In a long interview (video below) to Rick Beato a couple of years ago, Sting has his say on contemporary songwriting, recognizing an oversimplification of the structure with the disappearance of the cathartic bridge.
«In the song you expose a situation, “my girlfriend left me, I feel alone”… chorus, repeat and then go to the bridge. There comes a different chord: you start to think that maybe she's not the only girl for you, maybe you should look elsewhere, and this leads to a change of tone... bridge is therapy." For the former Police, today's music is too circular, "a trap that goes around and around, adapts well to the next song, but doesn't give you liberation, the awareness of a way out of our crisis".
If the bridge serves precisely to act as a bridge between verse and chorus (or between chorus and refrain, just to further complicate our life with the glossary), the middle-eight is instead a turning point with a contrasting function. It doesn't connect, if anything it separates.
Those eight central bars (which are usually neither eight nor central), preferably placed after the second chorus, are there to give the song a final development before the finale, an accumulation of tension - obtained with changes of melody, harmony, lyrics, arrangement - which is resolved by re-proposing the hook, the indispensable "hook" for every hit.
David Bowie is also a great connoisseur of changes, accompanying his Changes (2'28") with a simple middle-eight - a textbook passage on the subdominant - and very short, four bars to return to the refrain with a renewed attitude. Born to Run is much longer and more contrasting, an island within the song (from 2'11" to 3'06") from which one can return to the "highway jammed with broken heroes", only crossing a bridge under the orders of the Boss: “One, two, three, four!”
For the Beatles, who in those central bars create the perfect complement for their choruses full of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and singing inventions.
In the art of composing sngs, for Lennon-McCartney the middle-eight performs in an almost scientific manner what Franco Fabbri calls the function of grey, indicating John as the main author of those appropriately monochord and repetitive sections, conceptually in contrast with the verses: " We can work it out”, exclaims the optimistic Paul, “Life is very short…” replies the cynical John (curiously, in his biography Many Years From Now, Macca turns the situation on its head by claiming the central part .
«It was mine: John could never write the middle-eights"). As it happens with ' A day in the life' where is Paul writing the midle-eight, singing "Woke up, fell out of bed Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup. And looking up, I noticed I was late..."
Is it really true that bridge and middle-eight are becoming extinct? Let's try to answer with a simple exercise: let's listen to two annual Top 50s in sequence, taking 1998 and 202e as chronological extremes. Of 50 most popular songs in 1998 according to Billboard, 18 - a good third of the total - have sections clearly identifiable as middle-eight. Indeed, their overall shape appears so familiar and standardized to us that it suggests the arrival of that section to our musical unconscious discreetly in advance. As if to say: you feel that at this point something else must happen.
Source: Rolling Stone - VMZ.
