Lyric Writing 101: Essential Techniques for Beginner Songwriters

1. Lesson 1: Introduction: Welcome to lyric Writing 101. I am so excited to dive into this stuff with you guys. This is really a collection of some of the most high-impact tools and techniques that I have learned over the past 20 years as a professional songwriter and also someone who has taught thousands of students to write better songs, including being an assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music. Teaching for Berklee Online. Also teaching for the Australian College of the arts, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and many, many other colleges and institutions around the world are tutorials have also been viewed over 1 million times on our YouTube channel, Hutterites songs. And I'm so excited to offer for you here are really beautifully sequenced series of lessons to get you writing the best lyrics you've ever written. And before you even dive in to the lesson content here, I wanna give you a free downloadable, a book that's called The five Best Exercises for Writing Great Lyrics. This a really curated collection that goes into great detail on five lyric writing exercises you can start doing today that are really going to help you generate a lot of material and then can apply the tools and techniques in this course to the ideas you come up with through those exercises. That eBook is available for free at the link included in the course description as well as in the project description. So head over there right now, download that free eBook and then dive into lyric Writing 101 2. Lesson 2: First Impressions Matter: Impressions Matter in all aspects of our lives. Of course, you will find that in songs that are charting and in genres where the lyrics Matter, which is actually most of them, that the first lines do three main things. The first thing they do is avoid cliches and generalities. The second thing they do is they will introduce straight away the essential problem, tension or conflict that he's driving the song writer to write the song in the first place. Let's see a few more examples of this from across time and genre. The problem is all inside your head. She said to me, that's an example from Paul Simon song, 50 Ways to leave your lover. And it's such a great example of this inaction. So we know that there is a problem that the protagonist is ruminating about. But we also know that there's a bit of conflicts between these two people, that they are in some kind of conversation in which she is frustrated with him. So there's already a little bit of relational conflict going on. And it's just the first line, I know that you think I shouldn't still love you. Which is a Dido lyric from her song, white flag. And again, this is an older song at this point, but was an absolute smash hit for her. And I love this line. I think that it's a beautiful example of an absolutely killer first-line. We know so much from this first line, we know that this is a song about someone who was in a relationship with someone, that relationship has broken down. The protagonist of the song is still pining for these other person. And this other person is basically saying, it's time to let God, there's so much drama, there's so much conflict, there's so much tension. We know what this song is about from the first line. Let's even take a heaps more contemporary song. So I'm opening the global charts on Spotify again today, May 20, 2031 of the songs that I say that that was number two for many, many months is a song, Kill Bill by scissor. The first lines of that song are I'm still a fan, even though I was so T, hate to see you with some of the broad know you happy. So those first lines are establishing a relationship. And we can clearly see that there is a tension, problem, or conflict that exists between the voice of the narrator of the song and the person that she's speaking to in this whole. The third thing that first lines tend to do in great songs is they create a direct set up to the hook in the chorus. You can see this working in the Ed Sheeran lyric first time. So the course of the song is all about his first time with his lover. And the hook of the song is really, I can't wait to make 1 million more first time. Let's take a look at the first line of this song. I thought it had feel different playing Wembley. Playing Wembley might not be the most relatable detail for most of us. But what you can see here is what is he doing? He's setting up a first-time. The whole concept of the song is first times. And he starts with one of his first time, what he's describing as a first time that was totally grandiose, incredibly epic, but also was not something that he shared directly with his lover. But there is this incredibly tight connection between starting the song with a first time. That then leads inevitably towards the hook of the song, which is all about his first time with his lover 3. Lesson 3: Say No to Cliches: The crucial thing to understand here is that not all lines of lyric built the same. They're not all equally as important as each other. It turns out that some lines are more important than others because of their place in the structure of a lyric. Those lines have spotlights shining on them. Or as my lyric writing teacher and I always at music school called them. He called them power positions. The power positions in any song or the first line of any section, and the last line of any section. It's as simple as that. Now, we can create power positions or we can create artificial spotlight by doing unexpected things, right? By setting up a pattern and then actually subverting the expectation created by that pattern. But at a basic level, the first line and the last line of any section. But the first line of the song is the first line of the song, right? It is one of the most important lines in the whole song. So here's one very important lyric writing tip for me to give you. You are no longer allowed in your songwriting life to use a generality or a cliche in your first line. You can use them elsewhere in the song, as long as they're balanced with other rich, interesting language, but not in the first line. So if we take this idea that our first-line or office two lines, or maybe if we're being really relaxed about it, our first four lines really need to set up tension. We can also now start to dive into different types of tension that we can create. Different types of tension that are going to immediately grab the heart and mind, an ear of your listeners and make your lyric irresistible. They just because of the drama that you're creating immediately, they need to know more. The first is what I call image tension. And this is where we use a vivid sensory image. We're painting a