Storytelling in Songwriting:
Two Techniques for Writing Compelling Lyrics
By Aashna Gupta; Edited by Oshin Hephzibah
What hooks people on to your lyrics? Or more importantly, what moves you to write them?
Is it the smell of the shirt of the person you miss? The walls in your old bedroom with the peeling yellow wallpaper?
Some people write lyrics to release an emotion. Sometimes those lyrics tell a story – about a character, a couple, a friend, a feeling. Most of the time, it’s your feelings that people relate to in a song.
But what makes people relate to you?
Saying “I’m happy” doesn’t really make me feel anything in a lyric until I tie it to concepts that do make me happy – a sunhat, a garden, a song, a laugh.
Whether it’s the color ‘blue’, the red scarf in ‘All Too Well’, ‘Norwegian Wood’, or the ‘Hotel California’, the more personal details you can add from your own story, the better. Some say keeping it vague and broad means you reach more people – which could work for generic uplifting songs and blanket anthems. But in my opinion, the moment you give people a detail that makes them relate to you, humanizes you, sympathizes you – they can truly feel your emotions, not just listen to them. You don’t have to have a red scarf at an ex’s sister’s house to understand the loaded emotion behind the scarf. You latch onto the details – the journey this detail goes through, the journey we go through.
SIGHT, SOUND, SMELL, TOUCH, TASTE, MOTION…
Use sensory details to show, not tell. Paint a picture with your senses and let us vicariously live your story with you.
Let’s look at the scene Lizzy Mcalpine sets for us in ‘Ceilings’:
“SHOW NOT TELL”… AND WHEN SHOW COMES TO TELL
We can picture them staring at the ceiling, getting soaked in the rain, kissing in the car – it really reads like a movie we’ve all seen before. They’re all simple and generic details, but specific enough to hook every listener who’s stared at a ceiling, been in the rain, or watched a rom com.
All of the pictures she paints for us in the first verse trickle down into the second. Now we’re back in the room with the ceilings – but this time curled up in bed. By the second chorus, we have a new context to their relationship – they’ve taken a new step, the kiss feels different now, the movie is progressing. Note that nothing changed in the second chorus lyrically, it just has a new layer of context because of the narrative development in the second verse.
All this storytelling is achieved only through sensory details – the feeling of shoes soaked with water (touch), the plaster on the ceilings (sight), the kiss in the car (touch) the driving home (motion).
This culminates into the third chorus where the context completely changes – it’s been in her head all along.
Notice the lack of sensory details in the very last section – now we’re in the “tell” part of the story. This is classic “trickle down imagery” – she hooked us with all these details in the first half, and now we relate to her, we’re practically sitting in the car with her. Then right after reeling us in, she hits us with the candid, straightforward statement that reveals to us her real feelings – without any cute imagery to support it. She tears down the canvas and abandons the oil paints, finally looks you in the eyes and tells you the truth, and by this time we’re already so invested in this story it’s too late to not feel this loneliness with her.
The bridge, third verse, or outro is a great place to do this. “Telling” us your feelings hits a lot harder when we’ve already spent two minutes in your shoes.
Speaking of choruses getting a different meaning or context as the story progresses, let’s take a look at the timeless “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman:
“RECOLOURING” YOUR CHORUS
In the first verse, “fast car” is a metaphor for freedom; an escape from a hard life. She wants freedom from working at the convenience store, and the father who “lives with the bottle.”
The chorus describes that freedom – it’s all sunshine and rainbows, with the arm wrapped around her shoulder, with the feeling of belongingness.
By the third chorus though, it’s much more bittersweet. The same lyrics contain a hint of disappointment and nostalgia, because she just spent the last verse establishing that the relationship isn’t perfect:
“See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I’d always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me’d find it
I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere
Take your fast car and keep on driving”
Now she’s remembering the same scene but without the joy in chorus 1 – now she’s longing for what they had. The chorus lyrics didn’t change one bit, but the journey they’ve gone through completely changed the emotional context. The fast car, once representing feelings of belonging, now represents abandonment.
The last “Is it fast enough so you can fly away?,” verse also has a new meaning by the end – can the character “make a decision” to find the better part of their relationship again, or will they “live and die this way.” Beautiful use of sensory writing and narrative development to take the listener on a heartbreaking emotional rollercoaster ride.
In “So Long, London,” Taylor Swift even changed the meaning of the title phrase “so long” by adding one small word before it.
From:
….Oh, the tragedy …
Ch1
So long, London
You’ll find someone
To:
…And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free
Ch2
For so long, London
Stitches undone
The meaning “So long” changes from “farewell” to “a long time” – really stressing the longevity of the relationship, and the gravity of its ending. Just by adding the word “for,” she changes the entire meaning of the second chorus. Note the trickle down imagery in this song too – so many metaphors and sensory words in the first, and so much more “telling” in the latter half.
If you’d like more information and examples about this idea, you should check out Pat Pattison’s website: https://www.patpattison.com/developing-verse-ideas
[He has an entire article about the concept of “recoloring” a chorus, and even wrote a song using that technique with Scarlet Keys. Definitely check out his articles and books for prime lyric writing tips.]
PRO TIP: If you’re stuck, make a table of words, verbs, sensory cues, and rhymes tied to your theme. Use a rhyming dictionary. Summarize each section’s narrative development: What does the first verse introduce? How does the second verse shift the story?
Try It Yourself
Write a song with sensory details that trickle down throughout the song and make the listener feel every emotion. Experiment with recoloring your chorus through narrative development, and don’t shy away from personal details. Find your storytelling “hook” – an object or metaphor that is personal to you, because then it can become personal to us too.
Go forth, and write your story!