Bee Gees "Stayin Alive"

In episode 14 of the Anatomy of Tone podcast, I talked about how the Bee Gees used an expansion technique in the bridge to take a familiar phrase and wake our ears up. The Bee Gees were crafty songwriters. Not only did they write a very memorable riff for this song they found ways to reuse the riff without it feeling overdone.

An example of this is in the bridge. If we look at the song's intro, we’ll see two bars of a riff in F minor. Then we move to two bars on a Bb chord. This is the basis for the instrumental hook of the song.

If I were to guess, the Bee Gees avoided going to a bridge that takes the song to a new place as it would take us out of the trance state that the music creates. The song has an instrumental, verse, chorus, and a bridge for sections. Each section starts on an F minor chord keeping us feeling like we were in the same tonality the whole time, which adds to the meditative dance state the songs put us in.

The bridge is the instrumental section with an added bar. The instrumental hook section is usually f4 bars in the song. But the bridge adds an extra bar to defy our expectations of where we think it’s going. This allows them to use a familiar part but make it a little new to the ears. Some composers and songwriters always feel pressure to introduce something new or get stuck repeating the same thing repeatedly.

If we think about the core of what the Bee Gees did with “Stayin’ Alive,” we can use this technique in a song we’re working on where we want to keep reusing a part but feel it’s too stagnant.

Let’s look at the chart below as we listen to the song.

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