This ONE Lyrics Exercise Will Change Everything

the way my lungs actually press against my rib cage that presses against the seat as the car accelerates and I can actually feel the g-force pressing my skin against my skull [Music] one of the keys into writing great lyrics is the ability to turn your ideas into sense based imagery so sense based language is language that conjures the material stuff of the world so it's stuff out there that you can sense with your senses so what are our senses our five basic senses of course are sight smell taste sound and touch but we also have two extra senses that we can activate as songwriters that also end up evoking imagery that can be really powerful and really compelling in your lyric writing and those senses are the inside body sense so when we activate the inside body sense what we're trying to do is describe physical Sensations happening inside the body so let me give you a quick example of that one way that I could say something about being nervous is just to say I feel nervous but that's not activating anything sensory or tangible if I were instead to say something like adrenaline prickled and pulled inside my stomach and I could feel the acid burn of it start to tickle the back of my throat well now I'm starting to convert the emotion or the feeling into specific physical sensation inside my body and we can feel how much more visceral and you know energetic it is it just feels almost uncomfortable when you start describing your inner body workings in that detail and the most important thing is as a listener you feel it too because that level of detail actually conjures your experience of that feeling in a way that makes you as the listener participate in the description in the scene in the memory in the experience and not merely observe someone telling you about their experience of a thing so the other sense that we can activate as songwriters is what we call the movement sense so movement is highly related to visual it's also highly related to touch but it's really amalgamating those things into something else so movement is an invitation to really tap into the way that objects and people move in space as well as how your body is moving in space so let me give you an example if I were describing the experience of driving in a fast sports car well if all I was doing was trying to describe the car I might say it's black and it's shiny and it's got silver hubcaps and its Interiors are caramel leather yes that tells me what everything looks like but in a very static way so movement is really an invitation to describe the way something moves so if I tap into that I might actually describe the way that the car Zips through traffic like a dragonfly on the surface of a pond or I might even tap into what it feels like to be inside that car as it accelerates and I could describe the way my lungs actually press against my rib cage that presses against the seat as the car accelerates and I can actually feel the g-force pressing my skin against my skull right so tapping into the movement sense there gives you a much more Vivid and interesting picture of what's going on in the car as well as my experience of being inside that car and the outcome here for the audience is it creates a real level of depth or a sense of depth for us you know that that description of you being pressed against the leather and it the pressure building in your skull the g-forces that starts to you know my heart starts beating faster and I start having a physical response to the way you're describing it as opposed to talking about the feel of the leather and the color of the car and things that are very surface level descriptors it also opened up the opportunity for you to use metaphor the dragonfly zipping over the pond is this beautiful metaphor that really becomes available once you start going down this path and the most important thing for me as a songwriter and that what we want to offer you as well is this idea that you want people when they're listening to your song to project themselves into it you want them to be inside the movie of your mind right you want them to be sitting right next to you in that scene so that they really feel the emotions inside their bodies they're not just watching you talk about your experience but that you start to blend and kind of merge with your listeners and that's when songs really start to communicate to other people and it becomes about them and for them as much as it is about you and for you as the songwriter and this is when songs really start to communicate to a broader audience of people foreign we're going to set a timer for 10 minutes we start with a prompt which we are going to give you in just a moment and you write continuously for 10 minutes you don't edit yourself you don't censor yourself you write in full sentences not lyrics so we're not rhyming we're not trying to write with rhythm if you try to do that stuff you're actually not going to be getting the benefits of this writing exercise so for 10 minutes you write Pros consistently but specifically within the parameters of drawing on the seven senses the next step is to create a random prompt we're going to find it through a random object generator app there are many of these available we'll put a link to the one we're using in the resources folder but if I press randomize now and create a prompt we're going to get this word whistle what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that prompt and I'm going to let it associate in my mind as quickly as I can to some kind of memory experience scene or situation and I'm going to drop myself into it and I'm going to start drawing on all seven senses one of the things I like to do to start with is actually to write the seven Senses at the top of my page so that I can constantly refer to them and make sure that I'm not focusing just on one or two of them but I'm really systematically trying to integrate all seven senses [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] now we're going to go through that entire passage that cap is just written and we're going to Mark and highlight all the phrases that include sense-based language I was eight years old beach holiday in the Australian summer sleeping with sand in my toes crusting in my hair and behind my ears so there's probably a bit of visual sense in there but really also to me there's touch sense right like the feeling of sand on your skin in your hair and behind your ear so that calls on visual sense and the touch sense and the word crusting is really it's so uh you can feel it on your skin you can feel it yeah that's right the salt of the Sea warm and moist in the air so again that one is really touch right the words warm and moist we feel that on the skin but also using the word salt in the air conjures a little bit of smell or even taste right you can kind of smell the saltiness in the air there too the evening buzzing and the live with the rhythmic pulses of cicadas together creating a screeching high