Career Songwriter

…I love the part of your book where you said the greater the detail, the less time has passed. I think we live moment to moment, so it makes sense songs should too.
But one thing that came to mind is, once you have zeroed in on a particular moment with detail, where do you go from there? Do you string together different moments with each verse, or do you keep defining the same detailed moment throughout?

This is a great question pertaining to the craft of writing with external or ‘showing’ language as opposed to internal or ‘telling’ language. When we draw a listener into a specific moment, we’re drawing a picture in which we can evoke certain emotions. Those emotions draw their importance from the scene we’ve set, and so the question is how to craft the song around that scene to make our main message truly believable and powerful. I’d like to show you how to use a few techniques from my book Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling, and Commercial Songwriting Techniques, the online www.berkleemusic.com course, to apply this kind of imagery to your own songs.

I’m going to give you an overview of the process rather than outline each step.
First, to use imagery effectively we need to be aware of what kind of mood we’re trying to create. In other words, if we’re trying to evoke compassion and tears in the heart of our listener, we wouldn’t begin by describing a beautiful sunny summer day. Our details determine the feelings our listener will experience. Let me work with an example to pick this apart.

You look around, the room’s a mess
with dirty plates and empty cans
you spend your days just flipping channels
round and round

This is the first verse of a song I was working on awhile ago. Consider the details I’ve used here and what mood they create. The way I began writing this verse, and the way I begin writing many of my songs, is by choosing a location. When I’ve chosen that location, I begin to describe the things I see around me. In the case of this song, I may see shades pulled, morning light slanting in thin strips across the stained carpet of a ratty one-bedroom in LA. I see dirty dishes and a frayed couch sitting 5 ft. from a dated TV, I smell stale air and hear the drone of the neighbors through card-board thin walls. These details are simply drawing the picture so that my listener can feel what I feel instead of just take my word for it. When I go to write the actual verse, I simply choose the details that I want to include. Here, those details were, ‘room’s a mess’, ‘dirty plates’, ‘empty cans’, ‘flipping channels round and round’, which were all part of my original Destination Writing. (For more on Destination Writing, see Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling).

Once we’ve set the scene, our internal ‘telling’ language or ‘thoughts and feelings’, can make a bigger impact. The listener has context in which to feel what we feel instead of just being told how to feel. Here is verse two, in which I use much more internal thoughts and feelings:

She is gone and it’s a fact
you saw the truth a long time back
this was one that wouldn’t last…but

Now I’ve come to the chorus section. Here, my chorus starts as a pick-up to beat one, and so that fills in that missing fourth line of verse two where you may have noticed verse one and verse two do not match. Choruses are typically thoughts and feelings instead of images. The reason is that with imagery, we’re describing a moment in time rather than commenting on the big picture. Choruses describe the big picture, giving the whole song purpose:

Wasn’t she worth it
wasn’t she wonderful
the heaven and the hell that she was cursed with
But wasn’t it brilliant
just for a moment you felt
everything alive that you could hurt with
Wasn’t she worth it
now that the worst is almost done

Now we’re at that point in the song where we’ve got to figure out how to keep our listener interested. The dreaded second verse (verse after the first chorus and in this case, my third verse) can be tricky. But, when we think in terms of ‘showing’ details, we need only choose another location to get started again. Since my first verse was set in an apartment or room, I figured that to return to describing that room would be slightly redundant. So, I decided to move my main character outside. Notice how the ‘moment’ is not as specific here. Apart from the first line, my details are more broad, commenting on a bigger moment.

You walk the streets but in your mind
you turn the pages back in time
and all the places seem to fade like
another lifetime

But such a sweet and perfect lie
and you believed it for awhile
she broke you down and built you higher…but

I could have described more of what this person sees as he walks the streets. Maybe there is a specific place that captures a memory. Those ideas would be effective as well in creating an interesting verse. But here, I decided to stay on the surface of the image. The important idea to notice is that we can stay more surface for later verses as long as our first verse sets the stage. All of what we think and feel will be understood in the context of the initial scene.

When we’re writing with imagery, we can keep coming back to specific moments to generate song material. I suggest trying to get specific as often as possible, considering the location and then describing taste, touch, sight, smell, sound, and movement. Don’t be afraid of becoming too detailed. As you rewrite, it will be much easier to pull back into generic thoughts and feelings than to become more detailed where you’ve only skimmed the surface. Finding that balance between imagery and thoughts/feelings takes some skill that you’ll develop over time working with these tools. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how many ideas you have, and how you can capture the listener’s attention with more intensity as you work imagery into your songs.

Happy writing,
Andrea