No songwriter or creative artist likes to think of herself as an imitator.
But you know what’s strange? Careful imitation of works you admire can actually give you more original ideas and fresh material than the songwriters who claim that nobody influences them.
Each day, you can reach out and pluck some classic song or a timeless lyric like a peach. You can listen to it deeply, as we’ve planned in previous lessons. You can write notes on the music. You can copy great lines of lyric down into your copybook. You can identify which techniques the songwriter used to create the song.
Finally, once you’ve sucked all the sweet educational nutrients you can from that one perfect peach of a lyric, you can use that extract to infuse new works that are all your own.
For example, once you’ve analyzed exactly what’s going on in a certain passage of lyric, you can:
- Keep the form but change the content (keeping the song’s structure, but changing the core idea expressed in that structure) or
- Keep the content but change the form (totally rewriting and restructuring the piece, while staying within the same basic topic).
Let’s look at each of these methods of creative imitation in a little more detail.
Imitation Technique #1: Keep the form, change the content
Here’s an example of keeping the form of a line, but totally changing the content:
Let’s say you hear a song that celebrates the actions of some brave firefighters who gave their lives in the attempt to save others. This line catches your ear:
They raced toward the flames that others fled.
Aside from the subject matter of that line, the form of the line itself is appealing. There’s some nice assonance going on between “raced” and “flames”. And there’s nice alliteration between “flames” and “fled”.
They raced toward the flames that others fled.
You could experiment with using the structure of the line as a template for writing about other topics. “They raced toward the flames that others fled” could become:
- “She fled the comforts that others clung to.” Could be the start of a song about a woman who leads a remarkable life.
- “He embraced this woman that others shunned.” Could kickstart a song about a man who loves somebody that society didn’t accept.
- “They climbed toward the heights that so many had fallen from.” Could be about mountain climbers.
Next time you encounter a line that you love in a lyric, try using its structure to write lines of your own about other topics.
Imitation Technique #2: Keep the content, change the form
Let’s say you encounter a really boring line. Something like:
She was distressed.
That’s pretty plain. Hardly sounds like it’s even worth saying, let alone singing. How might a writer get that message across using a more interesting form? Try using different figures of speech and writing techniques to bring that boring line to life. “She was distressed” could become:
- She was about as happy as a snowman in Spring. (simile) OR
- She was not exactly singing. (understatement) OR
- She had money in the bank, a pretty face, a full fridge, and all the misery she could eat. (anticlimax)
In the examples given above, the core content of the sentence is basically the same. In all three examples there’s a woman, and she’s unhappy. But just saying “She was distressed” is a boring way to say it. Use any and all creative writing techniques you know to bring that line to life.
Come with me back to the 15th century for a second. You’ve got to meet this guy named Desidarius Erasmus Roterodamus… — call him “Erasmus of Rotterdam” for short.
Erasmus was this guy who liked to spend his time playing around with form and content in endless iterations. He’s known for deliberately rewriting the simple phrase “Your letter pleased me greatly” for hours on end.
Erasmus believed that writers should take on a wide variety of topics, or content. He also felt you should practice expressing that content in a wide variety of possible forms. Erasmus practiced what he preached: he demonstrated 150 different ways to say “Your letter pleased me greatly”.
For example:
- “Your letter brought me much pleasure.”
- “The greatest joy was occasioned to me by your letter.”
- “Your letter was off the hook, yo!”
Okay, that last one was me, not Erasmus. But you get the idea.
Ever heard that proverb “Repetition is the mother of skill”? That’s true — and few people spend as much time on repetitive practice as Erasmus did. To write better songs, and make ourselves better songwriters in the process, we could all be a little more… Erasmus-y.
The Four Categories of Change
In the tradition of rhetoric, there are four basic ways to transform a piece of writing. They’re called the Four Categories of Change. For short, I like to call them “The Four Cats”. Meow.
So let’s say you’ve got a line of lyric you want to play around with. You could:
- add something,
- subtract something that’s already there,
- rearrange its elements into a new order, or
- replace selected elements.
These categories of change work equally well for altering passages of music, too. You can apply any one of the four cats to:
- a line of lyric
- a rhyme scheme
- a particular song section
- a song’s overall structure
- a chord
- a chord progression
- a melody
- a rhythm
So the Four Categories of Change can be applied to any portion of a piece of music or any portion of a piece of writing. They also happen to be a great way to brainstorm variations whenever you find yourself stumped while writing a song. They can be useful to keep in mind while you’re rewriting and revising songs, too.
For example, given a passage of music, you could add notes, add chord changes, add notes to a chord to extend it (like changing a C to a CMaj7, for example), add a counter-melody, on and on.
You could subtract notes; you could subtract all of the chords, leaving the melody entirely naked; you could subtract notes from a specific chord to simplify it. Finally you could subtract the weakest sections from the song to shorten it or make room for rewrites.
You could rearrange the notes of the melody, playing it entirely in reverse. You could rearrange the lines of lyric in a verse. You could rearrange the order of sections in the song. You could rearrange which instruments play which notes.
Finally, you could replace any note with another, any chord with another, any instrument with another, any musical key with another, any single line of lyric with another, and any word with another.
Let’s be clear here: Imitation is not plagiarism
Bear in mind that if you use someone else’s work as a base, and you wish for these little exercises in imitation to produce work that’s truly all your own, you’ll have to make changes that are significant enough that the song truly does become transformed into an original work.
Just changing a few words of another writer’s lyric doesn’t make the altered lyric totally your own work—at best, that’s an arrangement of another writer’s work. To be original, your alterations need to fundamentally change the work.
In Closing
Don’t isolate yourself from the rich traditions of poetry, writing, songwriting, and music composition that we’ve inherited! Learn from what came before.