I was watching an interview with the musician Sting who observed how the structure of a song has changed over the last ten years. What has disappeared is called the bridge.
A song used to be made up of three parts.
The chorus – which has the message of the song in it and is repeated. Verses – which tell the story of the song. Then there is the bridge which typically introduces new chords and is a place in the song where there is release or resolution.
Sting observed in today’s music the bridge has disappeared, which is a loss because for him the “bridge is therapy.”
Sting continues: “You set a situation out in a song: my girlfriend left me. I’m lonely. Chorus – I’m lonely. You re-iterate that again. And then you get to the bridge and a different chord comes in (and you think) maybe she’s not the only girl on the block. Maybe I should look elsewhere. That viewpoint leads to a key change which leads to … things aren’t so bad. It’s a kind of therapy. The structure is therapy. In modern music … most of it … [is] a circular … trap really. It goes round and round and round… you’re not getting a sense of release that you’re getting out of our crises… music needs to show us a way out. Modern music isn’t doing that at the moment.”
Our emotional life can at times resemble a song.
We have emotions that are like choruses in our lives – I Will Always Love You; You Can’t Always Get What You Want. We have verses where we emotionally tell our story. But we also need a way to structure our lives to be able to emotionally cross over to a better place.
Like in a song, we all need to create our emotional bridge.
On Emotions 