[from today's L.A. Times - part 2]

The song "We Can Work It Out," for instance, has a typical 
McCartney optimism to it, until the bridge, thought to be by 
Lennon, becomes darker, more dubious, and more hurried 
on the bridge - "Life is very short, and there's no time ." 
Says Mann: "It's like the devil's advocate."

"Sometimes the song feels like it needs to go somewhere else," 
says Richard Thompson, who wrote a harrowing bridge for 
"Walking on a Wire" and a nostalgic one for "Al Bowlly's in 
Heaven."

"The art of the bridge is that it's an exciting place to go, and the 
unexpected can result."

In favor and out

The bridge goes back to one of the earliest blueprints in 
Western music: sonata form, which was codified in the late 1700s 
and serves as the foundation for not just the piano sonata but the 
symphony and concerto. In some cases, the bridge "modulates," 
changing keys to give the piece a new, sometimes darker, 
emotional flavor - as does the related sonnet, with its volta, or 
"turn," where an ode to a beloved can turn melancholy.

But in much of the music of the 19th and early 20th centuries - 
the rural music of Europe or North America, from 12-bar blues 
to folk and country - the bridge never took.

In the 1930s and '40s, classic American songwriters such as 
Porter and the Gershwins used the bridge to bring refinement to 
their songs - songs adapted as jazz numbers by Charlie Parker, 
Miles Davis and others.

In the early '60s, the bridge was reborn with the British Invasion. 
As song form stretched out in the '70s, structure fell out of favor, 
but even punk bands the Clash and the Buzzcocks - and post-
punks such as XTC and the Smiths, for which the bridge was the 
place for rhetorical questions - wrote concise and effective 
middle-eights. The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" has a 
bridge.

Music critic Ira Robbins points out that bridges often find a new 
vocalist taking over for a few bars, whether it's Keith Richards in 
Rolling Stones bridges, Pete Townshend for the Who, or Mick 
Jones for the Clash. Sometimes they provide "a 90-degree turn 
in the middle of the song."

By the '90s, alternative and indie rock were busy deconstructing 
the rock song or adding layers of distortion. Nirvana and "lo-fi" 
groups such as Sebadoh and Pavement couldn't be bothered 
with structure; post-rock groups such as Tortoise weren't 
interested.

But Benjamin Nugent, whose book "Elliott Smith and the Big 
Nothing," which comes out in October, says the bridge is on its 
way back.

"What a bridge does, generally, is interrupt the beat that a dance 
song depends on, so for a long time it wasn't the most desirable 
thing to have," he says. "But starting in about 2001, people had 
been so saturated with grooves - whether in dance music or 
teen-pop - that they started yearning for clearly structured 
songs and vocal performances that don't embellish the songs 
much. So what's happened is a return to the Cole Porter-Burt 
Bacharach-Beatles elements of a song."

The evidence, he says, is in the work of artists such as Smith, 
who wrote sublime bridges his whole career, and the White 
Stripes, who wrote memorable middle-eights with shifted 
rhythms on "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and "You're 
Pretty Good Looking." Or the Shins, whose "So Says I," about 
the loss of personal control, has a bridge ("In our darkest 
hours .") where the singer sounds like he's losing his footing.

"It's the hardest part of a song to write," Nugent says, "and a
place for really good songwriters to show off.

[part 3 of 3 coming up next]


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