Career Songwriter

I consider myself a bit of a hopeless romantic. I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy. I love watching the groom’s face as the bride walks down the aisle. Even though I know Valentine’s Day dinner and a movie at twice the price is a cheap exploitation of true love, I still make the reservations.

You’d think with such a soft spot for affection I’d eek out a few hundred love songs now and then. The problem is not writing a love song, but writing a good love song that people want to hear again and again without chewing their own arm off. For me, songs have to connect - and connect with a depth of purpose. If that depth of purpose only runs skin deep with phrases like ‘ever since we met’, or ‘I was so blind,’ my willingness to believe the song reflects actual experience is compromised. I want to be swept away by the love song, not just mildly interested. I want to feel down to the marrow of my bones that this love is worth every ounce of passion and vulnerability the artist is asking me to invest by listening to it. Anything less and there is a discordance between what the writer/artist intended on making me feel, and what I actually feel.

I’m not saying that a love song can’t be reggae, can’t make me smile, blush, or can’t bounce along with the pitter-patter of a new romance. I am saying that a great love song has to deliver some actual life experience between the clichés. It’s got to be real, intimate, and totally accessible.

It is for this reason that I find love songs especially difficult to write. In my opinion, my most successful love song attempts result from two techniques, both of which I only realized I was using in hindsight. The first of these techniques is using a location as the basis for the story. By setting the first verse in a specific ‘place’, such as a laundry mat or a coffee shop, the song finds its roots firmly planted in a real-life experience instead of whizzing out in nowhere with scattered thoughts and feelings. Take a listen to some of the more recent popular love songs and look for this ‘location’ within the lyric. Many artists within the pop or rock vein come to mind, such as Jason Mraz, John Mayer, Edwin McCain, Sting. As with any songwriting technique, look within your genre to find examples of the tool at work. For more detail on this technique, refer to Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling, chapters one, two, and three.

The other technique is using a metaphor to ground the song. For instance, love is a rose. Love is a rent-controlled apartment. Love is an open field. Love is a landing strip. Thinking about the characteristics of these nouns, we can draw contrasts and comparisons and come at love from a unique perspective. When I write with a metaphor in mind, I also choose my verbs wisely. If a landing strip is my launchpad for this technique, I list all the verbs, nouns, and adjectives that come to mind related to that idea. Taking off, zoom, jet fuel, screech, burnt rubber, passenger, wingspan, etc. This gets me on a path towards more ideas: What happens when love takes off? When would I describe love with the word ‘zoom’? What jet fuels love? What happens when I smell the burnt rubber, the screech, am I ever a passenger in love, and what wingspan can love have?

On a final note, I find break-up songs just flow out of me. Even though breaking up hasn’t been a theme in my life for years, I find I can access that well of painful words and images as if it happened yesterday. Perhaps it’s because so much of love is deliriously happy and almost removed from the details of mundane reality. But to connect in intimate ways, generalizations just won’t do. While you’re writing your next love song, how vulnerable are you willing to get for the sake of connecting with your listener with purpose worth writing?