“Songs are life in 80 words or less”
—Neil Diamond
Writers who are just starting out often feel they have to cram as much as possible into a song in order to impress music publishers, A&R reps or record producers. But if you really want your song to pack a punch, you should concentrate on just one strong message or emotion …and build your song around it.
After coming up with a first verse and chorus, you may feel compelled to move on to a different topic in the second verse, and maybe another new theme in the bridge. But, far from impressing people, presenting multiple ideas in this way can have the opposite effect.
Your song should make one major point, from one point of view.
If you try to explore too many ideas or themes, there is a danger that you will send out mixed messages to the listener. The last thing you want is to confuse people so much that they end up losing interest in your song.
That’s why many established songwriters believe simplicity is an important common denominator in all successful songs. Don’t say more than you need to, and say what you need to say concisely and clearly.
To prevent your song from going off in too many directions, you need to be clear about the whole point of the song before you start writing. You should be able to describe what the song is about in one short phrase.
According to Jimmy Webb, clarity is “the single greatest shortcoming” of new songwriters and their work. “If a young songwriter doesn’t really know what he wants to say, how the hell is he going to say it?” says Webb. “That’s why I tell a lot of songwriters to start with titles.”
Some pro writers find it helpful to sketch out the complete storyline for a song in a few paragraphs of prose, like a mini-treatment for a movie or a novel. If you take this approach, the next step is to add rhymes to your prose and turn the words used in your ‘treatment’ into the song’s lyrics. You then have to match the phrasing patterns with the melody and the number of beats in each line.
After you’ve written the first verse, subsequent verses and the bridge should go deeper into the story line—just like a tale unfolding in each new chapter of a novel. Unlike a novel, though, you only have about three minutes and a limited number of words to really explore your theme. “If you have a clear idea of what you want to say,” Lyle Lovett observed, “then you know when you have said it, and the song is finished.”
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