The Surprising Enemy of Good Songwriting

in the world of songwriting where lyrics and Melody intertwine to create Magic there is an unassuming enemy lurking in the shadows and it's not a lack of Talent OR creative inspiration that is the biggest threat to good songwriting it's actually something far more unexpected this enemy actually lives inside the good intentions of songwriters but if we can't recognize it it can creep in to every song we write in this video I'm going to tell you what that enemy is and also how to avoid it lyrics like this make me cringe a little inside and I suspect that they make you feel exactly the same way and yet they pop up everywhere and they actually pop up in the lyrics of people who are trying really hard not to write like that why well here is the enemy of good songwriting in the very Noble intentions of songwriters who write songs that are universally relatable the enemy is that we mistake Universal for generic something that is universal is not the same thing as something that is generic and in the attempt to write something that appeals to lots and lots of people the mistake is to strip your lyrics of everything that actually makes them personal and therefore relatable Universal ideas are experiences and emotions that are shared by lots of people and the feeling when you hear a song like that is you deeply feel like oh oh me too like that's exactly what it was like that's exactly how it felt and here is the Paradox of great songwriting and of course I am specifically talking about lyric writing here the Paradox is in order to successfully create that connection for our listeners we do not want to strip our lyrics of all the idiosyncrasies and all the specifics that make that idea and experience any motion come to life and feel real and true and authentic we need to keep those details in the song because it's those details that conjure the details of someone else's life and make them feel like me too let me show you an example of this from a beautiful song that absolutely Nails the idea that including specific details is actually what makes a song More relatable and therefore more Universal and the song is nothing by Bruno major so I'm actually going to sing the first verse for you because it totally captures the beauty of the specifics that he puts into the lyrics tracksuits movies for two we'll take off iPhones and turn off our shoes will plain Nintendo though I always lose cause you watch the TV while I'm watching you let's see how we can ruin this song by letting the enemy creep in and mistaking Universal for generic we sit on the couch just you and me we love to hang out nowhere I'd rather be can you feel yourself dying just a little bit inside so generic does not mean universal and in fact it often it has the opposite effect because it removes everything that actually triggers the life experience that creates that sympathetic response from a listener and creates that moment of connection when we take out the details we take out the relatability which actually makes something less Universal not more Universal the late and great Leonard Cohen said it beautifully in his wonderful interview in the book songwriters on songwriting we seem to be able to relate to detail we seem to have an appetite for it it seems our days are made of details and if you can get the sense of another person's day in details your own day of details is summoned in your mind in some way rather than just a general line like the days went by it's better to say watching Captain Kangaroo not watching TV sitting in my room with that hopeless little screen not just TV but hopeless little screen I think those are the details that Delight us they Delight us because we can share a life then it's our sense of insignificance and isolation that produces a great deal of suffering there's no better exercise that I know of for sharpening this technique of transforming ideas into specific details then the exercise called sense writing and I've talked a lot about sense writing in other videos which you can check out here and click on and just bookmark it and go to it at the end I've also included a free pdf in the link in the show notes which is to an ebook I wrote called the five best exercises for writing great lyrics and sense writing is number one so you can download that and really go into detail there but I'm going to demo an exercise for you right now that's a sort of Abridged version of sense writing and something that you can do really quickly to practice this idea of taking something general or generic and really transforming it into something that puts a picture in the mind of your listener so here is the exercise I call this exercise turning the dial because we're taking something that is generic and we're turning the dial up on the level of detail so let's take a generic line like it was a normal lovely Saturday afternoon this line shows me nothing it tells me something but I see nothing and therefore I really don't feel much here is the exercise I'm going to set a timer for six minutes and for six minutes straight I'm going to come up with as many single lines as I can in six minutes that turn that generic idea into specific sense-based detail the goal here is to really paint a picture it's almost like a small little photograph that you're trying to take with words now the lines don't need to be connected in fact they shouldn't be connected they're just single little photographs of pictures that are designed to show a normal lovely Saturday afternoon rather than merely telling about a Saturday afternoon so I'm going to write one line and then I'm going to move on to the next let's have a go [Music] thank you [Music] all of these lines do such a lovely job of really painting a picture and it invites you into the world that I'm creating now it's not that I'm going to use all of these lines it's not even if I wanted to use one of the lines that I would literally use the whole image I can extract images out of it that really work hard to paint the picture let me show you this in action in another song this is the lyric to the song dearly departed Friend by the American Country Bluegrass Americana band Old Crow Medicine Show now this is the second verse to their song and their whole song is full of all kinds of incredible details that really draw us into the story but I really want to show you this verse because it's related to the exercise we just did so let's check this out barbecue grills and lawn mowers kids on four wheelers and ice cream trucks yeah they buried you on a Saturday Georgia lost to Tennessee you would have liked that I know afterwards we went to O'Charley's your mama's boyfriend got drunk saying it should have been me and I wish it was him I mean so I went home got drunk and watched the TV can you see here how the song writers are actually painting the picture of a normal Saturday now this song is not about a normal Saturday this song is about attending the funeral of a friend but it's actually the specificity of the imagery they're using to paint the image of a Saturday kind of just rolling on as normal out there while actually the singer is experiencing a day that is unlike any other Saturday they've experienced that really creates the emotion through the contrast of those two experiences the normal Saturday out there and the funeral happening in the world of the songwriter one little caveat that I want to put on the idea of including details into your song lyrics is we're not really talking about adding ornamentation onto your lyrics I'm not talking about shoving in as many adjectives and adverbs as you can in fact adjectives and adverbs tend to also be enemies of good songwriting and good communication but the importance of nouns and verbs cannot be overstated I love this quote from the Stephen King book on writing Stephen King here is talking about descriptive detail and he says for me good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand in for everything else in that Bruno major song tracksuits red wine and movies for two it's just so beautiful it tells us so much it tells us about their relationship it tells us about their age it tells us about their level of comfort and intimacy with each other it tells us that it's something romantic but shows us the details of that but not too many details the inclusion of the playing Nintendo is so Charming in that song and again it kind of tells us something really charmingly quirky and creates that sense of relatability one thing I would love you to notice however in that verse is the almost total absence of adjectives and adverbs so don't rely on adjectives and adverbs to do this job but also understand that not every line of lyric needs to be dripping in the diamond dust of detail really look at your song lyrics and aim for one to two lines per section and mostly here we're talking about verses not even choruses choruses can do whatever they want to do but in the verses where your job is to really paint the world of the song and draw Us in to the who when where and what of the song really aim for one or two lines that use a few key specific images mostly nouns and verbs that do a lot and really help us enter the world of your song and connect with you and your experience of the world if there are songs whose lyrics you absolutely love that do this in a really beautiful way please let us know in the comments and if you want to dive more deeply into sense writing you can check out this video right here happy writing guys I'll see you next time

Channel: How To Write Songs

Views: 15,551

Keywords: songwriting tips, songwriting tips for beginners, writing lyrics, how to write better lyrics, songwriting techniques, songwriting for beginners, how to write a song, song writing, lyric writing, struggling to write lyrics, songwriting tips and techniques, lyric writing tips and techniques

Id: BqYgsTpJnfY

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023