How to Disappoint Your Audience (in the Best Possible Way)

When writing lyrics, you want your listener to feel something. But unfortunately for us, a lyric as simple as “I’m disappointed and sad, you guys” won’t move an audience.

Too bad—that’d make our jobs much easier, eh?

I’m sure a master melody writer could make “I’m sad” sound alright… but as a lyricist, I don’t like to depend on melody to carry a mediocre line. I’d rather write the kinds of lines that embed in listeners’ hearts and minds, the kinds of lines that practically beg to be sung even before they’re set to melody.

Show and Tell

Instead of telling the audience how the song’s narrator feels, it’s often better to look for a way to make the audience feel it themselves. Blandly stating an emotion isn’t enough to make an audience feel that emotion. So writers use sensory description to draw the audience into the experience.

Writers of all kinds have been saying for a long time: “Show, don’t tell.” Description is key. Try to illustrate moods.

Disappointment and unfulfilled desire appear often in song lyrics. When writing about disappointment, there’s one trick of description that you can use to let your listeners experience exactly what your song’s narrator is going through.

The trick is called anesis.

How to Use Anesis

To use anesis in a lyric, simply defuse and deflate a train of thought with the final line of a section.

Here’s a quick example:

She stepped into her stockings
And combed out her hair
Rimmed her lips red
and pulled on her best dress
Fussed with the straps,
Slipped into her bracelet
Practiced her smile,
Stepped into her heels…
On her way in the taxi, he called her to say
“Something came up; I can’t make it tonight.”

She feels let down, and so do we—because we came along for the ride. Seven lines of getting ready, and then he cancels? And he doesn’t even give us a good reason?

We shaved our legs for this?!

We’ve All Felt Let Down Before

We’ve all gotten excited about things that later fizzled out. Life is full of let-downs and neverminds: some of them small, others profound.

Maybe you get excited and buy a stack of books, then put them on the shelf and never pick them up again. Maybe you buy an expensive, beautiful notebook, and then find yourself terrified to write in it.

Batteries–it turns out–are not included. Fame isn’t everything you thought it would be. Wanting the [insert object of desire here] was actually better than having it. Need I go on?

Anesis is a great way to express life’s false starts in a way that the audience can emotionally relate to. We’ve all experienced the emotional bait-and-switch.

Here are a few other scenarios that are well-suited to anesis, just off the top of my head:

• Being stood up
• Bracing for a crisis that fizzles out (what a relief)
• Making a simple mistake that undoes all your elaborate plans

“Almost Lover” by Alison Sudol has a great example of anesis right built into the first verse. See if you can find it.

Try It

Surely you can remember something that’s left you feeling disappointed or relieved at some point in your life. If nothing comes immediately to mind, make something up using the examples I gave above.

Then, using anesis, retrace that experience for us in a verse of lyric. Get our hopes up with two or more lines; get us nodding along, and then–in the final line–let us down. Let us feel the disappointment (or the relief) for ourselves.

Feel free to share what you write with the rest of us in the comments section, if you like.

Thanks for reading.

fun denied by the photo stylings of Sister72