I have watched a LOT of songs die.
Not bad songs, mind you. Lovely songs. Songs that would break your heart on a good recording, sung by a good voice, in a quiet room. And then some poor brave soul stands up in the back snug of Cruise's on a Friday night with thirty people roaring and a fella behind the bar dropping a tray of pints, and the song just... folds. Goes quiet. Dies on its feet. Everyone claps out of mercy and orders another round.
So I've thought about this. Probably too much. Here is what I reckon, after twenty-odd years of running sessions and getting it wrong plenty of times myself.
The single biggest thing — and nobody tells you this — is RANGE. A song that works in a pub does not have a big range. It can't. Because the whole point of a session song is that everyone joins in, and "everyone" includes my cousin Declan who has roughly four notes and uses all of them at the same volume. If your song jumps an octave and a half on the chorus, you have just lost the room. The lads can't get there. They'll mumble the low bit and shout the high bit and the whole thing goes sideways. The best singalongs sit in a comfortable little band where a normal scratchy human voice can live. The Rattlin' Bog is GENIUS for this. It barely moves. You could sing it with a head cold. (I have. Many times.)
Next thing. The chorus has to come back FAST.
This is where a lot of beautiful songs fall down for session purposes — they make you wait. Verse, verse, verse, then a chorus, then more verses you don't know. No good. A pub crowd has the attention span of a labrador, God love them, and they want the thing that lets them join in to come back round before they've lost the thread. The reason a cumulative song like the Bog works so savagely well is that the "bough on the tree and the tree in the bog" bit comes around every single verse and gets LONGER, so even the fella who walked in five minutes ago is roaring the bog-down-in-the-valley-o by the end. He doesn't need to know anything. He just needs to hold on.
Length. Here's a contradiction for you, and I'm going to let it stand because real life is full of contradictions. A good session song should be short. AND a good session song can go on for ages. Both. The Bog is maybe ninety seconds if you do it straight — but you never do it straight, you keep adding verses and inventing new ones and someone shouts "the FLEA" and away you go for another four minutes. The trick is it's short at its CORE and long by choice. A song that's structurally seven minutes long with no escape hatch is a different animal. That's a sit-down-and-listen song. Grand in its place. Not a session song.
And now the big one. The one people fight about. The KEY.
Lads. Please. I am begging you. Pick the right key.
The number of glorious renditions I've heard ruined because some hero started "The Wild Rover" up in a key that suited the recording instead of the room. The recording was sung by a professional with a professional voice in a professional studio. You are in a pub. The collective vocal range of a pub crowd at half eleven on a Friday is, charitably, narrow. Start low. Lower than you think. If it feels slightly TOO low when you're a man on your own, it's about right for the crowd, because half the crowd will go up an octave anyway and the other half will sit nicely under you. I generally find that whatever key feels comfortable, I should drop it a tone and we're golden. (TradSessionKing disagrees with me on this and says I sing everything too low and I sound like a foghorn in a coal cellar. He's entitled to his wrong opinion.)
A few smaller things, quickly, before Rattlin' walks across the keyboard again.
The words have to be daft enough that getting them wrong is funny, not embarrassing. Nobody minds botching "the bog down in the valley-o." Everybody minds botching a tender lyric about a dead mother. Choose accordingly.
It helps enormously if the song has a bit that's just SHOUTING. A "HEY!" or a "no, nay, never!" A little release valve. The Bog has the rolling list that builds and builds — that's the release. People NEED to be loud at some point or they get shy and stop.
And honestly? The best session song is the one your particular room already half-knows. There's no universal answer. A song that kills in Ennis might get blank faces in Cork. Read the room. Some nights the right song is the wrong song done with enough conviction that it becomes right.
If you want the practical follow-on to all this, I'd start a beginner off with something forgiving — I put a few thoughts together in how to start a session, and if you're hunting for actual material there's a whole pile of tried-and-tested ones in the songbook and a proper list over in best pub singalong songs.
But if you only take one thing from me: low key, fast chorus, daft words, and let the eejit at the back hold on. That's the whole game.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' has decided the windowsill above the radiator is his now, which means every song I practise this winter has a small grey audience who blinks at me disapprovingly during the high notes. He's right. They were too high.