Popular song is often argued against in academic literature as a sight of the mundane, holding little to no evidence of musicological value (Ward 2019). As part of a PhD, 300 number 1 songs (2017) were subject to a musical analysis of form and organisation. This analysis tested the assertions of the most prominent instructional works on songwriting, namely: popular song forms are inherently formulaic and consist of only 7 forms. The results of this analysis demonstrated that 84% of the music analysed shared a common form and structure, with only minor variation being present in the data set (Ward 2019).
In a work that undertook 7 different rewrites over an 18-month process, Mama Said subverts concepts of modern song form by deploying multiple variations of musical structure to the popular song format. Irregular sectional length and breaks in arrangement continuity are used to disrupt the most common song forms while still adhering to the other temporal considerations of popular song (Bennet, 2015). In this way, Mama Saiduses quantitative analysis to inform its structural composition and distils the knowledge of 300 number 1 songs into a single work arguing for the efficacy of a quantitative-informed songwriting approach. This structural songwriting approach is one of the key outcomes of the PhD Project undertaken by the writer.
Mama Said is part of a music publishing agreement with Origin Australia and after being produced for Warner Music Poland, the sound recording received its first Gold Record status (15,000 physical sales) in May of 2021. The work has received over one-million streams on various platforms and was included in a demonstration of the structural analysis model at the biennial conference for the International Association for the study of Popular Music in 2019.