vivid rich picture with that first line. But it's not mere description. Something has to be happening. There has to be something action-based. There has to be an interesting verb or something happening inside that image. That's what gives it a sense of movement and a sense of tension. Let me give you some examples. Now this is a beautiful line because it's a great image. There's no cliche there. You've never heard that line before. You've never seen that immune to describe like that before. So immediately that's compelling. But also there's something happening. The night is coming undone, which is just a beautiful image. And then using the metaphor of like a party dress is so powerful, so unique, such a great image. Each of these examples splashes a multi-sensory seen in the Canvas of the mind. But notice that each of them contains an active. The, something is happening because movement implies change. And change is really the spark that creates connection and emotional connection between a storyteller and an audience. So that's the first way that we can create tension immediately is using a vivid image. But where something is happening, something is in motion 4. Lesson 4: Feel Those Feelings: Our next level of attention is called inner tension. And as we work through these levels of tension, these are becoming more and more intense. The level of tension is increasing and becoming more sticky and more irresistible for a listener. So what is inattention? Inattention is really directly introducing the protagonist, which is to say, the voice of the song, the main character of the song. Whether you're singing from an AI perspective of first-person perspective, or you might be singing in the third person, right? Like that John Mayer example, woke grace. That's a song entirely in the third person. It's all about what grace. It's not about John Mayer or some John Mayer persona and being sung from the first-person perspective, it's a third-person narrative. So whether it's first-person, third-person, second person, it doesn't matter in that first line, if we are clear on what the tension is inside that character is hot own mind. A listener is immediately drawn in. So try this in your next song. Try putting your main character in the first line and put them in a state of action. Conflict or tension in attention can also be a matter of wanting something else or something more than what you have. Look how the following examples set up a really intense feeling of longing. If you as someone who loves musical theater or you write songs in the musical theater domain. One thing that you might be familiar with is the concept that in musical theater, there's almost always for the main character, the, I want song. And so this is a type of song in musical theater that is part of the musical theater trope or conventions of musical theater that we really clearly need to know about our main character. What is it that they want or need or desire most in the world? And so the, I want song in musical theater is so important to the whole narrative. But we can see that this idea of setting up that fundamental want, need or desire by framing it as wanting something more or something else, then what one currently has or had is a really powerful way to set a song in action. And again, it's irresistible for our listener, which brings us to our third level of tension, interpersonal tension. By far, the most compelling and intense type of conflict is conflict between two people. And this really is the molten core of human drama. You walked down the street and you see two people arguing. You can't really help, but want to slow down and know what they're arguing about. Even if you happen to be polite enough to resist that urge. Interpersonal tension can sometimes be outright conflict or argument, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be a growing sense of distance between two people or a feeling of lost connection or misunderstanding or miscommunication. The title, look at a couple of examples. Hopefully you can see from these three levels of tension, image tension in attention and interpersonal tension that creating conflict or revealing the central problem at the heart of the song, almost straight away, if not in the first line, is one of the most powerful ways to grab a listener and draw them irresistibly into the world of your song. 5. Lesson 5: Generic Isn't Necessarily Relatable: This is the tip that is a little counterintuitive because it seems logical that if we are motivated to write songs that have universal appeal, that we should make those lyrics general so that more people can relate to them. But this is the paradox of Songwriting that actually all great songwriters know the paradox is the more generic and general you make your lyrics, the less Relatable they become. It is actually a well known truth of great lyric writing that the more specific and detailed and personal your lyrics are, the more Relatable they are, it actually becomes more universal when you harness something that is more honest and authentic through the expression of your unique perspective and your unique experience of the world. And as the late and great songwriter Leonard Cohen said, we seem to be able to relate to detail. We seem to have an appetite for it. Our days are made of details and if you can get a sense of another person's day in details, your own day of details is summoned in your mind in some way rather than just a general line-like the days went by. You don't want to say the tree, you want to say the Sycamore? 6. Lesson 6: What's Your Point of View?: Point of view is essentially the pronouns that we use to describe the different characters in the world of our song. But the most important thing to understand here is that using different pronouns can radically alter the emotional tone and quality of your songs, lyrics. And let me show you this through example. Let's say I have a line of lyric that is something like this. You left me standing there all night. That lyric is angry, it is sad, it is passionate. It's a bit accusatory. That really comes out of this point of view that is in direct address. It's me talking to you. Let's look at the same lyric ID where we use different pronouns for the characters in this story. She left you standing there all night. It's just a change of pronouns, but it feels like a completely different story, right? The whole emotional tone here, it is caring and concerned and compassionate. It feels like the song is no longer about me blaming you for doing something mean to me. It feels like this song is sung from the perspective of a friend talking to another friend in really sympathetic, compassionate tones. If we look at charting songs in almost any genre, 90% of their