Touching the Heart of the Audience: A Songwriter's Most Important Task

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Over on the “Echoes” blog there’s a very good interview with country music songwriter Kent Blazy, who has written hit songs for Garth Brooks, Patty Loveless and others. In that interview from January 2014, he was asked “When you write a song, how much focus do you put on your intended audience?” Here’s his answer:

For me, the target audience is really the universal, trying to get to the heart of a song that will touch as many people as possible. Most of the people I write with have the same approach, and Garth [Brooks] is really like that. He’s always looking for a way to make people laugh, cry, be grateful… and it’s such a benefit to work with songwriters like that. Striving to use music, like music has always been, for it’s ability to change the world, change things for the better. That’s what I’m aiming for.

All songwriters recognize that emotional impact is a vital part of a song’s success. If you aren’t making people feel something, you might as well be singing your high school chemistry notes, or the phone book.

The problem for many novice songwriters is understanding exactly how to make the audience feel emotions. And one of the most common errors is to assume that if you express emotion in your lyric, the audience will feel that emotion.

But it doesn’t often happen that way. And you certainly can’t assume an audience will feel emotions if you haven’t laid an important lyrical foundation. How do you do that? Here are 7 tips for making sure that you touch your audience and make them feel what you want them to feel:

1. Jumping in with “I feel so lousy” kinds of lyrics will leave your audience feeling disconnected from you. They want to know why first, and then you have a hope of touching the heart of the audience.
2. Imagery is everything. One of my favourite examples of great imagery is in a Dave Matthews song, “Loving Wings”: “My heart was made of broken wings.” That’s far more evocative than simply saying, “I felt so lousy.” By finding imaginative ways of expressing states of mind, you create powerful images in the mind of the listener, and they create their own emotional response.
3. Structure your lyrics to express circumstances first, and emotions second. Look at any good lyric, and you’ll see that the verse describes people and events, while choruses express an emotional response. That’s an important lyrical ordering, and it’s crucial not to mess that up.
4. Use words you’re likely to hear in the local coffee shop. That simply means to avoid highbrow, sophisticated terminology, and use common, every day expressions. Those are the ones that have the greatest chance of eliciting an emotional reaction.
5. Create strong partnerships between your lyrics, melodies and chords. Emotional words and phrases will have a greater impact if they are placed higher in a singer’s range, and so think carefully about this when you write your melodies.
6. Create word lists as a first step to writing your lyric. Word lists allow you to brainstorm and come up with many, many ways of expressing all the emotions you’ll want to use in your song. Word lists help prevent writer’s block by giving you ideas that you can quickly glance at as soon as you get stuck.
7. Write, and then rewrite. It’s rare to have a good lyric appear in your mind all at once. So get something written down, and then keep working and reworking the ideas. It will become clear to you when you’ve got something that will serve as a final product.

Gary Ewer is the author of “Beating Songwriter’s Block: Jump-Start Your Words and Music”, available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Hal Leonard Books.

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