People-watching is a popular pastime. Have you ever wondered why? I have. Why would people go to an airport or a park and consider it recreational to watch other members of their species? Maybe it's because people are relentlessly fascinating. And if they're interesting from a distance, how much more obsessed might be become if we knew them intimately? Character studies in songs deal with both the close-up and the far shot.
When you write a song about someone else, have you ever found that it's easier to write about someone you don't know extremely well? There's so much to say about someone you know intimately, you can't possibly get all into a 3-minute song. Of course, you could choose one facet to explore about the person. Or you could write about the character in metaphor. I wrote a song which I recorded on my "American Romance" album, called "Coyote."I was trying to write about someone who was way too big for a song, so I wrote about an animal which carries with it an entire set of similar characteristics. It's a little like dragging an icon on a computer, and carrying a whole set of information with it that gets dropped when you drop the icon down. It's building vertically where you can't spread out. And in a 3-minute song, you don't have the luxury 90 minutes as you do in a film. So you have to pack meaning in a small space. Sometimes that means writing on more than one level.
In the song, "Coyote," I'm talking about the animal, yes. But I'm also talking about a group of people the animal represents, as well as about one particular person--the person who inspired the song by discussing the coyote with me. When he talked about the coyote, all the qualities he mentioned were qualities he, himself, had. I interpreted them in this lyric: "The coyote sees us come and go/He watches from the dark/We can only imagine what he must know/And how it breaks his heart/He's outlasted all of his family/And the dreamers who shared his dream/And for better or worse, he sees what is/Right through the way it may seem..." I was writing about a visionary, who always takes a back seat, never takes the credit, whose hard-won wisdom has helped him survive, but has left him lonely and sad. It continues, "The Coyote howls/When the sun goes down/That one more day is lost/And yet he survives/To teach us all/But at what a cost/To the coyote."
Another way of packing layers of meaning into a character study is by letting the character depict you, yourself, in some way. I recently saw the movie, "Nell" and I was very moved by it. I also had a realization watching it. I was in New Mexico preparing to hand out music and songwriting awards at the 7th Annual Mic Awards celebration, so my mind was on songwriting. I discovered a principle of good writing by watching the film, and seeing us see Nell (Jodi Foster) through the eyes of the other two main characters. If it had just been a movie about Nell, it would have still been interesting. But what deepened its meaning was that we saw Nell through the eyes of two characters who were seeing themselves in Nell. Each of them was looking at a part of himself/herself which Nell so clearly tapped. This made us even more interested, because all of the characters are revealing something about human nature, and we are discovering ourselves in the process. So when people hear a character study song you write, their interest will be much keener if when you describe the character, you reveal a part of yourself in the process. Anything else is simply documentary.
Just go through daily life, some time, and do this experiment. People watch, and then notice whom you're watching and ask yourself why. Or go through an art book of portraits. Some faces will catch your attention. Ask yourself what you see in the character. Then see if you're really examining your own personality by this process. Recently, I was at a music business fund raiser, on a beautiful day at an exquisite home in Bellaire, California. Everyone was schmoozing up a storm and genuinely enjoying it. I looked out by the swimming pool and there was one guest, sitting on a chaise longue, all alone, talking on his cellular phone. I couldn't stop watching him. Why would he pay $100 to come to this gorgeous home, ignore the company of charismatic people, just to sit there alone, on the telephone? He could have done that at home, I thought. It finally occurred to me how much of my day I spend isolated, alone and on the telephone. It wasn't something that I felt was significant enough to write a song about, but it made me wake up to the idea that sometimes we're interested in other people to the degree that we, ourselves, are reflected in them. Of course, our listeners are no less egocentric. So we need to give them a shot of themselves by revealing ourselves in the person we're describing. The ripples in the pool just keep expanding.
Nik Venet talks about character studies as parallel to the opening credits of a film being over a still photograph. There are two ways, he says, to get more information from the still photo: 1)You can pull back to reveal more and more of the scene or 2)You can have the characters in the photo begin to move. In a song, you can keep adding to the picture you start the song with, telling us more and more about the character. Or you can simply give us the opening visual and have the person "do" something which will reveal character.
But the most important thing, Venet says, is for the camera to pan around to the person telling the story before the end of the song. There are two parts to this: 1)You write the narrator into the story, giving his/your own viewpoint toward the character or how you know the character (e.g. Bernie Taupin's bringing himself into the lyric of "Candle in the Wind," saying he would like to have met Norma Jean) and 2)You reveal parts of yourself reflected in the character, that you have in common with the character. (e.g. No doubt, Don Henley and Glenn Frey revealed qualities of their own, as well as qualities in all of us, when they wrote "Desperado.") The second one need not be verbalized. But if you know this information, as a writer, the song will have more truth and depth, because whom do you know better than yourself?
That's when the camera turns into a mirror. That's when everybody really gets interested. And that's when the close-up begins.
© 1995 Harriet Schock
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