Popular songwriting remains an under researched area with specific reference to narrative theory and how story telling operates in a disparate musical form. In a PhD Project in popular songwriting, 300 number 1 songs (2017) were subject to a quantitative structural analysis. This analysis outlined a consistency of musical structure but went little way to exploring the ways in which narrative operates in the non-linear forms of popular song. In further work, the PhD deployed Genette’s narrative discourse analysis model to unpack the ways in which narrative discourse interacted with popular song forms. The key finding in this narrative analysis outlined that the majority of works within data set are intradiegetic direct address narratives with no fixed narrative pronominal gendering, and predominantly led by flux in narrative time.
During a 12-month long production timeline, We Are Done was developed to interrogate the nature of narrative operation in the restricted structures of popular song. It does so by deploying collective and single non-gendered pronouns in a direct address literal conversation between to existents. The flux in narrative discourse occurs in narrative time and narrative perspective. According to Genette’s focalisation, both narrators hold a homodiegetic narrative position while being internality focalised. In this way, the song lyric and resulting music demonstrate the narrative analysis model in songwriting and test its efficacy in emulating the narrative discourse of other popular works.
We Are Done is part of a music publishing agreement with Origin Australia and after being produced for Warner Music Poland, the sound recording received over one-million streams on various platforms. The recording was included in presentation of new songwriting theorisations at the biennial conference for the International Association for the study of Popular Music in 2019.