Sensory Songwriting: How to Write Lyrics that Capture Your Listener’s Imagination

To save time and energy, we ignore the world every day. Caught up in our tasks and besieged by distractions, we hurry past the tree rising out of the lawn each time we walk past it – it won’t help us pay bills or fix the car.

As hard-working songwriters struggling to find the right word, the right chord, we sometimes forget the miraculous experience of touching a piano key or plucking a guitar string and producing a single, pure note, beautiful all by itself.

Likewise, most of us don’t take time to look at a disposable pen and appreciate its design-we’re not meant to. Instead we use it as a tool to write notes, letters, and so on. This constant ignoring of information and withholding attention does make sense; it allows us complete our routine tasks instead of standing around and gawking all day. And you’ll find no argument from me that we don’t have time to fascinate ourselves with everything.

DANGER

Daily habits, assumptions, and repetitive motions can cause us to view the world itself as a narrow path, rather than a rich experience: this “road” just takes me to work. This “tree” is just something for the dog to pee on. “Today” is just another work day. Hundreds of thousands of pens just like this one sit in warehouses, retail stores, and desk drawers worldwide.

Repeated exposure to almost anything will eventually dull us out and drain the experience of meaning. Repeat the word “rat” dozens of times until it starts to lose its meaning and begins to sound like a repetitive, meaningless noise. You’ll see what I mean.

Over time we come to memorize the small portion of the world we inhabit, and then we withdraw from the world itself because it’s easier to just operate in accordance with our memorized map of it. If we spend too long on autopilot, our powers of observation and navigation atrophy and we rely on them less and less.

Then one day you awaken to find that you’re knee-deep in the footprints you made last week, month, year. You’ve been walking the same route over and over and over, and it hasn’t been getting any more interesting.

Meanwhile, you’ve been missing all the rich details of life that make existence itself a pleasure-and those are the very details that you can write about to give your listeners a deeper, more poetic experience.

Don’t succumb to the belief-sometimes perpetuated and encouraged by employers and other people close to us-that you must always do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.

You Are the Whole Toolbox.

Not just the wrench, not just the hammer.

Human beings have sense organs for sight, sound, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. And if you happen to be blind or deaf or otherwise missing a sense, the remaining senses tend grow more nuanced and detailed in response. And we even have hearing aids like these on EarPros and certain types of glasses now that can restore hearing and sight to some degree.

What’s your day job? Odds are good that you’re overqualified for it. If in a typical day you don’t engage all your senses, your entire mind, and all of your body, then you have abilities and equipment that you aren’t using.

Eyes that blink. Sensitive lips. A tongue capable of both taste and touch. Feet. Legs. Fingers that bend in three places. Lungs that draw air.

If you were to lose or damage any of those parts (I do misplace my brain from time to time), you’ll likely have renewed appreciation for what remains-and if you’re fortunate enough to still have a full array, now, don’t let it stifle in an office chair and neglect it at home, too.

Ever watched a toddler? Any object you hand her is a rich and interesting stimulus. Like her, you’ve got sense organs and a big, beautiful world right here.

Use it, babe, use it.

The arts are sensual, and songwriting is no exception. Obviously music engages your ears and brain, but great writing can engage any of the senses, bypassing the actual sense organs to stir sensation directly in the listener’s brain, creating the experience literally under their skin and inside of their head. That’s where you want to be, of course.

Make something interesting happen inside of a listener’s head and they’ll remember you. Through sensory writing you can furnish her with a complete experience, almost as though she is living it. The more sensually vivid your writing is, the more real the experience will seem to anyone who reads or hears it.

The more real it seems, the more likely it is to impact them emotionally. The more you impact them emotionally, the more they’ll think about you, talk about you, and perhaps even spend a little of their hard-won money to hear your music.

* Sense Exercise #1 *

Experience and enjoy one food item for its sensual properties today. Remain aware during the entire process of preparation, if any is required: heating water, pouring, and sitting at the table to drink tea, for example. Focus on the warmth of the cup in your hand, the feeling of the chair against your body, the sound of your own throat as you swallow. See the steam curling from the cup. Pay close attention to the taste and the smells.

Or you could just eat a peach. What does it feel like to bite through the skin, suck the juice, run your tongue up the inside of your arm to catch what drips?

Whatever you choose, I recommend something simple and easy to prepare, preferably something that doesn’t require a fork, spoon, or knife. Be a heathen and eat with your hands.

Then sit down and try to encapsulate the experience in words, being certain to evoke all the senses you can.

When you’re done, I hope you’ll stop in again and tell me in the comments below what you wrote and what you discovered!

And don’t forget to grab the RSS feed or bookmark this site in your browser if you liked this article! I’ve got many more ideas in this direction of songwriting, and I’d love to share them with you. In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring ways to recognize sensory detail and present it vividly in writing so that others can really “see.”

Thanks for reading!

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