One of the most exciting ways to learn any art form is to take in great works by great artists. Many of us first pick up a pen or an instrument because we’re inspired by the work of songwriters that went before us. But to get the most out of these encounters with brilliance, it helps to capture the best things you hear on paper.
That’s exactly why Renaissance-era writing teachers asked their students to keep something called a copybook.
A copybook is an ordinary notebook that you use to copy down passages of writing for further study. You’ll want to copy down any great passages of lyric that you encounter, of course, but you don’t have to limit yourself to merely that. You can also copy down lines of dialogue from novels, poems that speak to you on a personal level, quotes from people in your life that strike you as clever, well-written jokes… all forms of speech and writing can inspire your lyric writing.
Your copybook starts as a blank book. Your job is to slowly and steadily fill it up with examples of good writing; eventually it’ll be an entire 150+ pages of writing you admire.
What do you love?
One way to sharpen your familiarity with concepts in songwriting is to recognize and label them in the work of other songwriters. This will reinforce what you’ve learned and open your eyes to highly creative, exciting examples of those techniques in action.
As your copybook grows, you’ll begin to see patterns in what you admire in the creative work of others. What appeals to you? What’s intriguing to you? Write it down, and begin to explore it more deeply. Over time, you’ll likely see some patterns in your own tastes emerging.
Use what you know about the craft to analyze what’s technically happening in each passage that moves you. What appeals to you about this passage? Is there a particularly vivid image? A startling metaphor? A great line of dialogue?
Even if the writer you’re studying only uses these formal techniques in an untrained, instinctive way, you can still analyze their work in technical detail. This is the heart of why songwriters study music theory or writing techniques or grammar: because these fields teach you the vocabulary you need to understand exactly what you love and admire in certain music or lyrics. And if you’re able to identify exactly why you like something in enough technical detail, you’ll have all the information you need to begin using those same techniques to achieve similar effects in original works of your own.
Finding Models
How do you choose which songs and lyrics to analyze? How do you choose which artists, thinkers, writers, creative people to accept as your role models? Well, it often happens that you’re instinctually drawn to certain artists, but who you choose to follow might also depend on what your goals are. If you want more than anything to get a song cut in present-day Nashville, be sure to study whatever successful songs are coming out of Nashville.
Personally I admire highly specialized, well-crafted music. And my tastes do tend to run a little on the strange and experimental side. The kinds of artists that will never be bestsellers, but they do contribute something weird and interesting. Something unique.
Through listening and learning about music, you’ll find yourself drawn to certain scenes and styles of music, too. That may be in the modern mainstream or it may be in obscure corners of musical history. Your tastes are as unique as your fingerprint; let them develop and change naturally as you grow.
Form and Content
When analyzing a lyric, you’ll want to pay attention both to the lyric’s form and the lyric’s content.
Content: the core theme, situation, topic, or feeling being expressed through the lyric. What’s the basic premise in this passage of writing?
Form: the techniques, exact words and phrasing, and other strategies used to bring the lyric’s core idea to life. This includes things like sensory description, rhyme, alliteration, and all the myriad figures of speech.
Form and content are woven tightly together in finished works, and listeners usually experience both at the same time. By taking great care to examine both form and content individually, you can gain a better understanding of all the moving parts of a lyric. Content means what the songwriter is writing about; form means how the songwriter specifically expresses it.
If you keep a copybook, the entire world offers itself up to you like an apple. Whose work do you love? You can make any one particular CD, song, ballet, or poem your classroom. By paying close attention to a piece of work and working to understand how the writer crafted it, you can make any great writer your teacher—even if you’ve never met them. And even if you never will.
Good writers write badly
One other thing to keep in mind is that just because a particular writer or composer is regarded as “great” doesn’t mean that they never made any poor artistic choices. Hero worship won’t make you a better songwriter! Even the best of the best make questionable decisions at times, so don’t be shy about admitting to yourself that you don’t necessarily love or understand everything a favorite artist creates.
And just as you do with passages you love, try to understand exactly why you don’t like in a particular lyric or piece of music. Exactly which parts turn youoff, or leave you indifferent? How might you have handled the piece differently?
Get messy.
Once you’ve copied down a lyric that you love, go ahead and write all over your copy of the lyric. Mark it up, identify sensory imagery, metaphors, and so on. Underline passages that especially appeal to you. Notate the rhyme scheme. Make observations about the piece’s structure, the writer’s word choice, and so on. Mark it up!