Songwriting is a complex art. We’re talking hundreds and even thousands of tiny little techniques here.
Consider the skills a songwriter uses when she’s simply writing down a melody. Practice has made her fluid–she writes smoothly without having to pause for thought. Let’s call this hypothetical songstress "Julia".
Although Julia makes writing out a melody look easy, she’s put in some hours learning how to do this. In exchange for that time and effort, she now enjoys mastery of at least four small skills:
1. She understands music theory enough to be able to notate the key signature and time signature of a piece.
2. She’s trained herself to instantly identify which note lives on every fret of every string on her guitar.
3. In less than a second, she can draw a dot on the music staff that represents the exact note she’s just played.
4. She knows how to draw stems that represent each note’s precise length. We’re talking about fractions of a second here. She knows how to specify whether a note should be held half a second, or a quarter of a second, or an eighth of a second… on and on, into even smaller fractions.
So, having paid some dues, Julia can jot down a melody just as naturally as she can scrawl a message in her native tongue.
In other words, she’s fluent. Inspiring, no?
And we’ve still only covered her notation skills.
Now consider that she’s also written her own melody–so she must also have some knowledge of how to improvise and compose. Julia’s also written down a few ideas for a lyric that would fit her melody–so she’s harnessing a creative writing skillset that involves sensory imagery, metaphor, poetic meter, rhyme, and other aspects of language. She can sing the melody she just composed on her guitar–that’s another skill. She can sing and play simultaneously; there’s yet another.
If our songstress were conscious of all these skills at once, she’d be absolutely overwhelmed. That’s just too much for anybody to keep track of all at once.
Fortunately, her training has prepared her well enough that she doesn’t need to keep track of it all. Most of these skills come readily to hand with little or no conscious effort. That’s because she already went to the trouble of learning each ability slowly and thoroughly. She spent some time staring at sheet music thinking, "Okay, so that’s F. No, wait. It’s G."
When one skill became effortlessly easy, she moved on to new skills that built on top of what she’d already learned.
Soon enough, Julia soars where she once stumbled.
Songwriting Through a Microscope
Studying individual techniques of lyric writing and music composition gives you the ability to analyze. It lets you pinpoint exactly what you love about existing songs, poems, and compositions. It allows you to break them down into little pieces to see how they work.
Knowledge of craft lets us tinker, revise, play with possibilities, and turn out work that has a certain reliable baseline of quality.
By studying craft, we put the art of songwriting under a microscope to get a zoomed-in view. We take just one tiny aspect, one tiny skill, and strengthen it. Over time, these little skills really start to synergize and add up.
And there’s no shortage of areas to study. For starters, any poetic technique or creative writing skill is relevant to lyric writing. Sensory descriptions, poetic meter, rhyme. The entire body of music theory and composition is also pertinent. Scales, chords, notation, on and on.
Just in case the totality of poetry and composition aren’t enough to satisfy your hunger for knowledge, there are also specialized skills involved in combining words with music.
Songwriting Through a Telescope
Given that there are so many of them, how exactly do we navigate a path through all these myriad tiny skills without overloading ourselves? How do we thread a path through the trees without losing sight of the forest as a whole?
If at any point you’re feeling disoriented or overwhelmed, there are some simple ways you can step back, get some context, see the big picture.
- compare your early works with your current work
- listen to master musicians and poets to get a taste of high-level performance
- study the history of poetry, classical music, jazz, literature, art movements, etc.
- go do something else for a while (anything)
- read widely
- reflect. Ask lots of questions about life, the world, humanity, existence, etc.
- flip backward through your own songbook
- chase your instincts: take a break from studying and create impulsively
- keep a practice journal and review it after a month to see how far you’ve come
- set aside one book to work your way through in the coming month(s). Just one.
- enjoy the peace of knowing you’re working on something big
- acknowledge that this will take time–be patient with yourself
The Balance
- Zoom in microscopically to master technique. Then step way back with your telescope to check out where you’ve been and where you want to be.
In the posts to come, we’ll be zooming way in to work on the particulars of lyric writing.
Fair warning. 😉
cool photo of vintage microscope by Matt Gibson