Emotions are the whole point of songwriting. The emotions of the listener that is. I often talk about the nuts and bolts aspect of songwriting on this site. That’s what Songwright.co.uk is for, of course, but that doesn’t mean we should forget the emotional aspect of music.
What is music for?
I’m not entirely sure, but I do know one of its functions is to take us on an emotional journey. Importantly, by ‘us’ I mean the listener, not the composer or performer. Yes, your emotions will inform the song, but when writing a song you should never try to move yourself, should never worry about what it makes you feel.
What? But songwriting is about expressing myself!
Yes, but what are you expressing? If you want to say ‘this is what I think,’ the best thing to do is write an essay. If you want to say ‘this is what I feel’ then do the world a favour and don’t bother. No-one is interested. What all your favourite songwriters are doing is expressing themselves through music in order to make you, the listener, feel something.
But Insert-my-favourite-songwriter’s-name-here expresses him/herself perfectly. I know exactly how they feel!
No you don’t, not any more than you know how an actor feels during a performance. It’s all about the tricks and techniques they use to move the audience.
What techniques?
To move people when songwriting, think about:
- Dynamics. The quiet lull before the final chorus, the sudden pause, the surge of volume into the coda.
- Tonality: the key you choose has a lot to do with the emotional ride you take people on. Minor keys have a connotation of sadness (sometimes), major keys of happiness (kind of).
- Narrative: Story telling is an art form songwriters often borrow from, and with good cause. There are a thousand folk songs that would make dull pices of music except they have a compelling, tragic story.
There are more of course. The important point is that you should always be thinking ‘How will this song move the listener’. If it moves you too that’s great. It just isn’t the point.
Funny, but when I reflect on which songs of mine moved the listener and why — and the “why” in truth was something I speculate about and cannot know for sure — I am profoundly doubtful of your premise.
For instance, just the other day, I was reflecting on what a beautiful crazy woman I was in love with taught me about songwriting many years ago.
She said when you get to the chorus, it’s time to turbo-condense your emotion into a white hot concise emotional statement. Doing so won me a publishing contract with EMI.
Not out of any calculation.
Not with an eye to the market.
Not with any consideration of the audience whatsoever.
Here’s another reference. Have you ever attended a performance workshop? Something intended to support an individual in connecting with an audience?
One of the principles that becomes very clear very fast is that “we want your truth”. The audience is hungry for authenticity. And you can’t fake it.
It has often been written by various tall foreheads that what is deeply true and fully realized by one person will be universal.
I can only tell you that when I’ve worked with singers, I’ve worked very hard to get the licks and tricks out of the way, and to allow that person’s point of view to shine through. Their emotional point of view.
I have never for one second wondered how my song would move the listener. But I did write a song which caused an intelligent person to say, “I just saw God”. It would never have occurred to me to intend that. But I did have a very deep experience which triggered the song and which a listener clearly connected to.
And I have written songs that people claim they had stuck in their heads for months. But if it “worked” for that person it had only to do with how profoundly I felt it. Somehow it transferred. Somehow they connected with it.
One of my mentors said that to read a great piece of literature or to stand before a great painting was to “brush souls with a genius”.
To me, if I connect with a piece of “art”, what I’m really doing is connecting with the place it came from. The artist was in a state out of which arose expression. The state is coming across…it is communicating across time and space.
One more reference. One day I read the forward from a book on a Sufi journey of self discovery.
There was a little poem at the beginning which knocked me on my ass. I sought out the poet and discovered that he has been having that effect on people for centuries in all cultures.
When Rumi was confronted by Roman occupiers, he wondered how he could get his message of transcendent love across to them. He noticed that they responded to songs and poetry. So that’s what he gave them.
That’s a great support of your view.
But, he also put himself into an ecstatic state from which his poetry had such power that seven hundred fifty years later a boy in a book store would be moved to tears in six lines knowing nothing of the man, of his culture, of his intention.
Audiences want your truth. Scary, huh? They don’t want what they want. They want most what only you can give them. If you want to call it your feelings, fine. If you want to call it your mama, that’s fine too.
But an audience really wants something real and powerful, and nothing is so real and powerful as something that comes from deep within YOU.
It might just rock worlds seven centuries and thousands of miles away.
Tom St. Louis
http://www.gmsiamovie.wordpress.com
Tom, you’re quiet right that the listener often wants to connect with what they think is the artist’s state of mind.
And yes, one way of doing that is to really concentrate on how you feel. But I absolutely disagree with you that ‘it can’t be faked’.
For a start, if you’re writing a song and decide that you’re going to lay yourself bare and get to the absolute heart of what you feel, you are already faking it, because you’ve made the conscious decision. The emotions didn’t just happen to end up in song form, you decided to compose.
Art always includes craft, which immediately makes it ‘dishonest’.
Similarly, any performer who tries to find exactly the right kind of emotion in themselves is faking it, to an extent. They’re acting.
In fact, I think that is just another ‘lick’. Yeah, there are succesful artists whose entire act is an attempt to show their true emotions. There are also incredibly succesful artists (eg. David Bowie) who have never been ‘honest’ in their career and have still created deep and profoundly moving songs.
Besides, central to my point was the idea that what matters is the audience’s journey. Sure, you can try your best to express your emotions, and sometimes it’ll work and sometimes you’ll come across as self indulgent and pathetic (hello Alanis Morissette).
Music depends on moving an audience, not moving yourself. Your best art will be informed by your feelings and opinions, but it will also be informed by craft and technique and rational thought.
The audience wants to be fooled. They want to think their connecting with the artist’s emotions. But they don’t care whether they’re connecting with genuine emotion or not. They don’t even know if they are.
It is therefore perfectly valid for the songwriter to know all the ‘licks and tricks’, only one of which is finding your own feelings and expressing them.
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