“Where’s that confounded bridge?”

I continue to plug away at the guitar, building up my repertoire of jazz and pop standards from the first half of the twentieth century. They knew how to write good tunes back then. (Has anyone alerted Lady Gaga?) I’ll have the Sirius/XM jazz station on and hear something I know I’ve always liked and say to myself, “Sure, I can work that out.” But half the time I seem to have a problem with the bridge, just like Robert Plant in “The Crunge.”

Most songs are in AABA form: a catchy melody, repeated, then a brief diversion, then the melody again. And it’s that diversion, B for bridge, that more often than not trips me up, because it’s never as memorable as the melody. I got it in my head this past week that “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” or “Nice Work If You Can Get It” would be fun to play, but damn if I could remember the B part to either one, sending me to last.fm for a refresher. And “I Can’t Get Started”? I can’t get finished, because even after listening to a couple different versions I still find the bridge totally elusive. (Sure, I can google on a chord progression, but it’s never in a key I’m comfortable playing in. I mean, E-flat-minor? Come on.) It just gets lost in the fog.

One of the problems is, you take some of these songs – e.g., “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” and “Exactly Like you” – and the bridges seem practically interchangeable, the B from one working well enough with the A from another that I sometimes can’t remember which goes with which. And just try exiting the bridge from “Glory of Love” and not going directly into “Making Whoopee.” A bridge is like compositional sleight-of-hand intended to do nothing more than expedite another chorus of the main melody. But without it, constant repetition of the A would be monotonous – or does it just seem that way because of what we’re used to? After all, “The Crunge” doesn’t have one. And it gets to the same shore as a bridge does. Albeit somewhat irritatingly.

My main objection to bridges is that most of them are ultimately dispensable. They’re sometimes not even interesting musically, so I just want to get past them and back to the main theme with its more tantalizing hooks. But I have to hand it to one song’s bridge for containing what I think is the cleverest lyric in pop music, in “Cry Me a River”: “You told me love was too plebeian / Told me you were through with me and / Now you say...” Using a word like “plebeian” is gutsy enough to begin with; finding a rhyme in “with me and” ups the ante; then segueing directly back into the last verse is breathtaking. I don’t know that anybody’s pulled off anything quite like it recently. (How many people today even know what “plebeian” means?) And who’s this guy Arthur Hamilton who wrote it? He doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry (but is in IMDb).

 

So, a bridge can be frustrating at times but there are a few hidden rewards. And at least in music, it’s always a bridge to somewhere.