WELCOME TO SONG WRITING FOR HUMANS
This course will broaden your imagination, increase your creativity, and cleanse your
insides. We use whole-brain techniques like imaging, brainstorming, and clustering. You
will be challenged to design metaphors, form symbols, make puns, and coin words. No
longer will you be hampered by writer’s block for you will maintain your creative flow and
productivity throughout this course. The design is based on an actual course taught by
adjunct professor Sheila Davis at The New School University in New York.
This course requires the active participation of everyone. You must be prepared to talk,
sing, and play an instrument (a bowl and a wooden spoon is an example of an
acceptable instrument). Guests will give demonstrations of the lyric writing process and
will perform songs of original composition.
STARTING WITH A TITLE
Should the title come first, last, or sometime within the writing process? The answer is
yes.
THE COLOR TITLE: It will help you think in concrete images rather than in abstractions.
Color titles are also memorable and distinctive. Take out your mobile music device and
find examples of color titles.
Who is saying the title to whom, and why? Check out Roget’s Thesaurus for its lists of
dozens of exotic tints to blend into a title.
A CITY, PLACE or FOREIGN PLACE TITLE: Place titles exert the appeal of the
concrete and the specific. The specific can lead to the universal. Use your mobile music
device and find examples of place titles.
The plot of place songs can be remembering the place with joy, or regret. Heading to or
back to the place and singing its praises.
A DAY, MONTH or NUMBER TITLE: Again it helps you be specific. However, you may
need to work harder to think in details like names and numbers.
Coming up with this type of title is helped along by the brainstorming process. Anything
goes; don’t get rid of an idea before it hits the page. Use your mobile music device and
find examples of day, month, or number titles.
A FEMALE (most popular) OR MALE NAME TITLE: More specificity. Pick your plot.
People who do right, or people who do wrong.
Naming the subject helps draw a picture of a particular kind of person. Your title can be
about the one addressed or the one talked about. What’s in a name? Go mobile.
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A TITLE WITH: HEART, NIGHT, IF: Can you come up with a fresh way to use these
three popular words in songdom?
Use right-brain techniques such as free writing and other-hand writing. Write in short
rapid phrases. Switch your pen to your nondominant hand. You will be surprised at the
ideas that emerge which are closer to your heart than your head. Go mobile.
A BOOK-TITLE TITLE: Song ideas are everywhere including book covers.
Scan book lists and library shelves. A book title and a song title are free from copyright
restrictions.
AN ANTONYM TITLE: An antonym is a word opposite in meaning to another: hot and
cold. The way we put things together sets us apart. List making can help here. Allow
yourself to “goof around.” Brainstorming orally into a tape recorder can get you into the
creative flow. Go mobile.
AN IDIOM, AXIOM, or PARAGRAM TITLE: Everyday speech with a twist. Idiomatic
expressions are informal expressions as beyond belief, take it or leave it, no problem.
Axioms are self-evident truths based on common sense: finders keepers, losers
weepers or a stitch in time saves nine. Listen for natural dialogue and look for signs and
billboards. A paragram is a play on words made by altering a word, or a letter in a
common expression or literary allusion. “Friends in Low Places.” “Love at Second
Sight.” Writing a paragram requires a playful attitude. Go mobile.
A COINED WORD TITLE: Create words no one has yet put into a song. New words are
called neologisms: fax, camcorder, Nintendo
Use your left brain’s flair for word links and your right brain’s flair for playfulness.
“Verbifying”: turn a noun or proper name into a verb form. Stonewalled. Acronym: a
pronounceable formation combining initial letters. AIDS. Portmanteau: Blending two
related words into a third one. Smoke and fog become smog. Go mobile.
You are now on your own to construct a CD sleeve consisting of one original title from
each of the title forms listed above. There are nine in total. If you are unsure of what to
do ask questions. Make it as authentic as your artistic talent will allow.
When you bring your CD sleeve in for credit we will apply duck tape and smack them on
the wall.
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FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
A metaphor is a figure of comparison that implies some likeness in two different realms.
