Describing Your Emotions Rarely Works Without a Background Story

A good lyric will cause a listener to create their own emotional response to what the verse has described.

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This is a Part 2 to the post I did on May 20th, about making a connection to your audience through your lyrics. Take a look at great love songs, and you’ll notice that the writer spends little time at all describing emotions. Yes, you’ll always have songs that say something to the effect of “You make me feel so…” or “I feel like…”, but think about how ineffective those kinds of lines usually are in actually generating emotion from a listener.

Those kinds of “I feel” lines belong in a  chorus, but they tend to be ineffective unless set up carefully in the verse that precedes it.

A listener finds it hard to generate an emotional response when all they’re hearing is a description of the songwriter’s feelings. The truth is, as a songwriter you can write an effective lyric that powerfully connects to the heart of the listener without even once explicitly describing your own feelings.

That’s certainly not to say that relating how you’re feeling to your audience is wrong, and I’ll talk more about that shortly. But when it’s done in the hope of generating an emotional response, and there’s little else offered in the lyric, it rarely works. A listener relates to the circumstances that occur (usually in verses), and then they’re ready for emotional outpourings that come afterward (usually in choruses).

Some classic examples of great love songs where the lyricist only implies how they feel:

1. “My Love” (Paul & Linda McCartney)
2. “Love of My Life” (Freddie Mercury)
3. “Rolling in the Deep” (Adele, Paul Epworth)
4. “All of Me” (John Stephens (Legend), Toby Gad)
5. “Us” (Regina Spektor)

But how do you account for the success of a song like Alicia Keys’ “Fallin‘”, where the bulk of the lyric is describing feelings:

I keep on fallin’
In and out of love
With you
Sometimes I love ya
Sometimes you make me blue
Sometimes I feel good
At times I feel used
Lovin you darlin’
Makes me so confused

The difference here, and the reason why the lyric works so well, is that the wishy-washiness of her emotions is actually the topic of the song. There’s little else you can do when you’re trying to describe how erratic your emotions are, except to describe them.

Describing your own emotions in a song will do little to make those emotions relevant to the listener. The only way you hope to pull a tear from the eye of your audience is to set up a situation in your verse that allows your listeners to empathize — allows them to generate their own emotions.

When you do it right, a chorus needs to do little more than exclaim “You know I love you”, and the listener has an entire verse or two of background to allow the audience to also have an emotional reaction.

That background we get from the verse should describe people, circumstances and situations, and those are usually things to which your listeners can relate. Once they start getting that “I-can-imagine-that” feeling, they’re all ready for the chorus!

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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