Most great songs have a theme consisting of one or more emotions, and a situation that serves to demonstrate those emotions. For example:
- The sadness (emotion) of losing a loved one (situation) e.g. Yesterday - The Beatles
- The surprise (emotion) of being betrayal by a lover (situation) e.g. Heard It Through The Grape Vine - Marvin Gaye
The situation you use to depict that emotion should be fairly broad, however. An overly specific situation is unlikely to connect with people, for example: being reunited with your long-lost twin.
Whatever you choose to write about, make sure that it's something you've had personal experience with. Not only will this give added meaning and reality to the song, it also gives you inspiration and an insight into the theme that will aid you in its composition. Unless you've lead a very boring life, there should be plenty of 'real' topics you can write about, so why fake it?
The following is a list of emotions you might choose to write about, and an example song for each. Listen to (and read the lyrics of) each one to see how the writer has dealt with the mentioned emotion. You can listen for free to most of these on Songerize, and view their lyrics on any of these sites. [Tip: add Songerize and your favorite lyrics site/sites to your browser favorites, you'll get plenty of use from them.]
- Joy: My Girl - The Temptations
- Sadness: Tears In Heaven - Eric Clapton
- Anger: You Oughta Know - Alanis Morrisette
- Surprise: I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye
- Depression: Help - The Beatles
- Betryal: All You Want - Dido
- Obsession: Every Breath You Take - The Police
- Forgiveness: All Apologies - Nirvana
This weeks challenge:
In each issue of 'Songwriting Success' we offer you a fun and easy challenge to reinforce the lesson being taught, which in turn will expand your songwriting skills. The challenge can usually be completed in under 5 minutes, and we strongly recommend you attempt them. They often build on each other, so whatever you write down or make a note of, keep it so you can refer to it again in subsequent weeks. It's probably easiest to use a word processor (Windows Wordpad or MS Word would be ideal) to make your notes.
For this week:
- Observe the following list of emotions. Write them down on a note pad, or copy and paste the list into a word processor.
- Joy
- Sadness
- Anger
- Surprise
- Depression
- Betryal
- Obsession
- Forgiveness
- Next to each one, make a note of two or three situations in which you've felt these emotions in your own life. It doesn't have to be a significant or dramatic event, just anything that comes to mind
- Now look back at each situation you've listed and ask yourself: is there a song in that?If nothing comes to mind, or you aren't sure what you're looking for, don't worry - we're going to build on that in the coming weeks.
Useful links:
- You can search for more songs by theme at this site (plenty of annoying ads though...)
- This Wikipedia page has a handy list of emotions.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCE
Learn To Play Piano With 'Rocket Piano'
Being a successful songwriter, people often ask me how they can achieve a similar level of success. How can I write beautiful melodies? How can I arrange rich sounding chords?
From my observations about myself and other great songwriters around me, it's clear that one of the most important skills an aspiring songwriter can learn is playing the piano. Not only does it allow you to perform your own songs, but it's an invaluable aid to writing, and it allows you to "get inside" the songs written by great artists of the past to learn how they did it.
If you've never played piano before, or you have and you'd like to improve on your skills, I recommend you check out 'Rocket Piano'. In a nutshell, it's a course that teaches you how to play step-by-step with video and audio files. It also gives you three books to take you from beginner to advanced.
Here's the link to the 'Rocket Piano' website.
