"Just give me the facts, maam," Sergeant Friday used to say in Dragnet. And somehow we got the idea that the facts and the truth were synonymous. And frequently they are. But in songwriting, confusing the facts with the truth is like mistaking clay for sculpture. What is done with the facts, and which facts are chosen--that's everything.
First of all, let's be clear on what kind of songwriting is being discussed here. I'm not talking about "formula" stock songwriting. I'm talking about songs that are written from a desire to say something. Songs that communicate some truth always have a longevity beyond mere "hit" songs, because that truth lives beyond fashion. Though the production style on the first record may become obsolete, the message in the lyric and melody will not. So the children of the fans who first heard it will discover it again in the modern clothing of new arrangement and production later on. That's what makes a classic, a standard.
Let's take a very down-to-earth example. You're writing a song for your parents' anniversary. You want to express the truth that they are heroes to you, that their love has withstood more than many people's could have survived and they are deserving of the prize that comes with such courage and constancy--whatever you deem that to be. Now imagine that story told with these facts: You remember when you were six years old, he came home at 3 in the morning and she screamed her head off and threw a mirror at him. Seven years of bad luck later, they took you to Disneyland where you got really sick on those greasy cinnamon things. Lest you think I am jesting, let me assure you I've heard songs that have more inappropriate facts in them than this. And when I question their presence in the song, I hear the defense, "Well, that's what happened." Yes, I'm sure it did. But the sun came up again this morning and it doesn't go in every song you write.
Deciding which facts to use is what separates a true storyteller from a poser/lyric writer. One of the four qualities that makes a great songwriter, according to my mentor, Nik Venet, is "the talent to communicate truth and conceive from scratch realistic characters and situations in order to do so." Of course, many of these characters and situations will be straight from your life; many of them will be composites from different times and places in your life. But arranging those facts, shaping them into the story that will tell the truth you're imparting is like a sculptor taking a hunk of clay and bending it, adding a glob here and a twist there, taking part of it away.
When Paul Gallico (The Snow Goose) was asked what the hardest part of writing was, he said "the part you leave out." When you think about it, any situation you're writing about is so full of information, you have to be able to look at it as you would one of those "3 D" pictures and see the picture inside it. You have to look at life, full of irrelevant, fascinatingly distracting facts, strip them away and find the few key elements with which to tell your story, your truth. And if you tell it specifically, honestly, remarkably enough, other people will see their own truth in it. People will relate to it whose facts are totally different from yours. Truth is shared by many, specific facts are not.
Have you ever noticed two children from the same family remember the past totally differently? They may have had the same parents, lived in the same household, and yet they have totally different viewpoints and personalities. The facts surrounding them were the same, but they saw them differently, reacted differently to them. So to find any two people who actually share the same, objective experience is very difficult. It's better to paint with pictures the listener can put himself into. You'll never find the exact experience he had. That's why facts that don't go to the next level of revealing some truth are so lame in a song. A long time ago, of course, they used to sing songs to tell the news -- before the days of newspapers. Bards would go from town to town singing of politics, the latest scandal, and other Hardcopy type lyrics.
But art has always bent objective reality a bit to make its point. Novelists and playwrights are constantly using conglomerates of people they know for characters. And many visual artists, after they've mastered the craft of realism move into a less photographic style to express their feelings about the subject. Matisse is said to have had a visitor in his art studio one time, an artist's worst nightmare, a person who avowedly doesn't "know anything about art" but knows what he likes. He pointed to a canvas of Matisse's and said to the artist, "That woman's arm is too long." Matisse answered, "That is not a woman, sir, it's a painting."
Today, especially with the renewed literacy in all art, songs, poems, novels, plays, films, and short stories are expected to lead the listener/reader into a world so fascinating and so real, that he discovers real people there, some of whom are himself. And by being all those people, he can shift his viewpoint and know what it feels like to be other people and to feel what they feel. You, as a songwriter, will have helped him achieve this. And not by sticking to the facts, maam, but by sculpting them into the truth.
© 1995 Harriet Schock
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