You have just brought them home and now are about to put them away until you can show them off to your friends. The same logic applies to the matter of song form. In our next several sessions, we will look at some major song forms that have dominated commercial or hit music for the last century. Whether or not listeners are consciously aware that the songs they love have a specific form , they have, nonetheless, been conditioned to subconsciously connect with songs that use these major song forms. If our objective as songwriters is to communicate our songs to the ears and hearts of millions of listeners, then we MUST speak the language that listeners understand.
Song form is the framework for that language.
The first of the three major commercial song forms is commonly called the AAA Song Form and is the simplest and earliest of the three. So, the AAA Song Form is simply a series of verses linked together. The beginnings of the AAA Song go back several centuries to early court composers and musicians who set poems to music for performance at royal functions. Because the song form was so simple and repetitive, it also became part of early children's rhymes and songs. And, of course, Girl and Boy Scout camps would be literally handicapped without the AAA song form that has produced such campfire hits as Kum Bay Ya and Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall .