Seeking Emotional Feel in Your Songwriting

So for this month I have decided to write about creating music that tells a story or at least generates a specific type of feeling or emotion.  It seems to me that I frequently encounter songwriters who have a melody and some great lyrics, but the music falls flat and doesn’t really support the feeling, emotion, the overall vibe of what the lyrics are saying.

In my mind…my opinion, I believe that the entire song –the instrument(s), the melody for the vocals, the tempo, the specific sound choices; should all work as a team to generate the feeling, the emotional content of a song. I am sure that most of us have heard an instrumental piece that really painted a picture in our mind’s eye. You’re listening and mentally visualizing a scene, a scenario, like a short film in your mind. Classical music I’m sure does that for many.

It just doesn’t strike me as effective when someone is strumming a basic C-D-G progression in support of their lyrics about having a rough childhood watching their alcoholic father beat up their mother, or a forbidden passionate exchange between lovers who are cheating on their spouses (Does Country music come to mind?) Well maybe so, but these subjects can be found in any genre of music, and perhaps country music comes to mind when I mention C-D-G and that subject matter for lyrics.

Anyway the point I make is to say that as songwriters, we should be seeking to create the intense feelings of those subjects for the listener with the melody, and the instrumentation to give the listener our impression of those feelings & emotions to support the words as a whole, working from the standpoint that the listener may not be able to clearly hear and understand the lyrics.

C-D-G can be used but we need to be more inventive in our approach to describe with audio the intense passion of the lovers, or the intense pain and strife of a child watching their mother being physically abused. So maybe you would choose C major –D minor –G minor 6, then play the chords as arpeggios instead of simply strumming as an example.

This is where knowledge of music theory can be helpful, although not required. In fact I have met people who have extensive theory knowledge but for some reason are still not grasping how to get the desired emotion or feeling from their instrument and/or voice, and yet there are numerous examples of famous professionals who can’t read music and don’t know theory, who can make you cry like a baby with a song.  (Although some make you cry because they are so bad!)

While it is in my mind, I want to point out that we should maybe stick to the emotions & feel that actually related to the words. Why would you create a happy sounding pop type of song (“M-bop” by Hanson for an example) to go with the lyrics about spousal abuse? This I don’t understand or agree with. It doesn’t makes sense to me, but there is an example of this too (a terrible example! in my opinion) – the popular song “Pumped up kicks” by the group “Foster the people”.     A song with lyrics about a school shooter.

I have asked numerous people I have found humming or whistling along with this happy-sounding pop song - do you know what this song is about? All of them answered no. So I told them and they were appalled. Here are lines from the chorus:

“All the other kids with the pumped up kicks You’d better run, better run, out run my gun All the other kids with the pumped up kicks You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet”

You can do whatever you like in the name of artistic expression of course, but I believe that expressing a happy vibe about school shooting is in very bad taste. This perhaps resulted from ignorance or maybe was intended to capture vibe of the shooter (why would you want to promote that sickness?) or maybe simply to sell records – which is in extremely poor taste. Especially in today’s climate. This song is influencing how many of our youth? Do they need encouragement to commit more senseless acts of gun violence?

I certainly would have chosen a vastly different musical approach to that subject.

So I’ll wrap this up now by saying that the point is to find what moves you and your audience emotionally, to reproduce the “true” feelings and emotions in your head and heart – with your instrument(s) and/or voice.

Then you have the makings of a great song. Thanks for reading!