Last week, we went over an exercise designed to give your ear some work to make your pen more musical. This week, let’s extend that a bit with another song by Alizée, “Grand Central” from her 2010 album Une enfant du siècle.
Like last week, you don’t need to speak French for this one; in fact, you might have a slight advantage if you don’t. Listen to it once just to get a feel for it:
Definitely sounds different than last week’s, doesn’t it? It was so unlike her previous French-pop mainstream albums that it wasn’t received well at the time, but it has grown in reputation over the years and is now considered by many to be her best work. In fact, last week was the album’s 15th birthday and it’s still almost in the top 500 in French music sales, which is impressive for an album that was considered a failure at the time. Then again, so was The Great Gatsby.
It has earned its re-appraisal through its craftwork. It’s not a typical pop song with a verse-chorus, verse-chorus structure. Instead, it “reads” like a story of its own, as if it were a chapter in a larger book. The song is driven by the story it tells (Edie Sedgwick in New York City), but has scenes instead of stanzas.
These scenes have their own techniques. Listen to the distinctive cadence of how she sings the lyrics in the first scene. The “short-loooong” staccato is unmistakable. That in itself is worth noting, but she sings like that for the entire scene. That would get tedious to the ear after a while, but look at how it’s used. She opens up the first line with a short-loooong, then expands it into short-short-short-loooong and even into short-short-short-shot-loooong, then contracts it before expanding again. You can and should use this in your own sentence structure.
The next part to pay attention to is at the one-and-a-half minute mark. The energy that has been relentlessly pushing the story forward (a 21-year-old Edie arrives in the big city) is released through a short bridge into a dreamy interlude. There are no words here, just a long, soft series of “Na” for the next thirty seconds. If you listen closely, they are in only one track. That detail is important later.
Now comes the two minute mark and we’re given a spoken-word section (scene). Listen to how much of an impact this has and how much different a feel to it. You don’t even have to know the lyrics to know something has shifted. And it has: we’ve shifted from first-person to third-person narration. The first part was her impressions of the big city, and now we’re hearing a vignette followed by Edie being described by an external narrator.
Think about how this prose sounds so much different in this scene, and then consider how much different it would be had it not been directly preceded by that interlude. This is where structure and form interconnect and interplay. It is just as important in writing as it is in music.
Finally, it wraps up with another bridge into an outro that echoes the dreamy interlude from the 1:30ish mark. But listen closely: it’s similar, but rendered quite differently. This time, instead of her voice singing “Ba” in one track, there are two of her at the same time, so you can hear her intertwining with herself, creating a sort of ripple effect as if her dreaming is now being reflected in a puddle of water. The first time, the motif is given one layer, and now on being revisited, it’s given a second coat. This is an exquisite touch and the sort of thing that separates good art (be it music or writing) from great.
“Grand Central” is a 3:24 masterclass in how to structure your writing. From sentence-level cadence, scene placement, lyricism, and finishing touches, we can learn an amazing amount about what makes good writing by listening to what makes good music. If you want to learn more, the entire album is available here:
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