places the “golden age” of bridges in the early-2000s, a time when transitions were used that “captured attention” and meant a “break” with the previous section, through techniques such as “changing the mode from major to minor, breaking the tempo, or using more peripheral chords.”

Due to its novel or sometimes disruptive component, the bridge stands out within the structure of the song, allowing for some finality. It is, for example, the instrumental transition of Corazón Partío (1997) by Alejandro Sanz that propels the song towards its emotional peak. And the bridge on Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (1967) is clearly intended to build tension and then release it in the final, rousing chorus.

This technique is used most notably in the Weather Girls’ 1982 classic It’s Raining Men: in the bridge, the beat slows down, the drama of the music intensifies and the instruments begin to gather like clouds in the sky, musically depicting the stormy mood described in the lyrics. In the final chorus, more men rain down… and more heavily than before.

Bridges can also be quite shocking, as when Taylor Swift declared in the iconic bridge of her 2018 single — Look What You Made Me Do — that “the old Taylor is dead.”

For producer and composer Guille Mostaza, a bridge is effective — or even “perfect” — when, during the technical aspect, “a modulation of tone occurs with the necessary chord changes.” This resource “takes you out of where you came from to then land on the chorus.” However, Mostaza points out that there are many other resources to use apart from the bridge. For example, “you can set the tempo to half, or empty that part [of the song] of instruments, or make everything sound lighter… making it seem a little smaller.” Nevertheless, Mostaza confesses that most of the groups he works with “make songs with an ABCD structure: If A is the verse, B is the bridge that leads to C, the chorus.” Part D would be an “extra” element.

Mostaza recognizes that, for him “the most important thing — the basis of a good production — is an interesting song, something that’s solid and that transports you through various phases.” In fact, Mostaza — who has recently worked with artists such as Niña Polaca and Babi — explains that, oftentimes, singers ask him “to finish composing [their] songs… and, if I can, I always put in a nice bridge.”

The bridge — as it’s conceived in current pop music — may have originated in classical music.

However, Marta España — who sings under the name Marta Movidas — is skeptical about this resource being a direct evolution of early music. “The concept of the bridge was already used by troubadours in the Middle Ages, who were outside of academic circles,” the journalist reasons. “There are elements in the fugue, or in the sonata form, whose function is similar… but I wouldn’t say it comes from that era.”

España acknowledges that “it’s true how — in pop as we know it — a bridge is often used to demonstrate that harmonic or compositional technique that cannot be demonstrated in the verse. So, in our imagination, it has a cultured character that makes us associate it with classical music.”

It’s important to note a bridge isn’t at all essential in pop compositions. This has been demonstrated by the success of another of the hit summer songs — Espresso, by Sabrina Carpenter — a song that’s quite conventional in structure, but which completely dispenses with a bridge. It goes from the second chorus directly to the final chorus. This idea, precisely, makes it as addictive as coffee.

This economical way of understanding composition — forged in a “less is more” manner — isn’t new. The Swedish pop group Roxette already titled an album accordingly: Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus! (1986). Current composers also seem to have firmly applied this philosophy to their modus operandi.

“Now, we’re in a much more minimalist era,” España tells EL PAÍS. “There are no bridges, but no modulated choruses, either. Harmony, in general, has become quite stable.” España predicts that “since fashion is cyclical, at some point, bridges will return.” Yet it seems that this won’t take place from one day to the next.

“The reality is that bridges are conceived as this tacky, somewhat grandiloquent thing that aspires to superproduction. Right now, the opposite is in fashion,” the musicologist shrugs.

Mostaza shares a similar observation: “Taylor Swift has been eliminating bridges. This also happens a lot in urban music. Each person has their own tastes: there are people who like simple things and others who like more complex things… and that doesn’t mean that one has to be better than the other.”

España points out another factor: the idea that popular music is now a product of passive listening. “With regard to the disruptive nature of bridges, listening has gone from being an action to an accompaniment,” she details. “It’s in the background while we do other things. Rather than attracting attention, it needs to remain secondary.”

Of course, there are still artists who attend to what Guille Mostaza calls the “narrative” or the “journey” that a song offers by using a well-built bridge. Norwegian musician Sondre Lerche created one of the best recent bridges in his 2022 song Avatars of Love — more than 10-minutes-long — in which the bridge (very clear within the composition) serves in and of itself as a meta-homage to music. Mostaza mentions dozens of his favorite songs and artists who also use bridges, from Joni Mitchell to James Blake, from Frank Sinatra to Billie Holiday, from Sacrifice by Elton John to Taylor Swift’s folk records.

What separates the bridge in Avatars of Love is a first part that builds tension — brick by brick — and a second that freely takes flight. Mostaza is precisely one of those music fans who prefer songs with a bridge rather than without. “I really like to delight in the journey,” he emphasizes, “not just the destination.” He compares the use of middle 8s — as this resource is also called — with the soundtracks of horror movies, where the music “gets tense before the scare comes.” However, Mostaza points out that he prefers the bridge to be “short” and to “not dwell on itself too much. He likes it to “have that awareness of helping the song shine.” In his view, a musical bridge “has to be something appetizing, which helps separate two strong flavors.”

It’s evident that pop music has given us — and continues to do so — some of the most memorable bridges. Marta España highlights the aforementioned Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift and also mentions — among her favorites — the bridge in WHISTLE (2016) by BLACKPINK. The South Korean band “debuted with that song, which clearly demonstrates what a K-pop song with a proper bridge should sound like.”

For Mostaza, one of the best bridges is the one from ABBA’s One of Us (1981), because “it starts at minute one, it has everything I’ve previously mentioned and, on top of that, the song seems to shrink to give way to the chorus in a splendid way; it holds the tension perfectly and fits with the concept of the lyrics, the arrangements and the production.”

A new generation of artists — seasoned and professionalized in the immediacy of social media — are proactively claiming that songs “don’t need bridges.” PinkPantheress — alias of the British singer and producer Victoria Beverley Walker — is just one example of this phenomenon. Artists like her find that music is better when it gets to the point… a notion that’s in tune with the philosophy of an artist who writes two-minute songs.

Still, Chappell Roan has once again highlighted the importance of the musical bridge. Without apparently intending to, Roan has reminded the world that songs built following a classic pattern still have a place in the market. This observation has been confirmed by the enormous acceptance of Die with a Smile, a ballad by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga that recently topped the global charts. A song with an exciting instrumental bridge, the music video is accompanied by an already iconic image of Lady Gaga dancing with a cigarette in her mouth. It’s an emotionally irresistible bridge. As Chappell Roan sings, “you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.”

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