Or, “How to be an original copycat”
No songwriter or creative artist likes to think of herself as an imitator. The odd thing is, conscious, careful imitation can give you more original ideas and fresh material than supposedly “Striking out on your own.” Don’t isolate yourself from the rich traditions of poetry, writing, songwriting, and music composition that we’ve inherited! Learn from what came before.
Each day, you can reach back and pluck a classic song or a timeless lyric like a peach. Listen. Analyze. Copy great lines down into your copybook. Analyze what makes them great. Then, once you’ve sucked all the nutrients you can from that one perfect peach of a lyric, you can use those nutrients 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 (radically changing the song’s premise, but preserving the song’s structure) or
- Keep the content but change the form (totally rewriting and restructuring, but keeping the song’s basic premise).
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”.
You could experiment with using the structure of the line as a kind of template for writing lines about other topics, using assonance and alliteration wherever you can:
- She fled the comforts that others clung to.
- He embraced this woman that others shunned.
- They climbed toward the heights that so many had fallen from.
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?
- She was about as happy as a snowman in Spring.
- She was not exactly singing.
- She had money in the bank, a pretty face, a full fridge, and all the misery she could eat.
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.
Come with me back to the 15th century a for a second. You’ve got to meet this guy named Desidarius Erasmus Roterodamus—but you can call him “Erasmus of Rotterdam”. Erasmus liked to spend his time playing 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 different content and practice expressing that content in a wide variety of possible forms. In the end, he demonstrated some 150 different ways to rephrase “Your letter pleased me greatly”.
- 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’s mine. But you get the idea.
The proverb “Repetition is the mother of skill” is right—and few people spend as much time practicing as Erasmus did. 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.
Given a particular line of lyric, for example, there are four general strategies you could use to creatively alter it. You could:
- add something,
- subtract something that’s already there,
- rearrange its elements, or
- replace selected elements.
These categories of change work equally well for lyric writing and music. You can apply any one of them 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 aspect of a piece of music or 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. You could subtract entire sections from the song to shorten it.
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 reassign 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 any word with another.
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.
It goes without saying that 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.