songs are going to be written in direct address. Not every song in directed dresses, angry and sad. It can also be really happy and loving and passionate. It can be all sorts of things. What it is is extremely intimate, but there's definitely certain songs and topics and themes and things that we might wanna write about that are going to actually be more emotionally Relatable if we actually experiment with different points of view in the example that I was just demonstrating, the question is, do I want this song to feel angry and bitter and accusatory? The answer might sometimes be yes, that might be exactly what I'm going for, but it might also be the case that the particular story I'm trying to get out might actually be more relatable if we pick different pronouns, if we tell this story from a different point of view? 7. Lesson 7: Reality: Amplify It: In a song that is really a three to four ish minute vehicle for you to express an idea. The idea will be clearer and more direct and more impactful if you cut out a lot of the language that we might use in daily speech. So if I were just talking to a friend, I might say something like, I sometimes feel as if I wished, I could just take my fears and anxiety and costume magic spell that, turns that fear into a positive force. So what I need to do when I'm writing lyrics is edit out all the words that act as qualifiers or conditions on an idea. So I want to cut out words like sometimes it feels as if it seems as though it's as if I just want to say the thing is directly and clearly as I can. So it's much more effective to say, I'm going to cast a spell that turns fear into fuel. In Stephen King's wonderful book on writing, he actually defined writing in a beautiful way. He says, writing is refined thought. I would add to that and say, songwriting is amplified reality. It cut out words like sometimes maybe it seems as if you will find that your writing becomes a lot more clear, direct, emotional, and powerful 8. Lesson 8: Repetition Is Key: Of course they're going to be exceptions to this. But for the most part, if you actually look at great courses that are really memorable and really catchy in any genre, what you will find is that the course has this internal repetition of the hook or title. There is going to be aligned that repeat at least twice inside the chorus. A really effective example of this is what's called book ending, where you actually repeat the repeating line as the first-line and the last line. Here are some really famous songs or cross genre and across time that follow this technique, stop this train by John Mayer, chandelier by CIA, stay with me, by Sam Smith. And even as I looked on the charts today and today we are in the month of May in the year 2023. I can see that there's a rising song on the global charts, which is the song daylight by David Krishna. And when I peek inside that Lyric, I see the same technique at play. We have book ending of a repeating line inside the lyric of the chorus. The bigger concept here is actually important to mention briefly, which is the ID that a course is more than just a section whose lyrics repeat. A course is not just a different sounding verse that you then repeat, which might sound obvious to you, but it was not at all obvious to me and took me using, use to figure this out to really understand what the essence of a chorus is that makes it different to reverse where versus our exposition, right? They show us who is speaking to whom they are speaking. What is the situation or moment in which the song is taking place? Where is it taking place? When is it taking place, establishing the central problem, tension, or conflict of the song? The course is really the bit where we are putting neon lights around a central message, a core idea, a peak emotion, and one of the most effective ways that we can put neon lights around an idea like that is through repetition. The basic threshold for hook to become a hook is that it needs to repeat 9. Lesson 9: Find Your Title: In Nashville, which is of course one of the Songwriting capitals of the world. Songwriters there will habitually carry around what they call a book of titles or a hook book. And when songwriters in Nashville get together to do co-writing, they will very frequently get out there, hook books and share titles with each other. Those titles will often be six words or less. And are titles that are inherently interesting or memorable in some way. They usually titles that have some kind of concept or story attached to them, but not always. It might just be a phrase that is somehow compelling or interesting that just makes you think it makes you go, gosh, I wonder what a song with that title might be about. Not all songs need to start that way. Of course, sometimes we write to figure out what we're writing about. We might be free riding or sense writing or just kind of loosely Writing Lyrics with no specific idea of exactly what this particular song is about. We're looking for it. But here's the thing. If we commit to the idea of finding the title at our earliest possible convenience, we can turn that little searchlight on in our brain. And even as we're free-writing, we're constantly searching for that little phrase that contains the essence or core of the idea or image of feeling that we are getting at as we're exploring an ID. The benefit of finding the title at your earliest possible convenience is it really anchors the song in a specific thing. It says This song is about this thing and not about X, Y, or Z, which is a really important part of the songwriting process because great songs tend to go narrow and deep, rather than shallow and wide. They tend to focus on a singular emotional moment or situation and go deeply into that idea, rather than trying to do too much actually diluting the impact of the song. The very famous and celebrated songwriters, Jimmy Webb in his book tunes myth, talks about it this way. This is not a song idea. I want to write a song about someone who goes through acute mood swings from euphoria to emotional exhaustion. I love this person and want to address the song to him. If however you add the following sentence, I want to call this song problem child, then you have an idea, even though the song may not end up being cold problem child. Another way we can think about it flowing on from that Jimmy Webb idea is that the broad idea of your song is like a house. But what we're really looking for is the door that we're going to walk through to get into that house, we need to find a specific angle of entry, a specific point that we are going to enter that house through. And that is going to provide us with that central point of gravity, that anchor that is going to help us understand what is this