Sensory Songwriting: Take Your Lyric to the Optometrist’s Office

In songwriting–and the rest of life–boredom and ruts are produced by the lack of fresh, unique experience. Ever had somebody in your life who rearranges the furniture every month? This is how some people respond to what they feel has become too familiar and stale. Others are more likely to just sit down in the boring room without noticing it at all. Instead of moving the furniture, they find stimulation by daydreaming while the room collects dust.

Both responses offer us insight into what people want when they sit down to listen to your music. They are both ways of finding fresh experiences in daily life. Sometimes we seek that entertainment internally, other times externally. But are the two ways really that much different?

Because we are able to carry a map of reality in our heads, and because our memories are so richly stocked with images, scents, and sounds, we have a powerful capacity to play with the world just by imagining it. A person with strong spatial intelligence can look at a room and imagine what the room will look like if that blue sofa is moved to the opposite wall, and that heavy green lamp is placed on that end table on the left side… in this way it’s possible to construct a mental image pleasing enough to motivate ourselves to push some heavy, questionable purchases all around the room in search of a more pleasing reality.

Notice though that even the mental image in itself is pleasing. This is the reason some of us–I won’t name you, don’t worry–sing in front of a mirror with a hairbrush in place of a microphone. This is why we drool when watching pizza commercials. This is why some people read Car World or Playboy or even Cat Fancy. Imagery is powerful; it stirs our emotions. Advertisers use it to appeal to our desires and drives. The surest way to make somebody want something is to exaggerate and display its appealing physical qualities.

The way into a person’s mind and heart is through their sensory organs. The more you stimulate them in a way they find interesting, fun, or informative, the better they will like you, because in a sense they are able to experience the world—to live—through your words.

How to Appeal to the Senses

Bear with me while I play optometrist for a moment. Which reveals the clearer mental image in each case, the first lens or the second?

Lens 1.) A tree

Lens 2.) A weeping willow

Great. Again, which produces the clearer mental image, lens one or lens two?

Lens 1.) “She was like a bird.”

Lens 2.) “She had the hunched shoulders of a crow.”

One more, just for fun. Which is more visually interesting?

Lens 1.) “We got drunker as the night went on.”

Lens 2.) “A line of empty beer bottles formed on the windowsill.”

In each case I’ve put just a little more sensory information in Lens 2, which most likely gave you a clearer mental picture.

The key to vivid, stimulating songs is detail. Avoid vague and abstract phrasing wherever you can; opt instead for concrete, distinct imagery.

“Tree” is relatively abstract; it tells us little. No tree is just a tree. It’s a pine, a maple, a birch maybe. Furthermore, no tree is “just” a pine. It’s the pine that you carved your initials in and sheltered in as a child. Show us how the sun filtered down through the branches as you sat on a bed of dried orange needles with the bark imprinting itself in your back.

“Imagery” here does not refer only to visuals; you can also draw upon a person’s memories of tastes, smells, sounds, and tactile sensations.

Language is so useful as to seem almost miraculous. We have here a system of symbols that we can use to think and communicate about actual objects–even when those objects are not visible and tangible to us. You can make your audience see the weeping willow, the brown bottles on the windowsill. An image can tell a story in a much more interesting way than the bland statements of Lens 1 can.

But to make a person feel like they’re experiencing something entirely through your words, it’s often useful to choose the specific over the general. The more clear and exact you are, the more complex and real their vision will be, and the more likely that it will impact them emotionally. If you give a person what feels like a real experience in their own heads, they’ll remember you. You’re that incredible writer who took mere words–as dead and motionless as Frankenstein’s monster once was–and charged those cold symbols with a powerful electric current.

That’s what I want as a listener. Shock me to life. When my eyes glaze over during your song, touch that electrode of a pen to the page and send a charged current of rich, sensory description to shock us back to life.

To put it another way: grab that paintbrush and start dabbing a mural directly onto the domed ceiling inside of my skull.

* Songwriting Exercise: Pictures of Bigfoot *

Read some fiction, poetry, or song lyrics and notice where the images are. Are these images blurry and indistinct, like pictures of Bigfoot, or are they sharp and lifelike? One way to make one of your own songs much more powerful is to enhance its imagery–rewriting an existing piece is a great way to make the principles in this article series stick in your mind for future reference.

Next Stop — Sensory Songwriting, Part 3: Pluck at a Corner, Pull Out the World