Ariana Grande just dropped "No Tears Left to Cry", the lead single from
her upcoming album. I don't know how it will do with the general public,
but it certainly has people talking in the pop creators community. Two
of the most active Facebook groups for pop songwriters and producers--Make Pop Music and the Max Martin Appreciation Society--have
been abuzz since the release, hosting fierce debates about every aspect
of the production, composition, lyrics, vocal performance, and cultural
relevance of this song.
My first impression is that the songwriting and production team--which includes Grande, Max Martin, Ilya, and Savan Kotecha--is exploring some new territory. Only time will tell if their experiments will seduce the general public, but there are definitely a lot of interesting things in this song worth writing about.
Check out the song:
My first impression is that the songwriting and production team--which includes Grande, Max Martin, Ilya, and Savan Kotecha--is exploring some new territory. Only time will tell if their experiments will seduce the general public, but there are definitely a lot of interesting things in this song worth writing about.
Check out the song:
As a bonus, the backing vocals starting at 2:48
also move in parallel motion to the bass, with the most prominent voice
moving in parallel octaves. These backing vocals are brought forward in
the mix at 3:04-3:20 to continue the parallel motion because the
prechorus melody and the chorus harmony are juxtaposed in this
subsection and do not move in parallel.
The Prechorus Melody Stays Diatonic
In the verse, the vocal melody does hit on the C# that comes from the A major chord, but in the prechorus it sticks to C-natural and stays diatonic to the key of A minor.
This not only helps the prechorus feel more related to the chorus, but it allows the prechorus/chorus juxtaposition that I mentioned earlier (which is probably my favorite moment in the song).
Juxtaposing sections is one of Martin's signature moves--particularly juxtaposing the chorus over the final postchorus, as he has done in Britney Spears's "Till the World Ends", Demi Lovato's "Cool for the Summer", and Taylor Swift's "Delicate". But because of the switch from a majorized chord progression to a diatonic minor one, this juxtaposition required some extra planning.
The verse melody, for example, would have sounded awful over the chorus chord progression because there would be too much dissonant clashing. The prechorus melody, however, even though it is originally heard over the same chord progression as the verse, seems to have been carefully planned to work over the chorus progression as well.
This juxtaposition gives us a glimpse into the high-level compositional skills of the songwriting and production team that created this song, and goes a long way towards molding the scattered parts of this song into a cohesive unit.
The Absence of a Bridge
One more thing that I found interesting is the big-picture form of "No Tears Left to Cry". It's made up of two meta-sections, rather than the usual three, and leaves out the bridge. There are songs that do this--Sia's "Chandelier" or the Chainsmokers' "Roses", for example--but it's certainly not the norm. In fact, I can't think of any bridgeless song that features Max Martin in the credits.
I have no doubt that this was not a random decision, and that Martin and the rest of the team had very good musical reasons that persuaded them to not include a bridge.
If I try to put myself in their shoes, these are the reasons I would come up with:
1. A bridge’s role is to provide contrast and “loosen up” a relatively tight structure. Since there are already quite a lot of loose parts in this song, loosening it up too much more could make it fall apart.
2. The prechorus/chorus juxtaposition in a way makes up for the absence of a bridge because it fuses existing parts to create something new. It is also located where a bridge would normally be.
I'm not sure if those were actually their reasons, but hopefully they would agree with me that those are good justifications to ditch the bridge in this song.
Related: A Sonic Twist in the Plot: The Bridge in Modern Pop
Will "No Tears Left to Cry" Be a Hit?
My gut feeling is that this song's chart performance will be similar to that of another recent hit--Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do"--which soared to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 but fell off pretty quickly. Both songs are interesting and have received a lot of hype upon their release, as one would expect from lead singles from two of the pop world's mega-superstars would receive. But both also venture away from a lot of current pop conventions, which can make it difficult to hook the masses for a long period of time.
That said, I would not be surprised at all if after a few weeks, "No Tears Left to Cry" seeps into our collective systems and proves once again that no one can come close to Max Martin and his collaborators when it comes to knowing not what their audience wants, but what it needs.
Update (APR-26-2018): A previous version of this post wrongly attributed the production of Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" to Max Martin. As was pointed out in the comments below by Marcus Labanda, it was Jack Antonoff--and not Max Martin--who produced this song. I have updated the post to remove the attribution to Martin.
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