song doing and what is it not doing? And then it also helps us when we've got lots of different lyrics and ideas, figure out exactly what belongs in this song and what we can actually save for a different song. 10. Lesson 10: Paint Pictures with Words: One of the keys into Writing Great Lyrics is the ability to turn your ideas into sense based imagery. So since based language is language that conjures the material stuff of the world. So it's stuff out there that you can sense with your sensors. So what are our sensors? Are five basic centers. Of course. Our sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch. But we also have two extra senses that we can activate as songwriters also end up evoking imagery that can be really powerful and really compelling in your lyric writing and those sensors or the inside body sense. So when we activate the inside body sense, what we're trying to do is describe physical sensations happening inside the body. So let me give you a quick example of that. One way that I could say something about being nervous is just to say, I feel nervous, but that's not activating anything sensory or tangible. If I weren't instead to say something like adrenaline prickles and pulled inside my stomach and I could feel the acid burn of it start to tickle the back of my throat. Well, now I'm starting to convert the emotion or the feeling into specific physical sensation inside my body. And we can feel how much more visceral and energetic it is. It just feels almost uncomfortable when you start describing your inner body workings in that detail. The most important thing is as a listener, you feel it too because that level of detail actually conscious your experience of that feeling in a way that makes you as the listener, participate in the description in the scene, in the memory, in the experience, and not merely observe someone telling you about their experience of a thing. The other sense that we can activate as songwriters is what we call the movement sense. So movement is highly related to visual. It's also highly related to touch, but it's really amalgamating those things into something else. So movement is an invitation to really tap into the way that objects and people move in space, as well as how your body is moving in space. So let me give you an example. If I were describing the experience of driving in a fast sports car, well, if all I was doing was trying to describe the car, I might say it's black and it's shiny and it's got silver hubcaps and it's interiors or caramel liver. Yes, that tells me what everything looks like being in a very static way. So movement is really an invitation to describe the way something moves. So if I tap into that, I might actually describe the way that the cause zips through traffic like a dragon fly on the surface of a pond. Or I might even tap into what it feels like to be inside that car as it accelerates. And I could describe the way my lungs actually press against my ribcage that presses against the seat as the car accelerates and I can actually feel the G force pressing my skin against my skull, right. So tapping into the movement since there gives you a much more vivid and interesting picture of what's going on in the car, as well as my experience of being inside that car and the outcome here for the audiences, it creates a real level of depths or sense of depth for us that that description of you being pressed against the leather and the pressure building in your skull, the g-forces that starts to, my heart starts beating faster and I start having a physical response to the way you're describing it. As opposed to talking about the feel of the leather on the color of the car and things that are very surface level descriptors. It also opened up the opportunity for you to use metaphor, the dragonfly zipping over the partners. This beautiful metaphor that really becomes available once you start going down this path. The most important thing for me as a songwriter, and we wanted to offer you as well, is this idea that you want people when they're listening to your songs, to project themselves into it. You want them to be inside the movie of your mind, right? You want them to be sitting right next to you in that scene so that they really feel the emotions inside their bodies. They're not just watching you talk about your experience, that you start to blend and merge with your listeners. And that's when songs really start to communicate to other people. And it becomes about them and for them as much as it is about you and for you as the songwriter. And this is when songs really start to communicate to a broader audience of people. 11. Lesson 11: Explore Your Senses: We are going to set a timer for 10 min. We start with a prompt, which we're going to give you in just a moment. And you write continuously for 10 min. You don't edit yourself, you don't censor yourself. You write in full sentences, not lyrics. So when not rhyming, we're not trying to write with rhythm. If you try to do that stuff, you're actually not going to be getting the benefits of this writing exercise. So for 10 min, you write prose consistently, but specifically within the parameters of drawing on the seven senses, the next step is to create a random prompt. We can find it through a random object generator app. There are many of these available. We'll put a link to the one we're using in the Resources folder. But if I press randomized now and create a prompt, we're going to get this word. Whistle. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to take that prompt and I'm going to let it associate in my mind as quickly as I can to some kind of memory, experience, seen, or situation. And I'm going to drop myself into it. And I'm going to start drawing on all seven senses. One of the things I like to do to start with is actually to write the seven senses at the top of my page so that I can constantly refer to them and make sure that I'm not focusing just on one or two of them, but I'm really systematically trying to integrate all seven senses 12. Lesson 12: View the Results: Now we're gonna go through that entire passage that Keppie's just written. And we're going to mark and highlight all the phrases that include sense based language. I was eight years old, beach holiday in the Australian summer, sleeping with sand in my toes, crusting and my hair and behind my ears. So there's probably a bit of visual center in there. But really also to me, there's touched sense, right? Like the feeling of sand on your skin, in your hair and behind your ear. So that calls on visual sense and the touch sense and the word crusting is really it. So you can feel it on your skin. You can feel it, yeah, that's right. The salt of the sea, warm and moist in the