The 32-bar AABA song form

I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don’t have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. When we cover the Great American Songbook, the students will write 32-bar AABA tunes. But what does that mean?

The first thing to understand about the Great American Songbook is that it’s not a literal book (though there are many books collecting these kinds of songs.) It’s more of a loose canon of early-to-mid-20th-century standard tunes by composers like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Dorothy Fields, and Duke Ellington. Before I got deep into popular musicology, I tended to think of these standards as “jazz”, but that is not accurate. The songs do sometimes draw on jazz vocabulary, but really, they are pop songs that jazz musicians like to use as launchpads for improvisation.

There are a lot of differences between the Songbook standards and the present-day Anglo-American mainstream: melody and harmony, lyrical content, vocal styles, instrumental timbres. For the purposes of my class, the most important difference is below the surface, at the level of song form. When you listen to standards, the familiar signposts of verses and choruses are absent. (When jazz musicians talk about “choruses”, they mean something different from the chorus of a current rock or pop song.) The most common structure in Songbook standards is the AABA form, also known as the 32-bar song form because it’s (you guessed it) 32 bars long. 

To understand how the AABA form works, let’s listen to an example, “These Foolish Things” by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, sung here by Billie Holiday.

This recording begins with some instrumental solos. Let’s skip all that for now; instead, we’ll start at 1:30 when Billie begins singing the main melody. The term “AABA” describes the four sections of this melody.

• The first A section is an eight bar strophe, comprising four phrases of two bars each:
  • A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces
  • An airline ticket to romantic places
  • and still my heart has wings, these foolish
  • things remind me of you
• The second A section is another eight bar strophe with the same melody as the first (with a slightly different ending). The lyrics are different until the last phrase, which repeats the refrain:
  • A tinkling piano in the next apartment
  • Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant
  • A fairground’s painted swings, these foolish
  • things remind me of you
• The B section is also known as the bridge. It has the same eight bar length as the A sections, but the melody and chords are different, and there’s no refrain:
  • You came, you saw
  • You conquered me
  • When you did that to me, I
  • knew somehow it had to be
• Finally, there’s a concluding A section with its familiar refrain:
  • The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
  • A telephone that rings but who’s to answer?
  • Oh, how the ghost of you clings, these foolish
  • things remind me of you

Now that you understand the form, go back to the beginning of the recording. There’s a four-bar intro on the horns, and then pianist Teddy Wilson begins playing the A section melody. He doesn’t stick to the written melody for long, though; instead he improvises a new melody. If you sing the lyrics on top, you will see that he follows the form exactly. After Wilson plays the second A section, saxophonist Johnny Hodges plays a solo on the B section. You can continue to sing the lyrics on top and hear how Hodges also sticks to the form. Next, Wilson solos on the final A section. This entire AABA form is called a “chorus” (not the chorus, a chorus.) The second chorus is Billie singing the words. The recording ends with a trumpet solo on just an A section, and then a tag ending.

Now let’s listen to a different recording of this tune by Johnny Griffin. Even though Griffin begins improvising almost immediately and no one ever sings the words, you will still be able to follow the repeating AABA form all the way through.

Let’s listen to another standard that uses AABA form, “Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, as recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. This recording begins with a verse (“Times have changed and we’ve often rewound the clock…”), and the first AABA chorus begins at 0:46. 

As in “These Foolish Things”, each section is comprised of four two-bar phrases, and the A sections all end in a refrain.

• First A section
  • In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was
  • looked on as something shocking, now, heaven
  • knows, anything
  • goes. Good
• Second A section
  • authors too who once knew better words
  • now only use four-letter words writing
  • prose, anything
  • goes. The world has gone
• B section
  • mad today and good’s bad today and black’s
  • white today and day’s night today when most
  • guys today that women prize today are just
  • silly gigolos. So
• Last A section
  • though I’m not a great romancer, I
  • know that I’m bound to answer, when you pro-
  • pose, anything
  • goes

Here’s Brad Mehldau’s recording of “Anything Goes.” He does it in 5/4 time, but don’t be thrown off, he sticks to the AABA form all the way through.

The AABA form fell out of fashion during the rock era, but it didn’t disappear. The Beatles sound different from Cole Porter, but they used AABA surprisingly often. Maybe it isn’t surprising, actually; Paul McCartney talks about how everybody sang standards around the piano when he was growing up, and he adores those songs. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” has the same AABA structure as “Anything Goes”, right down to the refrain on the end of each A section. Note, however, that the sections are twelve bars long rather than eight.

The Beatles kept using AABA in their psychedelic era, for example in “She Said She Said”. The form uses odd lengths, but the structure is nevertheless still there, with a refrain and everything. After the first AABA cycle, the song repeats B and A again, a common arrangement strategy for AABA songs.

Beyond historical interest, you might wonder why a songwriter in 2024 should still care about AABA form. I have two different answers. The simple answer is that even if you aren’t writing in pre-rock styles, it’s still good to know how those styles work. But the more important answer is that getting familiar with AABA form makes you more attentive to form generally, and it can help you break out of the verse-chorus-verse-chorus rut. 

Understanding form is the final frontier for most songwriters, the last stage in their creative development. That was certainly the case for me. Most beginner songwriters aren’t aware of form at all. Either they unthinkingly fall back on cliche structures, or, more often, their material doesn’t have any particular structure at all. It’s just some idea, then another idea, then another, then another. There isn’t any higher-level order. You don’t have to use AABA or any other pre-existing form, but you do need some kind of skeleton to your song, otherwise it will feel baggy and shapeless. You might try out AABA and think, yes, this is great, I should write with this. Or you might try it and think, no, I hate this, it’s too predictable and trite, I’m going to use five groups of seven-bar phrases or whatever. Either way, you’re thinking on a deeper level than just, this thing happens and then this thing happens.

After I did a lot of systematic study of song form, I noticed that I like songwriters who refer to traditional/standard forms, but with their own mutations. I started to appreciate how the Grateful Dead could write songs that sound superficially traditional but that use weird structures. Ironically, learning about song form also made me more respectful of music that deliberately doesn’t use it: the open-ended two-bar grooves of James Brown and Parliament, or the even more open-ended modal grooves of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The whole point of improvisation is that it usually isn’t formless at all; the best improvisors can discover new forms in the moment.