Unearth the secret lessons hidden in the best songs.
One of the most exciting ways to learn any art form is to take in great works by great artists. But to get the most out of these encounters with brilliance, it helps to listen not just for pleasure, but also for understanding.
This is as true for creative writing as it is for any other trade. And that’s exactly why Renaissance-era writing teachers asked their students to keep a copybook.
A copybook is simply an ordinary notebook that you use to copy down passages of writing. You’ll want to copy down any great passages of lyric that you encounter, of course, but you don’t have to limit yourself to merely that. You can also copy down lines of dialogue from novels, poems that speak to you on a personal level, quotes that strike you as clever, well-penned jokes, or any other form of great writing that crosses your path.
Basically anything that appeals to you can—no, must—be copied into your copybook for safekeeping. Your copybook starts blank, and your job is to slowly and steadily fill it up with intriguing and well-crafted bits of writing from other people. Eventually it’ll be an entire 150+ pages stuffed with things you admire. What could be better than that?
Writing can be practiced.
Merely reading texts about songwriting technique, music theory, or creative writing won’t do much for you other than provide some entertainment. The whole purpose of reading a book or taking a course like this one is to use what you learn. Why else would we read about rhyme schemes, the harmonic minor scale, or song forms?
One way to sharpen your familiarity with these techniques and concepts is to label them wherever they appear in the writings or the music of others. This will reinforce what you’ve learned and open your eyes to highly creative, exciting examples of those techniques in action.
Your copybook is where you’ll explore the qualities you admire in the creative work of others. What appeals to you? What’s intriguing to you? Write it down, and begin to explore it more deeply. Over time, you’ll likely see some patterns in your own tastes emerging.
Use what you know about the craft to analyze what’s technically happening in each passage that you love. What appeals to you about this passage? Is there a particularly vivid image? A startling metaphor? A great line of dialogue?
Even if the writer you’re studying only uses these formal techniques in an untrained, instinctive way, you can still analyze their work in technical detail. This is the heart of why songwriters study music theory or rhetoric or grammar: because these fields teach you the vocabulary you need to understand exactly what you love and admire in certain music or lyrics. And if you’re able to identify exactly why you like something in enough technical detail, you’ll have all the information you need to begin using those techniques and qualities in original works of your own.
Form and Content
When you’re analyzing a lyric, you’ll want to pay attention both to the lyric’s form and the lyric’s content.
Content: the core theme, situation, memory, topic, feeling, or story being expressed through the lyric. What’s the song’s basic premise?
Form: the techniques, exact words and phrasing, and other strategies used to bring the lyric’s core idea to life. This includes things like sensory description, rhyme, alliteration, and all the myriad figures of speech.
Form and content are woven tightly together in finished works, and listeners usually experience both at the same time. By taking great care to examine both form and content, you can unravel that tight relationship and gain a better understanding of all the moving parts of a lyric.
Get messy.
Once you’ve copied down a lyric that you love, go ahead and write all over your copy of the lyric. Mark it up, identify sensory imagery, metaphors, and so on. Underline passages that especially appeal to you. Notate the rhyme scheme. Make observations about the piece’s structure, the writer’s word choice, and so on.
Often we find our musical and lyrical interests varied. Some songwriters have such wide tastes in music that they have a hard time sorting out exactly what kinds of material they themselves want to write! Analysis offers you a chance to learn from a variety of music genres and artists so that you can pour it all into the melting pot that is your own voice as a songwriter.