Watercolor titled Parachutists by Robert Andrew Parker, 1968
I wish I knew a musicologist, so I could ask him/her about the influence the Brill Building songwriters had on the use and prominence of pop-music devices like the modern pop bridge. I'd guess that they played a pretty big role, based on how they influenced the writing of the Beatles (and their contemporaries), who then influenced a big part of everything that came after. Take the songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, for instance - they wrote a lot of great bridges during their '62-'66 marriage/writing-partnership, my favorite probably being "Out in the Street", written in 1965 for the Shangri-Las.
It's one of the Shangri-Las best songs, with an unforgettable intro, a beautifully languid verse that builds up to a dramatic chorus, and (best of all) a killer bridge. After the second chorus, there's a drum roll and then the melody modulates upward, with Mary Weiss singing exultantly about how her boy "grew up on the sidewalks". The bridge serves as an important storytelling element here, ending with the line, "He grew up and then he met me." Our narrator's conflict is laid bare here, as she glories in her boyfriend's tough origins but worries that he has sacrificed an essential part of his identity (i.e. what made him attractive to her in the first place) in order to be with her. And Weiss just sings the hell out of those lines - it's pretty great.
"Out in the Street" by the Shangri-Las
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