pitched whistle that filled the air so that's all sound that afternoon I learned to wolf whistle two fingers of each hand shoved into my mouth so there to me there's a visual image right like you can see that happening but also you can feel it in your mouth I think so to me there's a bit of touch sense and even because it's sort of inside your body at that moment I would also start to blend that into the inside body sense the tongue has to be curled back like Elvis's hair to me that was a visual description so I'm really trying to show the shape of something using a simile to really show the visual picture of what that looks like it's a great visual too it's very creative and you know it made me chuckle a little bit when when I heard that it was a great one then blow at first spit dribbling down my chin and hot air just wheezing out to spit dribbling down my chin it's visual it's also touch based you can sort of feel it drilling down your skin and then the air wheezing out again that conjures the sound sense and then a short sharp sound my heart racing thumping Against the Cage of my ribs so there I was very consciously and deliberately tapping into the inside body sense and that was a very deliberate thing so I at certain moments when we get to an emotional Peak and a feeling I like to really focus on what that feels like or felt like inside the body and so I do remember learning how to wolf whistle and it feeling so exciting and kind of powerful and it to me it could have conjured the memory of the feeling of my heart getting so excited and I didn't just want to say you know I was excited it was exciting you know it's how do you convert that feeling into physical sensation inside your body some kind of possibility opening up I could taste the seaweed of the beach on my fingers and the spit glossing my lips again here this was a very deliberate and conscious move to integrate The Taste sense here and to me you might sort of think why why are we doing all the senses one of the reasons is because we have all these senses and the more you incorporate into your writing the more you can actually draw on unusual senses firstly you're showing your unique perspective of an experience secondly often those things are really really visceral and in fact the smell sense and The Taste sense are very attached to emotion for people but it's funny because as human creatures we are biologically evolved to rely more heavily on our visual scent and our sound sense so part of sense writing is actually very consciously moving to the less familiar senses but it's amazing how when we do that the experience is so much more immersive it becomes like a 360 degree experience rather than this kind of two-dimensional site sound experience and smell like you said is very nostalgic you know there's a lot of emotion wrapped up and memories wrapped up in smell sense as the sound sharpened until finally shooting out as the loudest most ear rattling sound a wolf whistle so obviously sound sense the sheer power of being eight years old and able to create that sound the sound waves hurtling past my lips and crashing through the glass sweeping out into the street again this was a very conscious maneuver on my part to actually try and describe sound as movement and this is one of the most fun things that you can do in sense writing is actually taking one sense experience and trying to describe it through a different sense it's like sense blending and sometimes that is the most interesting descriptive language that evokes lots of different things at the same time so that was using the movement right hurtling crashing sweeping describing sound as movement it really creates almost like an animalistic quality to this to this sound it's now got a form and it's it's crashing into things and hurtling past you know it it brings into life in a very physical way it's a wolf whistle it's a wolf whistle and joining those damn cicadas as the Indigo Twilight started to wash its ink over the day turning the street gray the blanket of the sky sweeping closed so that's a very visual sense description and it was interesting I had to flip back over to my seven Senses at this point and just check if I had covered everything and interestingly I think that I had avoided a lot of visual description which is natural in the memory that I was tapping into here because it was very sound based you know and I think as I was dipping into that memory and it was by the ocean and so there was smell and taste and sound and that hot heat of the air so it turns out that funnily enough in this description visual actually didn't come into it as dominantly as it often does if you're not thinking about it so in this experience I got to the end and I thought actually you know I haven't touched on the visual sense very much so let me dip back into the visual sense and for me the experience hearing it read back and reading over it again is it almost sort of steps out of the visceralness of the experience right the spit and the dribble and the yeah right and then as we pull back and actually see the sky and the Twilight and the colors getting darker the the camera Move If This Were A Movie would kind of be pulling back and giving a long shot and sort of Dipping up to the sky as almost like a closing scene so it's interesting to even feel that how the different senses create different levels of intimacy or closeness as well so I felt that I don't know if you felt that reading through almost like they're doing different jobs they're performing different functions very much the taste and the the smell brought us in closer to you the sights uh the visual imagery really like you said it pulls back and gives us that Observer kind of perspective so the in and out is a fascinating kind of you know it's a fascinating thing to see come to life in a piece of writing but the sound of those cicadas still droning into the salty night so we come back to the sound sense and I think my instinct there was because this was such a sound based piece of writing and I had mentioned the cicadas and then the wolf whistling and then I had brought the wolf whistle into the screeching sound of the cicadas I kind of wanted to bring it back to the sound of the cicadas at the end of that piece we've created this video using selected scenes and highlights from our brand new online course the five most powerful songwriting exercises revealed a course that guides you practically and in great detail through five songwriting exercises that have had a profound effect on both Cappy and I and have shaped us as professional songwriters over the years trust us these exercises will help you write better songs so if you're interested check out the udemy link below [Music]

Channel: How To Write Songs

Views: 33,126

Keywords: how to write songs, how to write a song, lyric writing, writing great lyrics, best lyric writing tips, songwriting, songwriting process, lyric writing process

Id: XlChHXm9DYg

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023