Song Club #64: Scenes

Writing songs with clear visual spaces

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For the longest time I thought of song lyrics in terms aesthetics and individual images. It was about good lines.

Maybe this is because I came of age musically in the 1990s, a time when much of popular music had nonsensical lyrics.

Maybe it’s because my father told me to focus more on narrative in songs.

But, I did not really think about narrative in songs.

These days I think about it as a matter of course. In particular, I think about scenes.

I think about each verse as a scene, and pay particular attention to the order of the images I am introducing.

I think about the size and shape of the visual world I’m evoking with those images.

I think about the flow of images between verses, and what visual spaces I’m pulling my listener between.

I started doing this when I got feedback from a friend on a song something along the lines of ‘It’s confusing to move from your bedroom to a totally unrelated space.’

It made me think about the spaces I pull a listener through in any given song.

This week, some Entry Points with this in mind.

Lucy

‘Entry Points’