air. So again, that one is really touch. Write the words warm and moist. We feel that on the skin, but also using the word salt in the air, content a little bit of smell or even taste. You can smell the saltiness in the air into the evening buzzing and alive with the rhythmic pulses of cicadas together creating a screeching high pitched whistle that fill the air. So that's all sound. That afternoon, I learned to wolf whistle, two fingers of each hand shoved into my mouth. So they're to me there's a visual image, right? Like you can see that happening, but also you can feel it in your mouth. I think so to me there's a bit of touch sense. And even because it's inside your body at that moment, I would also start to blend that into the inside body since the tongue has to be curled back like Elvis has hair. To me, that was a visual description. So I'm really trying to show the shape of something using a simile to really show the visual picture of what that looks like. It's a great visual to its very creative. And it made me chuckle a little bit when it was a great one. Then blow at first spit dribbling down my chin and hot air just wheezing out to spit dribbling down my chain. It's visual, it's also touch-based. You can feel it drilling down your skin and then the air wheezing out again that conjures the sound sense. And then a short sharp sound, my heart racing, thumping against the cage of my ribs. So there I was very consciously and deliberately tapping into the inside body sense. That was a very deliberate things. So I, at certain moments when we get to an emotional peak and a feeling, I like to really focus on what that feels like, a felt like inside the body. And so I do remember learning how to wolf whistle and it feeling so exciting and powerful. And to me it could have conjured the memory of the feeling of my heart getting so excited and I didn't just want to say I was excited, it was exciting. It's how do you convert that feeling into physical sensation inside your body? Some kind of possibility opening up. I could taste the seaweed of the beach on my fingers and the spit glossing my lips. Again here. This was a very deliberate, unconscious move to integrate the taste sense here. And to me, you might think, why, why are we doing all the sensors? One of the reasons is because we have all these senses and the more you incorporate into your writing, The more you can actually draw on unusual senses. Firstly, you're showing your unique perspective of an experience. Secondly, often those things are really, really visceral. And in fact, the smell sense and the taste sense, very attached to emotion for people. But it's funny because as human creatures, we are biologically evolved to rely more heavily on our visual sense and are sound. Since part of sense writing is actually very consciously moving to the less familiar senses. But it's amazing how when we do that, the experience is so much more immersive. It becomes like a 360-degree experience rather than this kind of two-dimensional sight, sound, experience, and smell like you said, he's very nostalgic. There's a lot of emotion wrapped up and memories wrapped up in smell sense as the sound sharpened until finally shooting out as the loudest, most E rattling sound, a wolf whistle. So obviously sound sense the sheer power of being eight years old and able to create that sound. The sound waves hurdling passed my lips and crashing through the glass, sweeping out into the street. Again, this was a very conscious maneuver on my part to actually try and describe sound as movement. And this is one of the most FUN things that you can do in sense writing is actually taking one sense experience and trying to describe it through a different sense. It's like sense blending. And sometimes that is the most interesting descriptive language that evokes lots of different things at the same time. So that was using the movement, hurtling, crashing, sweeping, describing sound as movement. It really creates almost like an animalistic quality to this sound. Now going to form and it's crashing into things and hurtling past. It brings into life in a very physical way. It's a wolf whistle. It's a wolf whistle. And joining those **** Zacatecas as the indigo twilight started to wash it's ink over the day, turning the street gray, blanket of the sky sweeping closed. So that's a very visual sense Description and it was interesting, I had to flip back over to my seventh senses at this point and just check if I had covered everything. And interestingly, I think that I had avoided a lot of visual description, which is natural in the memory that I was tapping into here because it was very sound based. I think as I was dipping into that memory and it was by the ocean. And so that was smell and taste and sound and the heat of the air. So it turns out that funnily enough in this description, visual actually didn't come into it as dominantly as it often does if you're not thinking about it. So in this experience, I got to the end and I thought actually I haven't touched on the visual sense very much so let me dip back into the visual sense. And for me the experience hearing it read back and rating over it again, is it almost steps out of the visceral illness of the experience, right? The spit and the dribble and the sound and the hate and personal one. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Then as we pull back and actually see the sky and the twilight and the colors getting darker. The camera move, if this were a movie, would be pulling back and giving a long shot and sort of dipping up to the sky as almost like a closing scene. So it's interesting to even feel that how the different senses create different levels of intimacy or closeness as well. So I felt that I didn't know if you felt that reading through almost like they're doing different jobs, performing different functions very much the taste and smell broadest in closer to you. The site of the visual imagery, really, like you said, it pulls back and gives us that observer kind of perspective. So the In and Out is a fascinating kind of, it's a fascinating thing to see come to life in a piece of running. But the sound of those Toccata is still droning into the salty night. We come back to the sound sentence and I think my instinct there was because this was such a sound-based piece of writing. And I had mentioned the cicadas and then the wolf whistling. And then I had brought the wolf whistle into the screeching sound and music Katas, I kinda wanted to bring it back to the sound of the cicadas. At the end of that piece. 