After the presidential election, I heard a well-known political analyst make the pronouncement that what wins elections is not platforms and voting records. It's not character or integrity. It's the ability of the candidate to communicate well. The political analyst did not mean precise communication of policy or viewpoint of the candidate, but merely the ability to say something clearly, interestingly and compellingly.
As most things do, this made me think about songwriting. If you compose music that is compelling, interesting and not over everyone's head, people will respond to it emotionally. If what you say is clear enough for them to get something--whether it's precisely what you meant or not--and if you say it in an interesting way and involve them emotionally, you will get their vote. The person could be a listener at a club, a producer looking for outside material, an artist, or merely a record buying fan. All these categories of listeners seem to respond similarly. They don't want to be confounded with illogic or arbitrary chord changes. They don't want to feel like they're sitting at a blank screen, the other side of which is your movie with you watching it; in other words, they don't want to be left out of the experience you're having simply by your inability to communicate it to them. Also, they don't want to be numbed by a string of cliches they've heard a thousand times: the "chicken in every pot" of songwriting.
When you listen to someone give a speech, what do you come away with? Generally I remember the pictures and actual stories they tell. If in telling them, the speaker illustrates a point he/she is making, then I may come away with the point of the speech. Too much songwriting is rhetoric, with no illustration. After it's over, no one knows what all that singing was about. Many times in a workshop, I'll hear a song and at the end of it, I'll wonder to myself, "What was that masked message?" Then I'll ask the other students what the song was about and they'll have no idea. But along comes a song full of pictures, illustrations, stories, analogies and examples, and everyone will know what it was about. Maybe everyone won't know every level on first listening, but people will be able to tell you what the main point was. And they will respond favorably more often than not.
Of course, musical genre and personal taste come into it, as well. A wonderful song in a musical bag antipathetic to the listener is not going to make it. I've occasionally been at showcases where the most brilliant lyric is presented and I'll be elbowing someone next to me to listen to it. She or he will say something like, "I can't get past the music." For those who think lyric is everything, it comes as a great disappointment that there are many audience members who are listening for melody as a prerequisite to the message and/or craft in the lyric. But when the melody is accepted, it becomes the carrier wave that takes a great lyric into the heart of a listener. Then you really have it all.
I think people do want information about the subject of your song, just like they want information regarding the topic of a politician's speech. They may not get it and still come away feeling it was a good speech. But when they start thinking about it, they didn't learn anything new. If the smoke is articulated well, they will like the speaker (songwriter) better than if it's gibberish, but what really pleases the listener is well-articulated substance. I recently had an audience member say he was listening to every word of a song of mine called "For What It's Worth" because he wanted to know how his ex-girlfriend felt. He kept waiting to find a line that wouldn't make him feel like it was her viewpoint, but he didn't find one. Perhaps the reason I succeeded in giving him substance is that it was written honestly from one person's viewpoint (mine) without rhetoric and with down-to-earth pictures and examples. I remember the night well. I didn't win the vote I was going for. But, at least, I helped one person know how his girlfriend felt.
© 1996 Harriet Schock
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