This article is third in a series: feel free to read it on its own, or to go back and begin with “Sensory Songwriting Part 1: How to Write Lyrics that Capture Your Audience’s Imagination.”
“Nothing stimulates memory like sense data. Memory lies coiled within us like a magician’s trick handkerchief, and a simple smell or taste can pluck the tiniest corner and pull out the world.” -Janet Fitch (from her article “Sense and Sensuality,” compiled in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing
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I don’t eat red apples often, but if I’m in a quiet place when I do, a memory takes me over the moment my teeth first puncture the skin. Here’s my best attempt at explaining what happens:
I’m standing on a dirt road somewhere in New England. The cloudy sky is lit from behind by the sun, so that it looks like a dome of smoky stained glass. The dust of the road has been darkened and muffled by a rain that’s barely falling now. Spread out before me is a little flat lawn or park surrounded by forest; in the middle of this green stands a single calculated tree. Raindrops cling to every blade of grass. The turf looks so green, so vital, that I take off my shoes to comb my toes through the blades. It’s cool and wet. I am deep in a campground, or a state park, or maybe a beach. The air is heavy, full of steam and the weighty, acrid odor of grass. Everything looks tall. My pale socks lay on the ground like crumpled earthworms, wet blades are stuck all over my feet and in one hand I’ve got a red macintosh apple with one bite missing.
Context, Context, Context: Nothing Happens in Isolation.
Have you ever been taken back in time by a smell? A taste? Have your travels during a typical day ever flipped a compartment open within you to reveal a fuzzy picture of a dream you had the night before?
Sensual writing works because of your audience’s vaults of life experience. When you describe an apricot, for example, everybody digs out whatever image sits in their brain with the label “apricot” tagged on. These pictures may or may not quite match what you had in mind. An interpreter may think of a particular apricot that went moldy in their refrigerator. They may not like apricots. They might even have their fruits mixed up, and picture a pear instead—as I did just now. When we write, we don’t describe something exactly the way it is, pore by pore. If you want to be able to do that, try painting or photography or concocting artificial flavorings.
When we write a song, our general purpose is different. Rather than painstakingly detailing and dramatizing something, we need only suggest all of the major details of the thing that we wish a person to see. The goal is to use words to penetrate into the psyches of others and awaken actual sensations deep within their memories and imaginations. Songwriting and song-listening are, like all experiences in life, thoroughly subjective.
When you call upon a person’s memory, you can never be sure of exactly what they associate with whatever you are conjuring. We are human beings, and we relate to the world as such. There are some general truths that you can rely on: for example, most of us associate knives with their potential to slice through or penetrate objects, including skin—they may represent danger. They may also represent aggression and feelings of power. But you never know who in your audience might have inherited, say, a pocketknife engraved with his passed father’s initials. To that person, knives may represent family, tradition, and the long labor of whittling away at the block of grief within them.
Or consider the taste of a peach. Peaches grow in the summertime, so the peach-eaters in your audience will likely connect the soft flesh and the sweet juice to sensations of heat, bare skin, sunlight, that trumpeting summertime abundance of green leaves, warm rainshowers and thunderstorms, buzzing insects, calling birds. Long days. Humid nights.
If you connect with associations that are already strong within a person, your song may eventually be woven into that web. I myself am embedded with the work of other songwriters: whenever I see, taste, or even think about a peach, I immediately think of Gillian Welch’s song “Wayside/Back in Time” and the song “Peaches,” which was forever on the radio when I was a boy.
Everyone is Unique… and Weird. Just Like You. Isn’t it Great?
From birth all the way to that chair they’ve pulled up close to the stage, each person views every object, idea, and experience through their own frame of reference. Many are not conscious of this—it’s hardwired into all of our nervous systems. If somebody threw a peach at you one distant summer and broke your nose, I’m sure there’s some pain blended into your experience of my new song about peaches and summertime. No matter how many verses I sing that are shot through with sunlight and tall grass, I doubt I’ll convince you that peaches are wholly innocuous. They may still be tasty to you now and then—but they also represent human creativity (improvised weapons!) gone cruelly awry.
These little tragedies, injuries, victories, and insights in life are worth writing about. It’s surprising and illuminating to hear and read about the life experiences of other people–everybody has something to teach or tell. It’s also possible to invent fascinating experiences.
You are unique and irreplaceable. Write well, and we’ll all be interested to lay your frame of reference atop ours to see where the differences lie. Perhaps you’ll give us something new, an aesthetic experience and widen our perspective on the spectrum of human experience.
Let’s Get to Work.
I had three or four ideas for songs in the course of writing this article, all of them triggered by writing about sensory phenomena—now let’s dig into your memory and imagination for new song material.
* Sensory Exercise #3: Equal Truth in All Things *
Arbitrarily choose an object. Write about it for ten minutes, sticking mostly to sensory information. Wring your brain for all the information and stored experience you have about that object.
Feel free to abandon the initial seed to chase a newly discovered association or new idea—these connections often lead to new, exciting places.
Pat Pattison calls this “object writing.” It’s easy enough to start with a particular place instead of an object, or even an abstract concept—just make sure you write about it in concrete terms.
Stop reading and try this. It changed my life the first time I did it, and it changes my life every morning.
Go ahead, get started. I’ll wait here. Ready? Go.
When your ten minutes of spilling ink are up, come back and let us all know what you wrote about and whether you uncovered anything remarkable!