13. BONUS: Conversations (Part 1) | Being a Bookworm is Useful: I'm interested to know whether you have observed these. Where do you think about it, whether it's something you talk about and how you think about those first few lines and the importance of the first few lines of the song. It's such a great topic because we can think of this like a meeting. You're meeting the song Grotto. That's how I always think about that first lyric for me is, this is the first conversation I get to have with you, those first phrases. So that idea of first impressions really comes into play. And the way the songwriter phrases that first line, the tone, the intent, all of those things I think you're quite sensitive to because you haven't eased into the song yet. You haven't heard anything else. This is that first impression. So we talk about this a lot in class, especially looking at things that add songs, especially looking at literature and poems. Because I think the great thing about looking at literature is authors. There are a special kind of bray. They spent so long agonizing over the right choice of words. They spend so much time just writing. They don't, they don't spend time worrying about chord progressions that aren't spend time worrying about music theory. The written word is their craft and that is, that is what they spent less time obsessing over. So one of the things that I've done in class previously is looked at the opening lines in classic literature and just played around with it to see what kind of impact it makes. Impact is the main, the main thing we're looking for. What, what is that feeling and that impacts the moment you hear that opening line. And so there's some great examples we can look at from classic literature if you want to. One of the, one of the great ones I just loved, starting with is from Albert Camus, 1943, the outsider. Do you mean about can be out there. I'd love to say Kane has anyone was kami? Is it really, I'm such a Luddite, I'm such an ignorant, famous opening line. Mother died today or maybe yesterday. I can't be sure. And I love that. I and I think the reason I love it is a because it's a bit, it's a bit morose. It's a bit dark straight up. And it's kind of, I think also the really interesting thing when you're looking at first lines of literature is checking in with yourself to check why you glitched to find out what it was that kind of got you going. Hang on a second because we do we stop and go Hang on a second. I think the interesting thing about this one is mother died today or maybe yesterday. And you're like, How can you not know? That's the first thing you think. How can you know what? Your mother, and so you become enraged and incensed at this, the right or this character being SO vague about the details of something as serious as his mother dying. And I just think that's genius to grab our attention and to get us feeling all of these emotions within 5 s 14. BONUS: Conversations (Part 2) | Short and Sweet: It reminds me of a lyric writing exercise, which is basically called six word stories. And it's the idea that it's basically like in 10 min, try and write as many six word stories as you can. And it's based on the story that they're understanding. Why have you heard about this? Absolutely. Exactly for that. So it's the Ernest Hemingway story that goes something like Hemingway was meeting who's drinking buddies at the pub in the Florida Keys. And he walked in looking even more morose and he normally would even want to drag. And he's writing buddies who like what's wrong. And Ernest Hemingway renowned for economy of language and trying to say things in the most simple, direct way you possibly can. Ornamented language, k-mean and slammed down is that pays in newspaper and said, Today I read the most beautiful story I've ever read. It's terrible. And his buddies said, What do you mean? Where did you read it? And he said, it's even worse than you think it is. I read it in the classified sections of Bullock. When you say button they then what do you even talking about? He said it is even worse than that. It's only six words long. But he said, You can't be series. I didn't know what you finally lost it bonus. He said No, let me read it to you and unraveled this piece of newspaper and read it out loud and those six words were baby shoes for sale. Never worn. Although I remember it. And we'll have to check this because for sale, baby shoes never worn as the order I remember because there you go. Well, either way that it works, right? It's like six words packs of Hunt and it tells a story and it raises all these questions and conflicts and immediately your brains that's creating the story of what happened to this baby. Why with a baby she was, why were they never worn? What are the circumstances in which these parents are having to celebrate issues? You run this lyric writing exercise. It's like, alright, I want you to come up with as many six word stories as you can. Minutes. And part of that is about how do you build drama, intention and conflict and mystery, but mystery with an implication of story into six words or less. And I love that exercise because it is all about economy of language. And as songwriters, we are in the business of economy of language. I often say to my students, we have to, on very limited real estate, build mansions in the minds of our business. And we need to know how to do as much as we can with as few words as possible. To totally. What the six word story shows us is that you can take people on a complete emotional journey. In very few words. There is an intro to that six word story, and then there is a little bit of detail in the middle. And then there's the turn, the twist. And that's amazing to think that you don't need more than six words to take someone through that kind of emotional roller coaster just like mother died today or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. I've now got about 12 questions that I need to ask this character to get that buy-in and that kind of investment from the reader or the listener. That's the game, I think to get that, to get that investment and that involvement straightaway 15. BONUS: Conversations (Part 3) | Questions, Journeys, Settings and Glitches: George Orwell, 1994. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13. And again, the word that always comes to mind here is the glitch. I feel like the device that's being used here is, is it's creating a glitch in us. Everything's going along fine, bright cold day in April. Nothing wrong there, but the clocks were striking. 