It makes a verbal equation: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely
players” (Shakespeare). Life = a play.
Thinking metaphorically draws upon the right brain’s ability to visualize, note similarities,
and synthesize.
A simile is a tentative metaphor. It makes a direct comparison using the words like, as
or than. It lacks the metaphor’s power and considerably lessens the impact of the
words.
It’s been observed that it’s virtually impossible for anyone to talk for more than three
consecutive minutes without recourse to a metaphor.
Personification is a subtype of metaphor. It is a figure of speech attributing human
characteristics to abstractions or inanimate objects: “The sun smiled on us.” You can
transform your singer into an inanimate object or abstraction. You give yourself an
ability to treat nonhuman entities in terms of human characteristics, activities, and
motivations.
Make sure your personification passes the reality check and it makes no metaphoric
claim for its subject that does not check with reality. A heartache does not own luggage.
Apostrophe is a figure of speech in which a place, thing, or absent (often dead) person
is addressed as if alive and will presumably answer. It is another subtype of metaphor.
Some examples: “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Amelia,” “San
Francisco.”
Instead of having the singer conventionally describe an emotional state, the lyric has the
singer hold a conversation about it with the moon (“Blue Moon”) or with an abstraction
like heartache (“Happy Birthday, Dear Heartache”), as if talking to a person.
Synecdoche is a figure of reduction that substitutes the part for the whole or the whole
for a part. It is a verbal shorthand: The sportscaster reports, “The Yankees need a
strong arm in center” – arm, in this instance, the most significant part of the outfielder,
substitutes for the whole person.
Metonymy is a figure of symbolic substitutions, not to be confused with synecdoche, in
which we represent the thing meant with an attribute or symbol. For example, “from the
cradle to the grave” is a metonymic expression that represents two abstract terms, birth
and death, with two (concrete) symbols. “The pen is mightier than the sword” substitutes
two symbols (pen and sword) for the two subjects (literature and combat) represented.
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A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought
to be offensive, harsh, or blunt. The expression “he passed away” is a gentler way to
express the blunt truth, “he died.” “Love for Sale,” is a prostitute’s euphemistic way of
describing her product.
An enactment is when you replace a literal statement with a symbol of it. For example,
instead of flatly stating the word “shy,” show the effect for the cause: “You take a
sudden interest in your shoes.” Thom Schuyler in his saga of struggling songwriters,
“16th Avenue,” shows the effect of being broke: “They all phone collect to home . . .”
Antonomasia
There are famous people and characters in fiction so associated with a particular
attribute they become symbols of it. Fred Astaire was the epitome of grace. To say
“He’s no Astaire,” is to say he is not graceful. “Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?”
Here a ballplayer stands for the grace and ability lacking in Paul Simon’s vision of
America. A Herculean task derives from the mythic hero, Hercules.
A compact metonym creates a symbol by using an associated attribute as an
adjective; for example coffee-table book. A Frisbee dog is one that has been trained to
catch Frisbees (an attribute). One of the most memorable lyrical compact metonyms is
Lennon and McCartney’s “kaleidoscope eyes” those which, after taking a hallucinogen,
see the world in refracted images. The advertising slogan, “Maalox moment,” attests to
the effectiveness of cause/effect thinking: “I need a Maalox (effect) because my wife just
asked for a divorce” (cause).
A symbolic lyric is a form in which an image is used to mean not only what it says but
to imply a larger meaning. In the song “April Showers” it means real rain plus something
more significant that’s only implied.
Pun is a subtype of irony. A pun playfully exploits homophones, words pronounced the
same but differing in meaning from another – whether spelled the same of not. Puns are
frequently funny, but are often used for serious effect. Many homophones are
homonyms words spelled alike though different in meaning. Example train.
In the country hit “On the Other Hand,” the singer recounts the ways in which, on one
hand he is attracted to the singee, but regrets that on the other hand (literally his left
hand), he wears a wedding ring.
The practical reward from exercising your inherent ability to discover multiplicity in
sameness comes in developing a more agile and imaginative mind. Pun making is a
stimulating whole-brain activity.
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