[haiku url=”http://lyricworkroom.com/aotd/aotd3-3.mp3″]
Back when I first started doing the research for this course, one of my main motivations was to explore some ways to apply deliberate practice principles to songwriting. I’ve also gotten a few emails from some of you asking if I’d get into this topic. Yes! Absolutely. Here it is.
On its face, you might think, “How can songwriting possibly be practiced?” It seems like such a highly creative, variable, hard-to-judge domain, right? But every song ever written was brought to life by a set of techniques that the songwriter uses–wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or not, songwriters use techniques and mental processes to make songs happen.
And yes, most of the techniques of songwriting are entirely mental, which could be why people don’t think of songwriting as something that can be practiced. In the case of, say, a world-class pianist, we can observe them in action and actually see the technique physically unfolding in real time–but in the case of lyric writing, all the action’s happening inside the lyricist’s head where it’s much harder to see.
Call this a hunch, but I think that the few songwriters who go the trouble of consciously studying and practicing those techniques–deliberately honing them one at a time–I think those songwriters have a much better shot at truly mastering the art of songwriting and crafting solid, timeless, influential songs.
If you’re willing to make the effort and do the work, you’re going to gain an enormous advantage. There are so many singer/songwriter types in this world already… and most of them are dabblers. It’s cheap to record an album now, so dabblers can record albums. What remains rare is the long-term thirst to learn more about this craft… coupled of course with enough determination to follow through on this desire.
There’s an old joke about songwriters that goes like this: “a songwriter, they say, is a half-assed musician and a half-assed poet.” And unfortunately, a lot of the time that’s true.
And that’s a huge opportunity for you. I’d guess that the vast, vast majority of songwriters out there don’t have any form of daily practice for their art. There just isn’t a solid, defined course of study for songwriters as there is for, say, violinists. But practicing this craft is totally possible—it just requires a bit of improvisation.
So what do we study when we study lyric writing?
Here are some areas that you can’t possibly spend enough time in… so knock yourself out with any of these for starters.
1. Sensory imagery—This is the art of infusing your writing with sensory details that create physical sensations in your listeners: like the wet cold of an ice cube pressed to the nape of your neck, or the sizzle and the smell of onions frying. Sensitizing yourself to these things and encapsulating sensations with descriptive language is one of the most important and challenging aspects of lyric writing. If you don’t know where to start, start with this.
2. Song structure—Know the parts of a song: verse, chorus, pre-chorus, bridge, intro, outro. Make sure you’re absolutely clear on the function of each of these in a song.
3. Rhyme types and other sonic echoes–language and music share much in common. Music is a language, they say… But it’s also true that language is music. Learn everything you can about alliteration, imperfect rhyme, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, on and on. Practice taking a single word–any word–and listing out words that rhyme with it, or words that share consonants with it, or otherwise have some kind of interesting sound relationship to that first word. Make time to savor and play with the sounds of words themselves. The sonic pleasures of language are at least half the fun of lyrics.
4. Rhyme schemes–Most songwriters just use one or two rhyme schemes repeatedly without giving it any conscious study or thought. There’s a whole world of possibilities out there beyond AABB and ABAB.
5. Listening–listen a lot and read a lot of lyrics. This is the only way you can get a sense of what’s been done before and what’s been done to death.
6. Literary terms and poetic techniques–Did you know there exist concepts like auxesis, which is the technique of building up a series of lines toward a climax? How about head rhyme, where the words at the beginnings of lines rhyme instead of the ends? Forget what commercial songwriters tell you about lyric writing and poetry being separate arts. Because these two arts go back thousands of years and evolved side by side. Many concepts in music theory have their roots in poetry, and vice versa.
7. Metaphor, simile, and other figurative language–these will teach you how to make striking, poetic comparisons between things.
8. Analysis of existing songs–We may not be able to observe the techniques of lyric writing directly in action–they’re mental and thus invisible–but we can certainly do some detective work to figure out which techniques are present just underneath the surface of a finished work.
Analyze songs by breaking down the techniques present in the work. Analyze lyrics as though they were literature. You can take any lyric and figure out the rhyme scheme, the rhyme types. You can underline the verbs to see what kind of action verbs are happening there. You can highlight all of the sensory images in the lyric to see what kind of picture they add up to and what kind of mood they set. You can transcribe the vocal melody and write the syllables underneath each note to see what’s happening there musically.
Analysis isn’t always the most fun you can have with your time, but it teaches us amazing things… whatever techniques you’re learning, look for them in the songs you hear.
Haven’t all the songs been written already?
Nope.
There are plenty of ideas still waiting to be written. Sometimes songs sound the same because songwriters don’t really take the time to get a solid understanding of the materials they’re working with. A lot of guitarists know that open-form G chord, but how many guitarists actually understand that hand posture? How many understand the music theory underlying that chord shape? There’s more going on there than meets the eye. But if you don’t understand the materials you’re working with from the foundation up, you lack control over it. You’re not choosing that G chord deliberately; you’re just taking it off the shelf. It’s practically store-bought.
So, over time, learn everything about it. That way you can own it and know exactly what you’re doing when you play that chord.
Let’s not forget that the recording industry itself has only existed for about a hundred years. Music has been around for thousands of years. The recording industry so far is still just the tiniest sliver of history. There are still whole vistas of territory left to explore; plenty of songs waiting to be crafted and sung.
So if you want to sound different and interesting and unique, one way to get started is to dig deeper into the craft of music, deeper into poetic techniques, and gain a better understanding of the materials and the techniques that we all use to write songs. There are a lot of songwriters out there who don’t have the desire or the focus to do this. That’s a huge advantage for you.
Three Ways to Practice Songwriting Techniques
An obstacle in learning poetic techniques is figuring out how to not just read about them, but instead apply them and ingrain them in your mind.
One suggestion I can make is that you pick a new technique from your studies and find a way to apply it to the next song you write. Or the next five songs you write. Or the next ten.
Or, for quicker reps, you might make up your mind to just take about five verse sections from any songs you want and find a way to rewrite each verse to work that new technique into it. And you don’t have to actually use these rewritten verses for anything or make them public; it’s just an exercise. Just for training purposes.
You could also just do a bit of free writing, and require yourself to use that new technique at least 5 or 10 times in the process.
Write songs that nobody will ever hear
Musicians spend hundreds and even thousands of hours, spread out over the course of years, making music that nobody will ever hear. That’s the music they make while they’re just practicing, or just playing around in an empty room. Only the cat hears. And sometimes even the cat runs away with its ears pinned back…
And we don’t think twice about this. It seems to match the nature of music itself: the notes ring in the air for a few seconds at most, and then they fade back into silence, often quickly forgotten.
I’d like to suggest that we try to approach lyric writing and songwriting from that angle, too. Go ahead and sketch out lots and lots of lyrics and songs just as exercises. Just to practice some new technique you’ve been reading about. Why not write something silly just to practice rhyming? Why not just sit with your notebook at a cafe and write a description of your coffee cup, making sure to use all five senses? With no expectations of a great result—just doing these exercises as practice.
This is much easier said than done of course, but I think most of us need to really loosen up and be more willing to just write lots and lots of songs that are not meant for public performance, not meant for release of any kind—but instead just meant to hone a particular skill.
So go ahead. Shut the door. Pull the curtains. Put a padlock on your notebook if you have to. Do whatever it takes to free yourself up to write wild and free and awkward and awful and try out all kinds of harebrained ideas and make all kinds of mistakes and just practice writing. Just practice.