13 has been deliberately placed because we know clocks don't go up to 30 and certainly not in our world. So what kind of world is this where clocks do strengthening. It feels like they took a lot of care without opening line. It feels like they weren't being lazy and saying, Yeah, we'll get to the great part. After about 25 pages. It feels like they really thought about how am I going to engage you with the very first sentence, how am I going to show you that I care, that you care about the story that I'm about to tell you. That's, that's like the glitch effect. There's some, I think there's also some great openings where they're just sitting tone. I think they're giving you a feel for what kind of rod where in foreign and a great one. There's Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy. And the opening of that is the story so far in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. I love the fact that in there he's got social commentary. He's got just dry humor. He's got this kind of grandness to the idea of the whole universe being created and that being a mistake. It's so tongue in cheek. And to pack all of that tone and all of that humor into that first line and pull it off again, I think is just a great device. Interestingly like bridging these examples that you give me more directly into lyric writing. It's interesting from the three examples. The second one with the clock struck 13, like that line sounds like a line of Lyric to me. That it's actually because it's the economy of language it actually says creates that glitch, creates that crime tension between one thing and juxtaposition, but trying to seemingly incongruous ideas or images like very quickly. Whereas that example I'm like, okay, let me just pretend for a second, but that's a lyric. Well, the first three lines are all pretty generic. You know what I mean? It's like we have to wait until the last line to get out fringe line. And I think one of the things that is different or that we need to translate as songwriters. We have less time, less real estate. We even like take that amount of time like, Yeah, of course we can take the concept of that and try and apply it to our own writing. But again, to me that like creating that glitch has to happen faster. Absolutely. What happens? I think when you say great songwriters DO, did you get that combination of a little glitch plus tone being sent very quickly. So Paul Simon, with sounds of silence, Hello darkness. My old friend. I've come to talk to you again, that there's a moodiness to it and there's a darkness to it and there's, there's a real tone being set, but it also creates these little glitch where there's a conversation That's not with another person. It's a conversation with something else and it creates this nebulous kind of ambiguity. So I think you're right, it has to be if that first line is gonna be punchy, we have to borrow the techniques from these Great Lyrics, these literary giants, but then get to the point much quicker. Yeah, I love fear and loathing and Las Vegas. Just for 70 raisins, but the opening of that and it's a crazy ride. But we were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. That sounds like a lyric doesn't mean that's a lyric. It's like it's really made totally. We'll somewhere around the edge of Barstow, on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take all to two things. It's a little setting, this idea of the desert, so they're remote. The drugs began to take hold. Basically says to me buckle up. That's Hunter S. Thompson. Say, fasten your seat belt. And the Songwriting equivalent for me, the one that I was think of is Hotel California on a dark desert highway, cool winter. My hair, smell of Kalita is rising up through the air. It's that kind of we're gonna put you in a little saying, I'm going to give you a little sense bound imagery that, that kind of immersion. And then we're going to twist it later on. But that putting us there straight away, I think is, is such a big part of it. Setting that tone 16. BONUS: Conversations (Part 4) | Intention - Does It Matter or Exist?: I guess okay. I got a question for you. Okay. And it's a question that I'm sure you've been asked many times and I've certainly been asked many, many times. We've just been analyzing this language and talking about the techniques that have been used and all these different devices. Do you think? And I'm being cheeky here, but this is the question that gets asked to us a lot. Do you think these riders meant it deliberately to do all the things we've just been pointing to and talking about. Like, did they deliberately know what they were doing? Did that deliberately know what they're doing? This question all the time? And it's not just about lyric writing, and it's also about code choice or that new melodic technique. Knowing classes where we're showing these tools or techniques or methods or processes or it's like aspects of craft. The question always arises, yeah, but did that Songwriting really know them what they were doing? And I'm glad you asked that question, Benny. I've got my smart *** answer to this question is I didn't know. It doesn't matter to me at all whether or not they did or didn't know. Because that doesn't change the impact of what I did do. It doesn't change my ability or my capacity to look at something. Ask myself, what is happening here, right? What effect is happening on me emotionally or in terms of my level of engagement and how is that person achieving that effect? If I can figure that out, it doesn't matter at all whether or not they meant to do it or not meant to do it, right? One of the examples, I think obviously, if we were in a photography class and photography teacher showed you an Ansel Adams photographs and said, look at the contrast of light and dark. Now if you want to achieve the same contrast, what you need to do on your camera, right, is increase the aperture and decrease the shutter speed. And look, I'll show you this is how it works. Click Say No one in that photography class is going to say yes, but Adams main, did he know to put his effort to there and your shutter speed there? Because the answer is whether he knew, it doesn't matter whether he was really going to set this a two-point font. Click, click, click. Okay, I need to set my shutter speed of a, but it doesn't matter or, or if really what was happening to him was he was just reaching for a feeling and adjusting the variables until he landed on the thing that he was feeling. Like. It doesn't really matter how he arrived at it. What matters for us is that we can figure out and much more quickly if we want to achieve the same effect, achieve that effect. Smartass answer is it a little bit like doesn't matter at all? Like the question is asking the wrong question. The real answer to this, my mole extensive your answer this question is a bit philosophical and psychological, which is to say, what is knowledge? Because the question is sort of assumes that knowledge is only explicit or deliberate, are conscious, that we only know something. If we can tell you what we did in how we did it and why we did it, right? Like that. There's explicit knowledge, but it turns out that that's not the only type of knowledge that there is. There's also implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, which we also colloquially call intuition or instinct, is knowledge. It's not different, right? Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this at length in the book Blink, right, That these kind of intuitive responses that experts have here. I'm not talking about naive intuition. I'm not talking that child like what, you know what I mean? I'm talking about people who are experts in their craft. All that great songwriters in this case, right? Like even if their experience of doing that thing was intuitive, they still knew what they were doing. It was just implicit knowledge. It was knowledge gained through experience, through practice, through deep listening, through deep analysis to other songwriters or like that Ansel Adams example, they were reaching for a feeling, right there might've been going. The song at this moment needs more tension. But rather than experimenting with the 390 available chords, right? And just randomly picking one out of a bag. They have knowledge and experience to know which subset of codes are actually going to result in defects that they're trying to reach for, right? Even if they're not consciously flicking through like a minor seven shot and I know. Right. Even if they're not consciously doing that, they might be at the speed of lightning, it seems trying certain things out and quickly arriving at the right feeling, right? But that's knowledge. It's not that, that's not knowledge. It's just knowledge by a different name. So just because someone is doing something intuitively, firstly, it doesn't mean they don't actually know what they're doing, right? And that's what muscle memory is. Memory is moving something from conscious or explicit knowledge into implicit or intuitive knowledge. Doesn't mean that you know what they were doing. And also for us as song writers, curious enough to try and learn from other songs and get better at Songwriting by learning from that. As songwriters, it doesn't really matter whether or not that knowledge was implicit or explicit. I think it's really interesting to think about where the question comes from. Why does the question get asked so often? It comes from a place of I think comes from two places. One, do I have to really do all this work? Don't have to do all this analytical work to get somewhere. But it also comes from this place of somehow analysis might tarnish the creative process. It might take away the magic and definitely you lose it counter Creative to apply crafted to create your first isn't going to dead and my creative flow, whatever. And I was thinking really going to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan basically analyzed Woody Guthrie right down to be shoelaces like it was. He was so obsessed with Woody Guthrie. So by the time it comes along for Bob to write his own stuff, this idea of intuition, I think really the word intuition is almost a problem. I think what intuition is having absorbed the craft so thoroughly that you are now no longer deliberately thinking of the craft in the act of creating. So if you are thinking about your technical craft or any kind of technique whilst trying to express a creative idea. There's a problem. And you have to go through that process. When I was learning to solo and improvise, It's like, yeah, I I broke down the notes. I'm going to start on the flat seven. I'm going to go down to the fifth, I'm going to hit the flat three and I had to do that to try and work out where my notes were in relation to my tonic, really get a grip on it. But five years later, if I'm still thinking like that while I'm taking a solo, instead of just trying to say something elegant as a phrase, then I'm letting technique run the show. And so my answer that question is always yes, they absolutely meant it by not considering it deliberately. Instead, they've absorbed they're techniques so well that they are now in a position to simply express a creative ID and rely or trust on all the work they've done previously. 17. BONUS: Conversations (Part 5) | Words of Wisdom: And you know what, that reminds me a lot of something that John Mayer told me in 2008 and also recently re-reading this journal entry is made at the time and have like re-posted it on the blog site, which I'll post the link to. One of the things that he, firstly cities, he really was very encouraging about the acquisition of knowledge and skill. Really comes from a position of more is more like The more tools you have available to you, the richer your writing is, the more possibilities you have, the more things you can reach for, the more rich and varied your writing will be. The same token. You also have to know when to let go of that. And also you have to know why you are applying a technique that's actually in this service of the song. Just wanted to be doing something because you can. It's like you apply this knowledge in this skill, but that doesn't mean that you should be packing it all into the ones song. It's a beta in service of the song, the idea, the emotions. And if you're a lyric EHR-based songwriter, like the lyric SME relationship, the choices, musical choices, you make, your relationship to the lyric, but that's it. We're talking about inverse here. I'm saying we can actually learn technique for home, right? Lyric ride is, and it's not being a great lyric writers, not just about being the deepest, most tormented genius with the most insight into the human soul. That's not actually what makes a great song write-up. It's actually knowing how to express something. And that How has a lot to do with understanding the ordering of ideas, the combination of showing and telling. It has to do with understanding the types of language that connect with and creating communication with other people. I think your resume, you write your resume with a good point there where I've never heard a great songwriter or a great musician or a great sports person for that matter. Who hasn't been obsessed with their heroes, like growing up and didn't obsess over the details of the way they're heroes did it. Just because you can't articulate that obsession or you can articulate the process doesn't mean there's not a process there. I think words can be really clumsy and articulating, especially a creative process. But it was like to first think about the concept. We'll learn about the idea. Break it down in a way where we then have to find a way to communicate it, find a way to translate it, and then have the conversation. Yeah, great topic kept. Great examples. Thanks. Happy writing everyone. Bye.